Jasper Harris

Jasper Louis “Jack” Harris, Chair of Environmental, Earth and Geospatial Sciences at North Carolina Central University, Durham, died in the fall of 2009.

Harris served on the faculty of North Carolina Central University in Durham for 34 years. He authored numerous articles and professional papers in scientific journals and also served on review panels for many federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation. He received his B.S. from North Carolina Central University, and earned an M.A. and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to the AAG, Harris was a member of the American Meteorological Society, the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and the American Water Resources Association.

Jasper Harris (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(5): 15.

See All Memorials

Charles Gildersleeve

Charles Gildersleeve, longtime professor of geography at the University of Nebraska- Omaha and one of the founders of the Geographic Educators of Nebraska, died recently at the age of 69. “Chuck” Gildersleeve was born in Iowa and earned a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He taught at the University of Nebraska-Omaha for 45 years, beginning his career there in 1964. He served as Chair of the department from 1981-1988. Gildersleeve’s first love was teaching and over the course of his career he estimated that he had taught urban, economic and educational geography to nearly 20,000 college students. Numerous teaching awards and other accolades were presented to him by the University of Nebraska-Omaha and other national professional groups. He was extremely popular with students, who regularly mentioned him in evaluations as a teacher who made a difference in their lives. Gildersleeve was also active in outreach to the community, giving hundreds of talks and workshops to classes and teachers in K-12 schools around Nebraska. He was a faculty coordinator of the Geographic Educators of Nebraska from 1987-2007. Gildersleeve also was responsible for running the Nebraska Geographic Bee from 1988-2007 under the aegis of the National Geographic Society, in which tens of thousands of students learned to hone their geography skills and compete for trips to Washington D.C. He was active in working with various community groups and served on statewide and local education committees.

Charles Gildersleeve (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(3): 14.

See All Memorials

George R. Rumney

George Richard Rumney, Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, died recently at the age of 94. His 1968 college textbook, Climatology and the World’s Climates, laid the foundations for the burgeoning study of climate and climate change. Rumney earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1940. After graduation, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Rumney subsequently joined the U.S. Navy, where as a lieutenant he commanded a submarine chaser in the Pacific during World War II. He would later attribute his fascination with atmospheric phenomena to his years at sea. Following the war, Rumney joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for his knowledge of geography and mapping skills before returning to the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in 1947. In 1948, Rumney joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut, where he persuaded his colleagues and the administration that the broad study of geography merited its own separate department. Rumney taught the University of Connecticut’s first course in oceanography and lobbied both the administration and the Connecticut State Legislature to support marine sciences. His efforts culminated in the University’s establishment of The Marine Science Institute (MSI) at UCONN’s Avery Point campus. After his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1983, Rumney continued to travel, delving into the maritime culture and history of Portugal as well as making trips to Costa Rica’s cloud forests and the Australian outback. He maintained an office at the Marine Science Institute, where he attended seminars and followed the progress of an increasingly international group of graduate students while continuing to write for various professional journals. As a naturalist, avid walker, gardener, and bird-watcher, Rumney headed the Groton Long Point Conservation Commission for several years following his retirement.

George R. Rumney (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(7): 19.

See All Memorials

Glen Elder

Glen Elder, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Vermont, died recently at the age of 42 after collapsing while jogging near his Burlington home. A political geographer, he was known for his rigorous, critical, and innovative work on queer space, heteronormativity, masculinities, race, bodies, and borders in the post-9/11 context. Elder earned undergraduate degrees in both Geography and English at the University of Witwatersrand in his home country of South Africa. He completed his MA (1992) and PhD (1995) at Clark University. Elder was appointed as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont in 1995, Assistant Professor in 1998, and achieved tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2002. He was in the process of preparing his dossier for promotion to full Professor at the time of his death. Elder had served on an interim basis as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since 2008 and had been scheduled to begin that role on a permanent basis on July 1. He was also past chair of the Department of Geography at UVM (2005-08). A well-known and respected teacher at the University of Vermont, Elder received a kroepsch Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004 and the Dean’s Lecture Award for outstanding Teaching and Scholarship in 2005. known for his commitment to confronting issues of marginalization and uneven power relations in the geography of sex, race, and place, he taught classes in African regional geography, political geography, feminist geography, and sexuality and space. Elder’s publications include Hostels, Sexuality and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies (ohio University Press, 2003) and more than a dozen other articles and book chapters.

Glen Elder (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(8) 20.

See All Memorials

Jack Reilly

Jack Reilly, former Executive Producer of ABC Television’s Good Morning America, died recently at the age of 84. Reilly assumed his position as Executive Producer of GMA in 1986, when that program was running a distant second in the audience ratings to NBC’s Today Show, and began restructuring GMA to enhance its coverage and elucidation of major news stories. To this end, he appointed “editors” in science, medicine, law, consumer affairs, media products, and other fields, and took the GMA team, led by Charles Gibson, Joan Lunden, and meteorologist Spencer Christian to locales where news was being made, from Scotland’s autonomy drive to Hong kong’s takeover by China. In 1988, Reilly became persuaded that America’s geographic illiteracy constituted a threat to the nation’s welfare and appointed a geography editor to the GMA staff. over the next seven years, geographic issues formed the topics of more than 200 GMA segments. The maps and charts supporting these segments attracted commentary from other networks as well as print media including TV Guide and People Magazine, and elicited letters from several thousand viewers including high-school and college students. In 1990, the AAG presented Reilly with a special award during its Annual Meeting in Toronto, in recognition of his advocacy of geography. Under Reilly’s leadership, Good Morning America became an Emmy Award winning program in 1993. Ownership and management changes at Capital Cities Broadcasting led to Reilly’s departure in 1994. He joined NBC as a highly esteemed producer and consultant at CNBC. When the new management decided on a different format at GMA, most of the staff, including the medical, legal, consumer affairs, and geography editors (as well as all three hosts) left the show. After the geography editor’s contract ended in 1996, Reilly persuaded NBC management to create the position of geography analyst, initially at MSNBC and in an advisory role at NBC News, which sustained his geography network-television initiative for another two years. Through his vision and matchless corporate diplomacy, Reilly brought geography to the general public’s attention in an unprecedented, and subsequently unmatched, way.

Jack Reilly (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(8):21.

See All Memorials

Thomas Leinbach

Thomas R. Leinbach, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Kentucky, died on December 8, 2009, at the age of 68. Leinback was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on November 28, 1941. He received an undergraduate degree in transport economics from Pennsylvania State University, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi. He remained at Penn State, where he later earned both a master’s degree and PhD in geography. Leinbach spent six years teaching at the University of Vermont in Burlington before moving to the University of Kentucky in 1977, where he spent the majority of his professional career. His work focused on transportation and economic geography, global production networks, e-commerce, and rural development in Southeast Asia. As a scholar, Leinbach traveled to and did work on a wide variety of countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Italy, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

Leinbach served as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. From 1990 until his death, Leinbach was the editor of the journal, Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy. During his career he received more than 25 grants and awards to fund and support his research. Through the course of his career he received research awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Ford Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays. In 1996, Leinbach was recognized as a Centennial Fellow at his alma mater for his career accomplishments. In 2001, Leinbach was awarded the honor of Advanced Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. In 2002, the UK Board of Trustees named him a University Research Professor, and he was honored with the UK College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Award in 2006.

Thomas R. Leinbach (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(3): 14.

See All Memorials

Leslie Curry

Leslie Curry, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Toronto, died on January 12, 2009, at the age of 86.

Curry was born and raised in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. He volunteered for the Royal Navy at age 18 and joined the 14th Destroyer Flotilla as a radar mechanic during World War II. Following the war, Curry graduated from Kings College at the University of Durham. In 1951, he received a master’s degree in geography from Johns Hopkins University while a Fulbright Scholar. He worked as an economist at the United Nations and then at Charles Warren Thornthwaite’s Laboratory of Climatology in Seabrook, New Jersey. Curry received his doctorate in geography from the University of Auckland in New Zealand in 1959 and later taught at the University of Washington, the University of Maryland, and Arizona State University before moving to the University of Toronto, where he spent 21 years before retiring in 1985.

As a theoretician, Les Curry was a modeler, using stochastic analysis to delve deeply into processes, especially economic, that produce the patterns and flows across the globe. One of his early papers showed that natural climatic change could occur as the result of random exchanges involving heat storage in the oceans, while another early paper treated central places in terms of inventory management and stochastic processes.

Curry received the Canadian Association of Geographers Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1977. Other honors included a Visiting Commonwealth Professorship in the U.S., a Guggenheim Fellowship at Cambridge University, an inaugural Connaught Senior Fellowship in the Social Sciences, a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study Center in Bellagio, a fellowship at the Australian National University, a citation for Meritorious Contributions from the Association of American Geographers, and the International Geographical Union’s prestigious Lauréat d’Honneur.

Author of the book, The Random Spatial Economy and Its Evolution (1998), Curry was featured in Geographical Voices (2002), an anthology of autobiographical essays by 14 eminent geographers, edited by Peter Gould and Forrest Pitts.
A celebration of Les Curry’s life will be held at the Faculty Club, University of Toronto, on Monday, April 20, 2009. If you would like to attend, please contact Andrew Malcolm at UTAGA@geog.utoronto.ca.

Leslie Curry (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(3): 27.

See All Memorials

Larry Ford

Larry Ford died on September 17, 2009. He was a longtime professor of geography at San Diego State University, where he spent his entire professional career after earning a PhD from the University of Oregon in 1970. Ford’s interests included urban geography, comparative urbanization, urban form/ design, cultural meanings of urban space, downtown revitalization and historic preservation. Known as an innovative thinker and a persuasive writer, he authored the acclaimed books, Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skidrows, and Suburbs (1994) and America’s New Downtowns: Reinvention and Revitalization (2003), as well as the thought-provoking The Spaces Between Buildings (2000), which examined ordinary and often unnoticed features of the urban landscape such as alleys, driveways and other recesses and suppressed cultural spaces. More recently, Ford wrote Metropolitan San Diego (2004) and My Kind of Suburb: the Inter- War Years in California (forthcoming from The Center for American Places). Ford received many accolades throughout his career. He was presented with a Distinguished Service Award from the Historical Site Board of the City of San Diego in 1981; a Distinguished Teacher Award from the National Council for Geographic Education in 1985; and a Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in 1995. He occupied the Benjamin and Louise Carroll Revolving Endowed Chair of Urban Studies at the University of Oregon in the Spring of 2000, and was awarded the Distinguished Educator Award by the California Geographical Society in 2004. Much of his inspiration for research on comparative urbanism came from a number of Fulbright awards. Within the disciplines of geography, urban planning, anthropology and sociology, Ford is known for his conceptual models of urban structure, the most enduring of which is “A Model of Latin American City Structure” (Geographical Review 1980, co-authored with Ernst Griffin). Ford served as President of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in 1982-1983, as an AAG Regional Councillor, and as a member of the American Geographical Society Council (1996-2003 and 2004-2009). He also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Geography and the Geographical Review. A recently completed Planetizen poll of architects and urban planners ranked Ford as among the world’s top 100 urban thinkers, placing his name alongside notables such as Frederick Law Olmstead, Walter Benjamin, William H. Whyte, Henri Lefebvre, Lewis Mumford, and Thomas Jefferson.

Larry Ford (Necrology) 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(10): 17.

See All Memorials

John Odland

Professor emeritus John Odland of the Department of Geography at Indiana University died on September 14, 2009. Odland joined Indiana University in 1970 as lecturer and rose through the ranks to the position of professor in 1989. He served the department as chair from 1989 to 1993 and retired in December of 2007.

Odland was known as a rigorous scholar with diverse research interests. These included national and international migration, spatial analyses of labor markets, urban and regional economic inequalities, and spatial modeling. His teaching interests included population geography, mathematical and statistical models in geography, and geographic information systems. Born in Saskatchewan on March 26, 1943, Odland spent his early years in North Dakota, Montana, and Oregon. Working his way through college primarily as a road and bridge surveyor, Odland received his B.S. in geography from Oregon State University in 1966 and earned an M.S. from the same department the following year. He acquired his PhD from Ohio State University in 1972, where his mentors Emilio Casetti, Leslie King, and Reginald Golledge were at the forefront of the quantitative revolution in human geography. Following this lead, Odland became an outstanding spatial modeler, quantifier, and economic geographer with a strong reputation as an empiricist. Odland was also known as an influential teacher and mentor who constantly sought to motivate and facilitate excellence in the students and colleagues with whom he interacted. He has been referred to by colleagues as selfless in his willingness to provide mentorship and to serve as a reviewer for tenure and promotion cases from across the country and hundreds of journal articles and research proposals.

John Odland (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(10): 17.

See All Memorials

Fred Lukermann

Fred E. Lukermann, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and a former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, died on September 1, 2009. A Minneapolis native, born December 9, 1921, Lukermann graduated

from Roosevelt High School in 1940 and entered the University of Minnesota the following fall. He returned to the University after serving in the U.S. Army, earning B.S., M.A. and PhD degrees. Lukermann joined the University of Minnesota’s Geography Department in the early 1950s and helped that program achieve steadily greater national and international recognition. As department chair, Lukermann promoted a pervasive spirit of wide-ranging and creative intellectual inquiry. Lukermann assumed several leadership roles at the University of Minnesota in addition to his term as chair of the Geography Department. He was instrumental in establishing the Departments of African American & African Studies, American Indian Studies, Chicano Studies, the Urban Studies Program, the School of Public Affairs (later renamed the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs), and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. Along with his inspired teaching, generous

advising of graduate students, and creative scholarly output, Lukermann pursued lifelong interests in what he termed the “proto-geography” of Classical Greece, the development of modern geographic thought and practice within the history of science, the historical geography of North America, and cultural pluralism.

Fred E. Lukermann (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(10): 17.

See All Memorials