William Woods

Bill Woods, professor emeritus at Kansas University and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a soil geographer and geoarchaeologist whose work stood at the nexus of geography, soils, anthropology and archaeology, passed away on September 11, 2015, at the age of 68.

William Irving Woods was born on March 5, 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After graduating from Whitefish Bay High School in 1965, he received an undergraduate scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).

His bachelor’s degree, granted with distinction in 1970, was in anthropology. This was follow by a master’s degree in geography, completed in 1973. During his time at UWM, he also served variously as a tutor and teaching assistant in anthropology, economics and geography.

Over this period he also pursued interests in modern languages, passing reading proficiency exams in German and Spanish, and spent a period at the Goethe Institute in Brilon, Germany where he earned a Certificate in German Language Ability.

In 1976 Woods was appointed the staff archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), a position he held until 1985. From 1980 until 1985 he was also a lecturer in the department at SIUE and was involved with the Environmental Studies Program, teaching courses on anthropology, archaeological mapping techniques, archaeology of the Midwest, and interdisciplinary concepts of environmental analysis, as well as running field trips.

He concurrently taught cultural anthropology courses at Jefferson College, MO, and Belleville Area College, IL, as well as giving archaeological training seminars for the USDA Forest Service and US Army Corps of Engineers. At the same time he was also undertaking his doctoral research in geography at UWM. His thesis, completed in 1986 was entitled “Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence in the Upland Cahokia Creek Drainage.”

Following the completion of his PhD, Woods continued at SIUE but this time in the Department of Geography where he stayed for 17 years, working his way up the ranks to professor. He taught courses including physical geography, soils, field study of environmental problems, cultural geography, cultural landscape, regional geography, and Latin America. He was also an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program and the director of the Contract Archaeology Program. In 2004 he left SIUE but remained an emeritus professor in the Department of Geography there until 2013.

Woods started at the University of Kansas (KU) in 2005 and stayed until retirement in 2014 as professor emeritus. He was a professor in the Department of Geography teaching courses on human geography, global environment and civilization, soils, anthrosols, Amazonia, cultural landscape, and sustainability and unsustainability. At KU he also served as director of the Environmental Studies Program and was a courtesy professor of anthropology, core faculty member of the Latin American Studies Program and the Center for Global and International Studies.

He was widely respected internationally and was invited to give seminars at universities across the world including Italy, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Costa Rica and Brazil.

Woods’ interests stood at the interface of geography, anthropology, and archeology, and included abandoned settlements, anthropogenic environmental change, cultural landscapes, soils and sediments, and traditional settlement-subsistence systems. Field study was always a significant aspect of both his teaching and research. He directed archaeological and geological investigations in the United States, Mesoamerica, South America, and Europe, serving as principal investigator on more than 110 projects.

He is perhaps best known for his work on terra preta (black earth) soils, also known as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE). These are distinguished by dark, nearly black color, high carbon and nutrient content, and high productivity (in contrast to more nutrient-poor soils in the Amazon basin that were shaped by natural processes). In the early days, Woods was part of a small but interdisciplinary group of committed and enthusiastic people studying terra preta, and went on to become a world leader in this field.

In a number of collaborative projects with colleagues from Latin America, Europe, and the US, he investigated the origin and importance of the soil. He was directly involved in organizing seminars, conferences, workshops, field trips on ADE, was the co-editor of the four main books on ADE, and authored of numerous articles and chapters on the subject.

His research showed how terra preta was formed by the strategies for land use and settlement of prehistoric Indian cultures. This provided a deeper understanding of the environmental and cultural history of the Amazon basin, as well as clues to sustainable use of resources in the Amazon today and in the future. His work was crucial to the emergence of a new understanding of the Amazonian rainforest landscape that has evolved over recent years, from having been regarded as an untouched wilderness to being best understood as a cultural landscape.

Throughout his career Woods looked at other aspects of anthropogenic soils and environmental history too, particularly prehistoric cultivation. For example, during his tenure at SIUE, he directed the study of Monks Mound, one of the major earthworks at Cahokia in southwestern Illinois, the largest prehistoric Indian settlement in North America, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

He was also well known for his development of techniques for examining soils at archaeological sites, especially the quantitative analysis of soil phosphate. One of his last research topics concerned carbon sequestration in soils as a potential mitigating process for land degradation and atmospheric CO₂ accumulation. An ancillary interest involved birds as an indicator of anthropogenic environmental change.

Woods’ cross-disciplinary interests were reflected in his society memberships: Association of American Geographers, American Geographical Society, Geological Society of America, Society for American Archaeology, American Chemical Society, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, and British Society of Soil Science. He also served on the editorial boards of Journal of Archaeology, Journal of Ecosystem and Ecography, and PLOS ONE.

During his career, Woods received many awards and distinctions. At SIUE he received the 1999 Paul Simon Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award, recognizing the interdependence of research/scholarship and teaching. The Association of American Geographers’ Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group awarded him the Robert Netting Award in 2006 for his impressive body of work in interdisciplinary cultural ecology. In the same year he received the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers’ Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholar Award given in recognition of a significant contribution towards Latin American geography.

In 2012, Uppsala University in Sweden conferred on him an honorary doctorate for his pioneering research on terra preta, and in 2013 he received the Rip Rapp Award, one of the Geological Society of America’s most prestigious awards, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the interdisciplinary field of archaeological geology.

Aside from his influential scholarly work, Bill Woods will be remembered as a great mentor and supporter of young and emergent scientists, providing inspiration and always willing to give advice. He will be missed by colleagues and friends across the disciplines that he touched. He is survived by his wife Deanna, son Colin and daughter Gillian, former wife Sandi, and four grandchildren.

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Gary S. Dunbar

Gary Dunbar, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles, who made notable contributions in the history of geography, passed away on August 16, 2015, at the age of 84.

Gary Seamans Dunbar was born on June 8, 1931 in Clifton Springs, New York. By 1948 he was valedictorian of Avon Central School graduating class. Further academic credentials came from the University of Virginia where he earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction (1952) and a master’s degree (1953).

In 1956 he completed his doctorate at Louisiana State University with a thesis entitled “Cultural Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks.” This was later published as a book: Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks (1958).

After a year teaching at Longwood College in Farmville, VA, he returned to the University of Virginia where he remained from 1957 to 1967. He began as assistant professor, later becoming chairman of the geography department. During this time he also taught at the University of Dacca in East Pakistan (now Dhaka in Bangladesh) as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar (1962-1963), and spent two years at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria (1965-1967). In the summers he taught at various Canadian universities: University of Manitoba (1961), Queen’s University (1962), McMaster University (1963), and York University (1968). In 1967 he joined the department of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, remaining there until retirement in 1988.

Dunbar published considerably with special reference to intellectual history. He was particularly interested in the history of both U.S. and French geography. His books included: Elisée Reclus, Historian of Nature (1978), The History of Geography: Translations of Some French and German Essays (1983), The History of Modern Geography: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works (1985), Modern Geography: An Encyclopedic Survey (1991), A Biographical Dictionary of American Geography in the Twentieth Century (1992; second edition 1996), and Geography, Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870: An International Survey (2001).

Additionally, he published a number of articles relating to the history of geography, including essays published in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies. Other articles related to historical geography, history of exploration, and cultural geography. He also gave a number of lectures in both the U.S. and abroad, and provided notes and reviews in several geographical periodicals.

He was a member of several professional societies including the Association of American Geographers, which he joined in 1953. From 1981 to 1992 he served as President of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. He also served on several editorial boards.

During his career, Dunbar traveled through North and South America, the West Indies, Europe, Africa, and Asia, often involving his wife and children in his adventures.

On early retirement at the age of 58, he moved to Cooperstown, NY, an area he had first visited in 1952 as a graduate student. While researching the cultivation of hops for his Master’s thesis, he was captivated by the village, Otsego Lake and the surrounding countryside. It became his home for the last 27 years of his life and he much appreciated the quietude of offered by the Cooperstown environment, where he was involved in various local community organizations.

Gary Dunbar was a kindly person, quite given to helping others, and happily productive in the genre of the history of geography. He leaves behind his beloved wife of 62 years, Elizabeth, their three children, Emily, Elihu, and Esther, and four grandchildren.

Contributed by Geoffrey Martin, and with thanks to the Dunbar family for the photograph

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Julian Bond

Julian Bond, renowned civil rights activist and recipient of the AAG’s prestigious Atlas Award, passed away on August 15, 2015, aged 75.

Horace Julian Bond was born on January 14, 1940, in Nashville. Both parents were academics: his father an administrator at historically black colleges and his mother a librarian. The family moved to Pennsylvania when he was five after his father was appointed the first African-American president of Lincoln University. Bond was expected to follow in his footsteps as an educator but the young man was more attracted by journalism and political activism.

Aged 12, Bond was sent to George School near Philadelphia, a private Quaker-run establishment. There he first encountered racial resentment when he began dating a white girl, incurring the disapproval of white students and the school authorities.

Another five years later, his father was appointed as Dean of Education at Atlanta University and the family moved south again. Bond was enrolled at the prestigious Morehouse College where he attended a class taught by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. However, extracurricular activities drew his attention more than academic studies.

In 1960 he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student activist group that gave young black Americans a revolutionary loudspeaker during the civil rights movement and executed some of the movement’s most dangerous work in the Deep South. Dozens of his friends went to jail during his time with SNCC but he was arrested only once when he led a sit-in at the City Hall cafeteria in Atlanta, part of a wave of protests across the South against segregated public facilities.

In 1961, Bond dropped out of college to focus exclusively on civil rights efforts. He served as the SNCC’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination. He organized campaigns to register black voters, and led student protests against segregation and Jim Crow throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.

During this period, Bond and some fellow black students visited the Georgia House of Representatives. Having deliberately sat in the whites-only visitors’ section, they were escorted out by Capitol police, but he was destined to return to the House.

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bond was part of the inaugural group of seven African-Americans elected to Georgia’s House of Representatives. However, furious white members of the Legislature blocked him from taking his seat, accusing him of disloyalty, primarily because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1966 for him to finally take his seat.

Bond went on to serve in the state Legislature for four terms, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a sickle cell anemia testing program and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-black congressional district in Atlanta.

In 1968 he attended the Democratic National Convention, where he was a co-chairman of a racially integrated challenge delegation from Georgia. His public profile shot up when he gave a rousing speech in favor of peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy and his name was even placed into nomination for vice president. He declined to pursue a serious candidacy because he was too young to meet the constitutional age requirement, but from that moment on he was a national figure.

In 1971, Bond was a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, AL, serving as its first president until 1979 and remaining on the board for the rest of his life.

Bond was also elected six times to the state Senate. In 1986 he ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives, standing against his old friend John Lewis, a fellow founder of the student committee and its longtime chairman. When he lost, he resigned from the Senate, spending the next two decades focused on education and media work. He was a favorite on the college lecture circuit, teaching at universities throughout the north and south.

His wit, cool personality, youthful face, dashing looks and natty dress sense lent themselves to media exposure. He became a regular commentator in print and on television, including as host of “America’s Black Forum,” then the oldest black-owned television program in syndication, and his face became familiar to millions of television viewers. His most unusual television appearance was in April 1977, when he hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He also appeared in a handful of movies, including as himself in the Ray Charles biopic “Ray” (2004).

In addition, Bond was also a writer. From a book of essays published in 1972 entitled “A Time to Speak, a Time to Act”, to poetry on the pained point of view of a repressed minority. He also wrote articles for publications as varied as The Nation, Negro Digest and Playboy.

In 1998, he was chosen as the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at a time when the organization was mired in debt and seemed woefully dated. He continued in the role until his resignation in 2010.

Despite dropping out of college in the early 1960s, Bond returned a decade later to complete his English degree. He became a celebrated educator, holding appointments at several leading institutions including Harvard University, Williams College, Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. In later years, he was based in Washington, DC, serving as a distinguished scholar in residence at American University in Washington, and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he was co-director of the oral history project “Explorations in Black Leadership.” He was awarded more than 20 honorary degrees throughout his career.

In 2014, Bond was awarded the Association of American Geographers’ prestigious Atlas Award, designed to recognize and celebrate outstanding accomplishments that advance world understanding in exceptional ways, whether in science, politics, scholarship, the arts, or in war and peace. At the Annual Meeting in Tampa, he delivered a presentation on “Race Around the World,” focusing on how civil rights figures and organizations shaped and changed American foreign policy, before being presented with his award by AAG President, Julie Winkler. Watch video

Julian Bond played a central role in America’s civil rights movement, spanning student protest and activist politics to institutional leadership and academia. Although his fight for social justice was focused on race, he also campaigned for peace, gay rights and the environment, among other issues. He was a charismatic figure with a reputation for charm alongside his persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy. In the few days before his death, after he was suddenly taken ill, his wife reported that he remained ever the optimist, finding reasons to laugh.

Following the announcement of his death, President Obama said: “Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life – from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP… Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”

Bond leaves behind his second wife, Pamela Horowitz, a former lawyer whom he met at the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as five children and eight grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother and sister.

Main sources

Links

Southern Poverty Law Center

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Explorations in Black Leadership

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Daniel W. Gade

Dan Gade, emeritus professor at the University of Vermont, and a geographer with diverse interests who pursued fieldwork on four continents over four decades, passed away on June 15, 2015, aged 78.

Daniel Wynne Gade was born in Niagara Falls, NY, on September 28, 1936. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Valparaiso University, IN, in 1959, immediately followed by an MA at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1960), then an MS (1961) and PhD (1967) both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His doctoral research examined ecological relationships in peasant societies, and a grant from the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council underwrote his fieldwork in southern Peru. His thesis was entitled “Plant use and folk agriculture in the Vilcanota Valley of Peru: a cultural-historical geography of plant resources” and he began to emerge as a leading proponent of the so-called Berkeley school of geographical thought.

Gade was appointed by the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1966, one of four dedicated young geographers tasked with establishing a new geography department to offer courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He remained at UWM for his whole career enjoying a succession of promotions in the geography department and a ten-year stint as Chair of the Latin American Studies Program (1977-87).

Over the years, the courses he taught were primarily in the fields of cultural geography, cultural ecology (with the anthropology department), and the geography of Latin America. For more than a decade, he also taught an elective course, always heavily subscribed, on the geography of wine.

In broadest terms, Gade’s scholarship examined the many kinds of connections that tie humans, in their cultural and temporal settings, to the earth and its resources. This took him into various academic subfields including cultural-historical geography, environmental history, ethnobiology, cultural ecology, and biogeography.

Gade’s wide-ranging research interests were underpinned by fieldwork. In fact, he was an enthusiastic field geographer energized by distant, exotic lands and cultures. He undertook research projects in various countries of Latin America, France, Italy, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Spain, Portugal and Quebec. He received support from the Social Science Research Council for further work in Peru in 1970, and from the National Geographic Society in 1977 for a project in the western Amazon. He received a Fulbright Research Award for work in Madagascar in 1983; a research grant in 1989-90 from the Comite Conjunto of the Government of Spain to do research in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville; and another Fulbright Award to visit Brazil and Argentina in 1993.

This varied field research resulted in publications on topics as diverse as: the verticality of Peruvian Indian agriculture, the concept of nature and culture, cultural history of coca leaf, manioc ecology, lightning and religion, Madagascar’s deforestation problem, the shaman as an archetype, appellation controlee of a French wine, ethnobotany and Nazi ideology, hyena predation in Ethiopia, and synanthropy of the American crow.

Gade authored five books, around 150 articles and book chapters in five languages in a wide variety of anthropological, geographical and interdisciplinary publications, and more than 50 book reviews. His publications were of consistently high quality, and often cited. For years, he was the U.S. correspondent for the Bibliographie Geographique Internationale and an editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies prepared at the Library of Congress in Washington.

During his final year before retirement, the UVM Graduate College designated Gade a University Scholar in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Although he retired in 1999 and became professor emeritus, he continued with his academic work, starting with a residential fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France in 2000.

Retirement saw a continuation of his prodigious publications output, with dozens of papers and book reviews, and, of particular note, three major books. Madagascar: Madagasikara (McDonald and Woodward, 1996) was a primer giving an overview of the physical geography and climate, culture and traditions, society and economy of the island nation. Nature and Culture in the Andes (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) was a suite of graceful, sweeping essays on the relations between landscape and people in the Andean countries of South America. This a masterful work pulled together disparate themes and materials, and weaving scientific analysis with personal reflections. More recently, Curiosity, Inquiry, and the Geographical Imagination (Peter Lang, 2011) was also a wonderful piece of academic writing about intellectual curiosity as the driving force in scholarly endeavor. In typical Gade style, it combined the empirical with the philosophical and reflexive, and straddled the borders between geography, history, anthropology, and other disciplines. Six weeks before his death, Gade submitted another manuscript to publishers in New York: Spell of the Urubamba, a series of essays combining geography, history and anthropology.

Gade was a member of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers who gave him the Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award in 1993. He was also a member of Association of American Geographers and received the Robert Netting Award in 2011 in recognition of distinguished scholarship linking geography and anthropology. In addition, he was a member of the American Geographical Society, the International Mountain Society, and the Society of Ethnobiology.

Gade had an unusually diverse intellectual curiosity about the world and his work manifested an unwavering love of fieldwork. Over the decades he inspired thousands of students and was widely respected by his peers who have described him as “one of the most traveled and cosmopolitan scholars in cultural and historical geography” (Stanley D. Brunn, University of Kentucky) and “a master cultural geographer” (Kent Mathewson, Louisiana State University).

Dan is survived by his beloved wife of 49 years, Mary Scott Killgore Gade, their son, Christopher Pierre Gade, and his granddaughter, Skyler Scott Gade. His wish was for some of his ashes be buried on Camel’s Hump in Vermont and the rest on an Inca terrace in the Urubamba Valley in Peru.

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Campbell W. Pennington

Campbell Pennington, a distinguished geographer who spent his career studying the material cultures and languages of indigenous peoples of northern Mexico, passed away on June 13, 2015, aged 97.

Campbell White Pennington was born on February 2, 1918 in Campbell’s Corner (now Farragut), Tennessee, moving to Austin, Texas, in the early 1920s with his parents, six brothers and a great aunt.

Education and culture were integral parts of Pennington’s upbringing, due in large part to the influence of four women. Foremost among these was his mother, a graduate of Wofford College, who insisted that her children read and “behave in a proper way.” In the home of two spinster sisters who lived across the road he was exposed to art, oriental rugs, pressed linens, classical music, porcelain and crystal, sterling cutlery, fine food, and language, while another lady neighbor gave him piano lessons.

Pennington often recalled the time his father gave him 25 cents, put him on a streetcar, pointed toward the University of Texas (UT), and said “Scat!” At UT, he completed a BA in history (1947) and an MA in sociology (1949). He also met Donald D. Brand, a prominent Latin Americanist geographer, who would not entertain thoughts of him pursuing a PhD at Johns Hopkins or Syracuse, insisting instead that he go to the University of California at Berkeley.

The notion of studying in the Bay Area was met with enthusiasm, as Pennington had enjoyed the culture of San Francisco while on leave from his Army duties at a POW camp for captured German soldiers.

Pennington’s days at Berkeley produced some of his fondest memories, especially of people, including William M. Denevan, Yi-Fu Tuan and James J. Parsons. But it was the great Carl Sauer who was his intellectual hero. When Pennington expressed an interest in the native people of the Sierra Madre of northern México, it was Sauer who endorsed him without reservation.

Pennington set out in the early 1950s to conduct field research in what would become his “beloved Chihuahua.” In no small way, his interest in northern México was sparked by his great uncle, Gordon Campbell White, who was director of the Mexican division of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the early 20th century.

Completed in 1959, Pennington’s dissertation was published with the title “The Tarahumar of Mexico: Their Environment and Material Culture” (1963, 1996). Subsequent research resulted in books on The Tepehuan of Chihuahua: Their Material Culture (1969) and The Pima Bajo of Central Sonora, Mexico (1980). He never finished The Mountain Pima of Maicoba, Sonora: Their Material Culture but chapter drafts and notes are archived in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Library at The University of Texas at Austin. Plants he collected while conducting field work in México were identified by B.L. Turner and are curated in UT’s herbarium.

In the course of conducting field research in places accessible only by mule or on foot, he also did archival research. Records maintained by 17th and 18th century Jesuit missionaries were of particular fascination, in part because of what they said about material culture, but also because of what they contained in regard to indigenous languages. Pennington compiled dictionaries of three Sonoran languages, two of which are now extinct, Ópata and Eudeve. The former was never published but exists in manuscript form in the Benson Library while dictionaries of Pima and Eudeve in 1979 and 1981 respectively.

All of his writing was done on a typewriter, much of it on an IBM Selectric. Close friends remember well his quest for a type ball with foreign letters and accents! Pennington was the consummate letter writer. Although he never relinquished his typewriter–using it later for notes and envelopes–he was an early adopter of computers. He purchased his first when he was 80 years old, and quickly began using email and was adroit with the internet.

A teacher as well as a scholar, Pennington held three academic positions. The first was at the University of Utah (1957-1964), an institution with a strong reputation in the publishing of research on native peoples of the Americas. Next, he went to Southern Illinois University (1964-1974) where he worked closely with anthropologists, J. Charles Kelley and Carroll L. Riley, producing a book entitled Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (1971) that was translated and republished in Japanese. He also collaborated with geographer John F. Rooney on a project that resulted in the publication of This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas of United States and Canadian Society and Cultures (1982).

Pennington was enticed back to Texas, accepting the position as Head of the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University (1974-1984). With geography being alongside the departments of oceanography, meteorology and geology within the College of Geosciences, he insisted that his faculty become good teachers. He contributed to his own mandate by teaching a course on the geography of Texas that became popular almost immediately. His efforts paid off handsomely, and to this day the department teaches more students than the other three departments combined.

He was also a visionary who made some important hiring decisions that broadened the scope of the department’s previous narrow cultural focus. Notable in this regard was his hiring of geomorphologist Kenneth L. White, historical geographer Peter Hugill, and urban and quantitative geographer Robert Bednarz. He was also instrumental in establishing the career of Daniel D. Arreola, an acclaimed geographer of the Texas-México borderlands.

Pennington was an inspiration to scholars working in northern México, particularly Robert Bye, Gary Paul Nabhan, and William E. Doolittle. He instantly became a supporter and friend of anyone and everyone interested in the region, typically addressing them as “Young sir.” He held no sense of propriety, sharing freely information, experiences, insights, and wisdom. He was also a great supporter of undergraduate students, employing many as landscapers and home improvement carpenters.

Pennington underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery shortly after he retired. In order to be closer to family, he moved to San Marcos in the early 1990s, and later to Austin. He never expected to live as long as he did. After a cancer diagnosis, he had to have his bladder removed and recovered from the operation much to his own surprise. He moved back to San Marcos and considered himself fortunate to have the financial means to live comfortably for many years. The last several years of his life were enhanced by Frances Pedraza, who looked after his every need, patiently and respectfully.

Pennington enjoyed classical music and recalled fondly many of the concerts he attended, including two performances by Sergei Rachmaninoff. He had a large art collection that included paintings by Texas landscape artists Dawson Dawson-Watson and Julian Onderdonk. Food was also important to him. He had quite diverse tastes and was an excellent cook himself. His elegant dinner parties were very special occasions; a few graduate students found them overwhelming.

Although not reserved, Campbell Pennington was a beacon of tolerance and humility. He would doubtless say this memorial statement is: “apropos of absolutely nothing.” To those who knew him well, he was truly a larger-than-life character. As per his instructions, his ashes will be scattered in Copper Canyon in the Sierra Madre Occidental in the southwestern part of Chihuahua state of northwestern Mexico.

Contributed by William E. Doolittle, The University of Texas at Austin

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GeoMentor Case Study

GIS Day with High School Juniors in California

June 11, 2015

GeoMentor Volunteer: Lane Simmons

Location: Grass Valley, California

Grade level of participating students: 11th

Activity Theme/Focus: US History & Math

Number of Participants: 22

How did you connect with your collaborator? The Teacher is a good friend from college. Over the years we often talked about bringing GIS to his classroom. I learned about AAG’s GeoMentor program through an email newsletter and brought the idea to him this past summer.

Describe your collaboration process. The teacher and I seriously began planning introducing GIS to the school in August with continued bi-monthly emails and a few phone calls the week before GIS Day (November).

Describe your tasks/involvement. I presented at GIS Day. My audience was an 11th grade US History class. The charter school focuses on project based learning, this class in particular is looking at a proposed dam on the Bear River as a way to learn physics, math and history. Each class plans a major outdoor expedition each semester that relates to their studies. In the spring we’ll use GIS to plan their route for a 5 day snow camping expedition. I also helped the math teacher contact Esri about ArcGIS online subscriptions for his school.

What did you gain from the experience? What do you think your educator collaborator and/or the students gained? The school was very excited about the GeoInquiry lessons, especially US History. I shared several other ArcGIS Online lesson plans with my friend and his colleagues, all of which were received with great enthusiasm.

Additional comments: Loved the entire experience and look forward to more! The students had great questions about remote sensing, especially LiDAR. My former firm in Sacramento completed a laser scan about 5 years ago of a nearby dam, I reached out to the PLS involved recently to see if they’d like to present it to the class and/or school.

GeoMentor Case Study

GIS Day with 5th Graders in Delaware

June 10, 2015

GeoMentor Volunteer: Lane Simmons

Location: Grass Valley, California

Grade level of participating students: 11th

Activity Theme/Focus: US History & Math

Number of Participants: 22

GeoMentor Case Study

Outdoor Learning and GIS Day Activities with K-5th Grade in Arizona

June 9, 2015

GeoMentor Volunteer: Lane Simmons

Location: Grass Valley, California

Grade level of participating students: 11th

Activity Theme/Focus: US History & Math

Number of Participants: 22

GeoMentor Case Study

Online Mapping with 4th-5th Graders / GIS and Public Health with 9th Graders in Georgia

June 6, 2015

GeoMentor Volunteer: Lane Simmons

Location: Grass Valley, California

Grade level of participating students: 11th

Activity Theme/Focus: US History & Math

Number of Participants: 22

Harley Walker

Jess Walker, a noted American geographer who spent 60 years at Louisiana State University, passed away on May 30, 2015, aged 93.

Like many in U.S. geography’s first and second generations, Walker had rural Midwestern roots. Harley Jesse Walker, later known as Jess, was born July 4, 1921 in Michigan.

Soon after, his family moved from Michigan to Colorado and then in 1929 to California, a few months before the stock market crash. The family lived much of the next decade in a tent encampment near Morro Bay. Walker’s father bought a boat and made a living from the sea, bartering fish for produce from inland farmers.

Walker had multiple jobs during the Depression years, but managed to save enough in high school to start college at Berkeley in fall 1939. An avid explorer of local environments, especially the coastal zone, majoring in geography was a natural outcome.

With the onset of WWII, and Walker’s childhood fascination with flying, he enlisted in the Naval flight school at the beginning of 1942. During the war he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific theatre learning coastal and Pacific island geography first hand. After the war he returned to Berkeley to complete his undergraduate studies (BA 1947), and then his master’s degree in geography (MA 1954). His thesis was a study of rainfall in Mexico under the direction of John Leighly, but the initial inspiration came from a trip to Mexico with Carl Sauer in the summer of 1947.

Walker’s academic career actually began before finishing his master’s degree. In 1950, on the recommendation of Wilbur Zelinsky (then at the University of Georgia), he was hired as Assistant Professor to help set up a geography program at Georgia State College in Atlanta. He was preceded the year before by his fellow Berkeley student, Reese Walker (no relation), also a Leighly advisee and participant in the 1947 trip to Mexico. The two Walkers quickly laid the foundations for the department. In 1956 Jess Walker was named Chair.

During his tenure at Georgia State, Walker also managed to do course work and fieldwork in the Arctic for his doctorate at Louisiana State University (LSU). His study was entitled “The changing nature of man’s quest for food and water as related to snow, ice and permafrost in the American Arctic” and was under the direction of Fred Kniffen.

He spent much of 1955-57 commuting by bus between Baton Rouge and Atlanta. At Georgia State he taught courses in anthropology and geology as well as geography and built up the library’s holdings in geography. Walker oversaw the hiring of several additional geographers including fellow Berkeley student Campbell Pennington.

Walker spent the academic year 1959-60 in Washington, DC with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the direction of Evelyn Pruitt. In subsequent years, the ONR would be an important funding source for LSU geographers doing coastal studies and foreign area fieldwork.

Receiving his PhD in 1960, Walker was invited by Kniffen and Russell to join the LSU department as an assistant professor. In 1962 he became the departmental chair. The 1960s were boom times in America, and academia was no exception. The Department of Geography & Anthropology under Walker’s chairship (1962-1969) enjoyed healthy growth, doubling the number of faculty from five to 11. During this decade new geography faculty hires included: Charles “Fritz” Gritzner, Milton Newton, Robert Muller, Jonathan Sauer, Fred Simoons, and Donald Vermeer.

Walker’s eclectic interests and abilities allowed him to teach a variety of courses, including climatology, geomorphology, human-environment courses, and special offerings on his Arctic and coastal research topics. Walker ended the decade with another ONR assignment, this time in London where he and his family spent the academic year.

During the decade of the 1970s Walker continued to help build the department having expanded the physical geography program in the directions of climatology and biogeography with new appointments and visiting scholars. During the late 1960s through the 1970s Walker helped bring in a series of visiting scholars for periods of a month to a year. These visitors included: H. Aschmann, D. Brunsden, E.E. Evans, H.G. Gierloff-Emden, D.B. Prior, C.O. Sauer, W.L. Thomas, J.K. Wright, and E. Yatsu. Similarly Walker was integrally involved in hosting symposia that resulted in published volumes in the School of Geoscience’s Geoscience and Man publication series.

Walker also oversaw the creation of a number of new courses focused on coastal topics. Led by Walker, the LSU department became a major geographic center of coastal research and teaching. In 1977 Walker was named Boyd Professor, LSU’s highest academic honor and rank, thus joining Russell, Kniffen and Robert West (all with Berkeley degrees) becoming the fourth LSU geographer to achieve this status.

Walker’s formal teaching career ended in 1984 with his retirement, but he continued to oversee theses and dissertations until 1990. With retirement Walker may have been relieved of his teaching and administrative duties, but if anything, the pace of his research and service only accelerated. A world traveller with an impressive roster of places visited and conferences attended, in “retirement” Walker served as one of U.S. geography’s most seasoned and effective informal ambassadors abroad.

Accordingly, he was awarded a number of honors, including an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, Distinguished Career Award from the Association of American Geographers, and recognition from a number of other national geographic societies on several continents. He was also a Fellow of various scientific organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His publications (books, articles, chapters) reflected his main research interests. Perhaps foremost are the Arctic topics, especially on his Colville River delta site (Alaska’s North Slope), his workshop during multiple field seasons. But Walker also did field work in tropical environments, including studies of Mauritius. More broadly, coastal places and processes were the objects of Walker’s global investigations, with special attention to East Asia (China and Japan) and Italy.

As emeritus professor (thirty plus active years in this role!), when not travelling, or conferring with colleagues in the field, or attending conferences, he was certain to be in his carefully curated office or laboratory writing up yet more material or researching new projects. During these years he also contributed to the history of geomorphology, with various publications including a large co-edited volume on The Evolution of Geomorphology (1993). Similarly he wrote memoriam pieces for the Annals of the AAG on Fred Kniffen and Evelyn Pruitt, and the entry for Richard J. Russell in Geographers: Bibliographical Studies.

Walker’s time and tenure at LSU, some sixty years – from start of his doctoral studies in the mid-1950s to the present, spans much of the department’s history. When he entered only the three Sauerians (Russell, Kniffen, West) and two of their students (William McIntire and John Vann) were on the geography staff. Walker not only oversaw the expansion and “diversification” of the faculty and program, but also subsequently helped keep the founding visions and directions in focus and on course.

Perhaps more than anything, Walker stood out for his fidelity to the department, university, and discipline. But at the same time, he was very much his own person, not someone to be easily emulated. Perhaps more than most, he was a product of his times. He epitomized what Tom Brokaw had in mind when he coined the term “The Greatest Generation.” From Depression Era deprivation, to daring service in WWII, to post-war boom and building, the trajectory was clear – upward and onward. In Walker’s case, and to most of all who knew him, his was a generous run — an arc bent only slightly with time — that still possesses some momentum.

Jess is survived by his wife Rita, sister Lois, three daughters Winona, Angie and Tia, nine grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.

By Kent Mathewson, Louisiana State Unviersity

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