Nicholas Helburn

Nicholas Helburn, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado and a former President of the AAG, died recently at the age of 93.

Helburn was born in 1918 in Salem, Massachusetts, and grew up in Cambridge. He enrolled at Harvard University but left after one year to work in the New Hampshire mountains. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and later received an M.S. in Agricultural Economics at Montana State.

During World War II, Helburn was a conscientious objector who provided alternative service by participating in bridge building and other public works projects in Tennessee and by working as a “smoke jumper” in Montana, parachuting to reach and extinguish wildfires in their beginning stages. After the war, he earned a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin.

Helburn was known as an avid educator, mentor, outdoorsman, traveler, gardener, ecologist, peace activist and advocate for alternative life styles. At the beginning of his career, he moved to Bozeman to start the Department of Earth Science at Montana State College. While at Montana State, Helburn spent a year in Turkey in the early 1950’s on a Ford Foundation grant, the research from which resulted in a book about dry land agriculture and village culture in Anatolia.

In 1965, Helburn became director of the High School Geography Project, one of the “New Social Studies” curriculum projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation to develop a new approach for teaching geography in high schools. He also became the first director of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) for Social Studies.

Helburn joined the geography department at the University of Colorado in 1971 and chaired the department for three years. During its formative years he served on the senior faculty of the University of Phoenix, helping to develop a unique college curriculum for working adults.

In 2002, the Peace and Justice Center in Boulder, Colorado recognized him as “Peacemaker of the Year.”

Nicholas Helburn (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(8): 22.

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Stephen J. Lavin

Stephen J. Lavin, Professor of Geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), died May 3, 2011 at the age of 68 following a year-long battle with cancer.

Lavin was born February 1, 1943 in Buffalo, New York. Following service in the U.S. Navy, Lavin earned a B.S. in Geography at the University of Buffalo in 1969, an M.S. at Montana State University in 1971 and a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1979. He taught four years at Dartmouth College before joining the Department of Geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1981. During his three decades at UNL he mentored more than 40 graduate students, served as Department Chair for five years, and was Chair of the Geography Graduate Committee for nearly 20 years.

A specialist in cartography, Lavin was well known for his research on map design, cartographic communication and computer cartography. His published work received a number of awards including, for example, the British Cartographic Society’s Best Article Award for 1988 for his research with Randall Cerveny on Unit-Vector Density Mapping, published in The Cartographic Journal.

During the last decade, Lavin devoted much of his time to working with his close colleague Clark Archer on production of atlases. These included The Atlas of American Politics: 1960-2000 and The Historical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections 1788-2004. The latter was a Best Reference List selection by the Library Journal and was chosen as the Best Single Volume Reference in Humanities and Social Sciences for 2006 by the Association of American Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. In total, Lavin designed and prepared well over 1,000 maps for these books.

Lavin’s two final projects, published this summer, serve as a fitting culmination to his career. In May, the University of Nebraska Press published his Atlas of the Great Plains, a volume containing over 300 maps within its 336 pages. Shortly thereafter, Rowman and Littlefield issued the Atlas of the 2008 Elections, on which Lavin served as chief cartographer and co-editor with Archer and others.

In honor of Lavin’s lifetime achievements in cartography, his students and colleagues will sponsor a special session at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society.

Stephen J. Lavin (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(7): 20.2011

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Alexander Vias

Alexander C. Vias, associate professor of geography at the University of Connecticut (Storrs), died at the age of 51.

Vias was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. After beginning his academic studies at Rutgers University, he completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, Denver in 1993. Vias then earned a master’s degree (1995) and a PhD (1998) in geography, both from the University of Arizona. Between 1998 and 2002 he was an assistant professor at Northern Colorado University. Since 2002, he had served as a member of the faculty of the Geography Department at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005. Vias coordinated the Urban and Community Studies Program on the Storrs campus and worked closely with the Institute of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Vias was a widely respected population and economic geographer best known for his research on micropolitan areas, population change, economic-demographic linkages, and the settlement geography of rural America. He published over twenty professional articles and several book chapters. In recent years his research moved into the area of community health and health disparities, leading to a number of funded projects and the publication of several important research papers as well as close working relationships with the Connecticut Department of Public Health.

Vias was an active organizer of rural geography sessions at AAG Annual Meetings and Regional Science Association conferences. He worked collaboratively with federal researchers from the USDA Economic Research Service and the U.S. Census Bureau. Among his many service activities, Vias was an editor of the Population Specialty Group Newsletter and a member of the AAG’s Census Advisory Committee.

Vias received numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including being named a University of Connecticut Service-Learning Teaching Fellow in 2010, the Best Paper of the Year 2004 from the Great Plains Research Center, the Economic Geography Specialty Group Award for Best Dissertation (2000), and the 1998 Charles Tiebout Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper from the Western Regional Science Association. He received the National Hispanic Scholarship Award from the National Hispanic Society in 1996.

Alexander C. Vias (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(8): 44.

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Allan Rodgers

Allan Rodgers, emeritus professor at The Pennsylvania State University, died at the age of 89 on April 19, 2011.

Rodgers was born in New York in 1922. He received a B.S. in economics from the City College of New York, graduating cum laude with honors in the social sciences. He served as lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, as a crewmember on a destroyer escort in the Atlantic Theatre. Following the war, Rodgers returned to his studies and earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Wisconsin. He received his doctorate in 1950. His first position was as an assistant professor of geography at the University of Oklahoma, from 1948 to 1950.

Rodgers was appointed to a position in the Geography Department at Penn State in 1950, where he served until his retirement in 1988. He taught at Penn State for 38 years, serving as department head from 1963-70. Rodgers was an economic geographer with primary interests in regional economic development, industrial geography, and the economic geography of Italy, the U.S.S.R., and China.

Rodgers received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including a research grant from the Office of Naval Research (1955-58) for work on the industrial port of Genoa, Italy; a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Fulbright Grants (1960-61) for research on the industrial geography of southern Italy; a grant in 1957 and 1960 for research on the USSR from the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants; and a number of research grants from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation. In 1977, he was named an honorary foreign fellow of the Italian Geographical Society. In 1982-1983, he was awarded a Fulbright Lectureship for the University of Rome.

Rodgers authored or co-authored numerous journal articles, which appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Economic Geography; The Geographical Review; Essays in Geography and Economic Development; The China Geographer; and Industrial Change; in addition to those that appeared in many foreign publications. He served the discipline and academia at large as head of the Symposia Committee of the AAG; consultant to the National Science Foundation; and consultant to the U.S. Council of Graduate Schools. Rodgers also served on the writing staff of the Columbia Encyclopedia. Rodgers published The Soviet Far East: Geographical Perspectives on Development in 1990.

Rodgers served as a member of a special delegation to China in the 1980s following President Richard Nixon’s landmark trip to that country. The Penn State group in that delegation included the president of the university and several deans as well as Rodgers, and they spent several weeks as invited guests. He enjoyed the experience. “I believe that one cannot become a good teacher without extensive field and library research,” he told his co-worker E. Willard Miller for the history book The College of Earth Mineral Sciences at Penn State in 1992. During an active retirement, Rodgers gave invited lectures at several universities in The People’s Republic of China.

Allan Rodgers (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(7): 20.

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Paul E. Lydolph

Paul E. Lydolph passed away on March 25, 2011 at the age of 87.

Lydolph was born on January 4, 1924 in Bonaparte, Iowa. He attended Harvard University in 1944 and was a student at MIT in 1945 while serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces (1943-47), where he underwent meteorology cadet training and served as a Radar-Weather Officer during the Second World War.

Lydolph received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Iowa in 1948, and both a Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1951 and a Ph.D. in 1955. In 1956-57, Lydolph was a Ford Foundation Fellow and completed a Russian area studies program at the University of California-Berkeley.

Lydolph was a math teacher in Iowa Public Schools from 1946-49. He was assistant and then associate professor at Los Angeles State College from 1952- 1959 and professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1959-1992. He served as UWM department chairman from 1963-1969 and again in 1971-1972.

Lydolph specialized in the geography of the U.S.S.R. and climatology. He served as a visiting lecturer at Oxford University, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Hawaii at various times during his career. He was the Smithsonian Institution Tour Director to the U.S.S.R. from 1976-1979.

Lydolph was the author of Geography of the U.S.S.R. (editions 1 through 5, 1964-1990), Climates of the U.S.S.R. (volume 7,1977), World Survey of Climatology (1977),and many other publications on climatethroughout his career. Published in 1987,a Festschrift was written by his colleaguesin his honor, “Soviet Geography Studiesin Our Time” edited by Lutz Holzner andJeane M. Knapp.

Paul E. Lydolph (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(5): 22.

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Hubertus Bloemer

Hubertus “Hugh” L. Bloemer, 71, associate professor emeritus of geography at Ohio University, died March 10, 2011.

Bloemer was born on November 15, 1939 in Dinklage, a small town in Northern Germany. In 1960, he moved from Germany to Cincinnati, Ohio, to live with an aunt and uncle. There, he completed his high school equivalency while working as a metal worker, using the skills he had learned as a young man in Germany. In 1962, he entered the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1966 with a B.A. in geography. Bloemer began graduate work at Kent State University and obtained an M.A. in geography in 1968. After beginning work on a doctorate he accepted a position as Instructor of Geography at Ohio University. Upon receiving his degree from The Union Institute in 1977, he was promoted to assistant professor and then to associate professor in 1984. In 1989-90 he served as a Fulbright Professor of geography at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya.

From 1971 until his retirement in 2009, Bloemer was Director of the Ohio University Cartographic Center. He served as chair of the Department of Geography from 1993 to 1998. He was a member of the Faculty Senate for a total of fourteen years, culminating his service as Chair of the Senate from 2001 to 2004.

Bloemer’s research interests and numerous publications were in the fields of high mountain remote sensing, cartography, environmental applications of remote sensing, and the development and application of geographic information systems for developing economies. In recent years his association with the High Mountain Remote Sensing Cartography research group took him to many parts of the world, including Tibet, Kazakhstan, and eastern Africa, where he completed three ascents of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Hubertus L. Bloemer (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(5): 22.

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Huber Self

Huber Self, emeritus professor at Kansas State University, died at the age of 97 on February 7, 2011.

Professor Self was appointed to a position in the Geology Department at Kansas State University in 1947. At the time of his appointment, he had recently been released from the U.S. Navy, where he received a citation for laboratory research in bacteriological warfare. With a master’s degree from Oklahoma State University, he began developing the teaching and research interests that would carry through his professional career: the geography of Kansas, cartography, geography of the Soviet Union, and physical geography. He pursued additional graduate studies at the University of Nebraska and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Self retired in 1980 after 33 years of service to the university.

Self was a diligent promoter of geography at this university, and he repeatedly identified promising students and encouraged them to develop majors in the field. His ongoing interest in students helps to explain the many hours he invested, especially after retirement, in mapping their after-graduation locations. Self played a role in establishing a local geography club and in achieving its recognition as a member of the newly organized national honorary fraternity, Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU).

In 1983, Self published A History of Geography at Kansas State University, which he later revised. Hejoined with colleagues to produce “KansasForests” in the Encyclopedia of American Forest History. Self’s textbook, Environment and Man in Kansas: A Geographical Analysis was publishedby the Regents’ Press of Kansas in1978. With the late Dr. Homer Socolofskyhe produced A Historical Atlas of Kansas, publishedby the University of Oklahoma Pressin 1972 and revised in 1987. His “MinorityPopulation Groups in Kansas” appeared in Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1978). The same journal alsocarried his “Irrigation Farmingin Kansas” in 1972, and “TheMagnesium Industry,” one ofhis earliest significant publications,appeared in Economic Geography in 1949.

Professor Self traveled widely. He visited the Soviet Union for a month in 1964, during the height of the Cold War, the same year that Justus Liebig University in Germany extended to him an invitation to lecture. Self traveled throughout Western Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, as well as North America, often in the company of his late wife, Audine. His intrepid VW “bug” was known to play a major role in many of their travels.

Huber Self (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(3): 37.

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Peter H. Nash Sr.

Peter Nash died on January 19, 2011. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Nash took a B.A. degree at UCLA in 1942 before enlisting in the U.S. Army. He won two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star during World War II, serving with the United States 160th Engineer Combat Battalion and the 12th Army Group Intelligence Service. After the war he took an MCP from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1949), an M.P.A. from the Graduate School of Public Administration (1956), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1958).

As his career unfolded, Nash moved from Medford, Massachusetts, to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to the University of Cincinnati, to the University of Rhode Island. In 1970, he became the founding dean of the new faculty of environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. In each of these stages of his career he was involved in applied geography with special reference to planning and administration. As the years passed, he became ever more interested in the larger reaches of thought. At Waterloo the new faculty included four academic units: architecture, geography, man-environment studies, and urban and regional planning. Nash studied and published in each of these units.

Nash published 180 items including articles, reviews, and notes during an active career. These are listed as appendix B in Abstract Thoughts: Concrete Solutions: Essays in Honour of Peter Nash (1987. Eds. L. Guelke and R. Preston). Included in this collection of 15 essays by geographers whose lives were touched by Nash is his autobiographical essay, “The Making of a Humanist Geographer: a circuitous journey.” This chapter reveals study with Whittlesey at Harvard, participations at IGU Conferences, his enthusiasm for music and its place in the humanities, administrative moves encouraging ever more study of the environment, participation in the Delos conferences, and activity within the AAG. Some of his other interests are indicated by his membership of the board of directors of the Kitchener-Waterloo Philharmonic Choir, Kitchener Rotary International American Planning Association, and the American Geographical Society.

Peter H. Nash Sr. (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(4): 29.

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Charles F. Lane

Charles Franklin Lane, professor emeritus of geography at Longwood College (now University) in Farmville, Virginia and longtime member of the AAG, died on December 31, 2010 in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Lane was born December 10, 1919 in Knox County, Tennessee. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Tennessee in 1944 and his M.S. in 1945. He then pursued graduate work at Clark University and Northwestern University, finishing his Ph.D. at the latter institution in 1951. After teaching at the University of Georgia, he began his 35-year tenure as professor of geography and geology at Longwood College in 1951. During his career at Longwood, he served as president and journal editor of the Virginia Geographical Society; state coordinator for the National Council for Geographic Education; managing editor of the Virginia Journal of Science; chairman of the Virginia Resource-Use Educational Council; and president and secretary-treasurer of the Virginia Social Science Association.

Charles F. Lane (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(5): 22.

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William Beetschen

C. William “Bill” Beetschen died in 2010 at the age of 84. Born in Pekin, Illinois, he later moved to Bremerton, Washington. He joined the U.S. Navy in July of 1943 at the age of 17. He was assigned to the Argus 27 unit and later to an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Shangri-La, CV-38, where he served as a radarman third class prior to his discharge in April, 1946. A brief summary of his wartime activities in the Pacific appears in the book, Heroes Among Us, Volume 2. In November 1950, he was recalled and served on the U.S.S. J.C. Butler (DE 339) during the early days of the Korean War. Beetschen earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and later moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the U.S. Geologic Survey, where he spent the majority of his professional career. He did early work on the National Atlas of the United States and was often responsible for USGS liaison with the domestic and international cartographic communities, map and atlas publishers, federal and state mapping agencies, and the public. His wife, Liz Beetschen, served as the AAG Executive Assistant for 30 years.

C. William “Bill” Beetschen (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(4): 29.

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