Paul Dean Simkins

Paul Dean Simkins passed away on February 9, 2010 at the age of 82.

Simkins was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, on October 1, 1927. He graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a B.A. in 1951 and a Master of Arts in Geography in 1954. He completed his PhD in 1961 at the University of Wisconsin.

Simkins spent his professional career as professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University. His specialties included Latin America, migration, and population. Simkins was a member of the Pennsylvania Geographical Society and received a distinguished teaching award in 1990. He was a longtime volunteer with the American Association of University Women, as well as a driver for the State College Area Meals-on-Wheels. He was an avid wild flower enthusiast and photographer and was on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society. He received the outstanding teacher award from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences in 1974.

Paul Dean Simkins (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(5): 15.

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Robert W. Marx

Robert W. Marx, former Chief of the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, died following an illness. Marx served as the Geography Division’s Chief from 1983 to 2003, interrupted only by a three-year period as Associate Director in the 1990s to prepare for the 2000 Census. He was the architect of the Census Bureau’s TIGER System, which began in the early 1980s as a collaborative effort with the U.S. Geological Survey. Marx was known as a trailblazer who sought new ways to advance the importance of census geography through technological advances that were made practical through useful applications. By making spatial data for the nation available, the TIGER effort opened the way for GIS development and pioneered an entire new industry. Bob Marx began his GIS career in the early 1960s while a student in geography and urban planning at the University of Minnesota, studying under John Borchert. To cover his educational expenses, he worked in the offi ces of Hodne Associates, Architects and Planners, preparing land use and comprehensive plan maps for small communities in Minnesota and Illinois under the auspices of the former “Section 701” program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In this capacity, he used the precursor to modern automated GIS methods – mylar base maps and clear overlays emblazoned with Zipa- Tone shadings and Presstype letters – to create the various “views” that illustrated combinations of information integral to the planning process. After joining the Census Bureau in 1966, Marx helped launch the Bureau’s then fl edgling Metropolitan Map Series, which provided the base for the Address Coding Guides that covered the 145 largest urban centers of the United States for the 1970 decennial census. Although crude by today’s standards, these two systems – comprising the base map information of streets, street names, address ranges, rivers, lakes and their names, railroads, governmental unit boundaries and names, census tract boundaries and numbers – once entered into the Census Bureau’s computers and enhanced with the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) technologies, this series evolved into the Geographic Base Files (GBFs) covering the 287 largest urban centers of the 1980 census, and then to the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files that covered the entire United States, Puerto Rico, and the associated Island Areas of the 1990 census and Census 2000. During his more than 36-year career at the Census Bureau, Marx received several awards for exceptional performance, including the Department of Commerce’s Gold and Silver Medals, and the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award. A memorial/tribute session in honor of Bob Marx is currently being organized at the AAG Annual Meeting for the evening of Wednesday, April 14. Consult your conference program for place and time.

Robert W. Marx (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(3): 14.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Howard J. Nelson

Howard J. Nelson, who taught Geography for many years at the University of California at Los Angeles, passed away May 19, 2009 in Carmichael, California. He was 90 years of age.

Howard J. Nelson (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(7): 19.

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George Anglade

George Anglade, distinguished Haitian- Canadian geographer, political activist and author, died on January 12 as a result of injuries sustained during the Haitian earthquake. His wife of 43 years, Mireille Neptune, a vocal feminist, French teacher, and United Nations diplomat, also perished in the disaster. Anglade was born on July 18, 1944. Upon completing degrees in his hometown of Portau- Prince at the École Normale Supérieure and the Faculty of Law, he went on to obtain his PhD at the Center for Applied Geography in Strasbourg, France, in 1965. Anglade subsequently became a professor of social geography at l’Université du Québec à Montreal (UQAM). He retired from that university in 2002. A renowned political activist, Anglade was twice imprisoned and exiled from Haiti under its former dictatorship, but that did not prevent him from maintaining strong ties with his homeland. He not only helped to lead Haiti’s democracy movement but also served as the Minister of Public Works in the Aristide government. He was an advisor to current president René Preval. Anglade liked to define himself as “a man in three pieces” – geographer, politician and writer. As an engaged political writer, he authored more than 30 books (both fiction and non-fiction) in which Haiti occupies a central place. As a writer of short stories, Anglade was known for explosive, comic fiction. He influenced the evolution of modern Haiti and was one of the leading writers produced by the close relationship between Haiti and Canada.

George Anglade (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(2): 12.

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