Mary Meader

Mary Meader, a well-known pioneer of aerial photography, died recently in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the age of 91. Born Mary Rachel Upjohn in April of 1916, she dropped out of Smith College in 1935 to marry the aviator Richard Light and partner with him on an unprecedented 35,000 mile journey across the Southern hemisphere. She took flying lessons, learned Morse code, and became her husband’s navigator, radio operator, and sometimes emergency co-pilot, but her primary mission was to capture the first aerial photographs of various remote or little-known places of the Earth. Mary and Richard Light would often risk their lives in a small Bellanca monoplane lacking heat and pressurization in an effort to capture photographs from the sky. The effort took ingenuity as well as daring, and Mary Meader has often been credited with creativity and invention in certain technical aspects of her photographic work.

The 95-pound Meader built a sling from canvas and clothesline to hold her heavy Fairchild F8 camera in place as she took photographs out of an open window, often from heights exceeding 10,000 feet and in freezing temperatures. In this way, the couple made the first aerial photographs of the Nazca lines in Peru, and they were the first to capture the stunning crater at the top of Mount Kilamanjaro on film as well as the peak of Mount Stanley. They later captured many of the Pyramids of Egypt from an aerial perspective as well as surrounding settlements and urban areas. The journey was supported by the American Geographical Society. In 1941, their book, Focus on Africa, written by Richard and illustrated with Mary’s photographs, was published, causing a sensation. Mary Meader’s photographs have appeared in various exhibitions throughout the years, including at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Mary and Richard Light divorced in 1961. She later married Edwin Meader, a professor of geography. She was one of 11 grandchildren of Dr. W.E. Upjohn, founder of the Upjohn Company, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical concerns. Mary and Edwin Meader became well-known philanthropists who gave generously to education and the arts. In 2006, Mary Meader was asked to sign the Explorer’s Globe at Western Michigan University in a special ceremony. The Globe includes the signatures of Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and John Glenn, among others.

Mary Meader (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(5): 16.

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Calvin Beale

Calvin Lunsford Beale, senior demographer at the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, died on September 2, 2008 at the age of 85. A lifelong resident of Washington, DC, Beale earned an undergraduate degree at Wilson Teacher’s College in 1945. He studied geography under O.E. Baker at the University of Maryland and received an M.S. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His 62-year career in the federal government began at the Veteran’s Administration in 1942 and included jobs in the Office of Strategic Services and the Census Bureau. Beale came to USDA in 1953 and, at the time of his death, had the Department’s longest record of full-time federal service.

Beale conducted ground-breaking research on the U.S. farm population, tracing and explaining its rapid decline over several decades. His comprehensive reporting on black farmers chronicled the circumstances underlying the massive rural exodus of the 1950s and 1960s. He was the first to uncover the 1970s’ nonmetropolitan turnaround, when for the first time more people were leaving metropolitan areas than were moving in. More recently, he drew national media attention by documenting the disproportionate placement of prisons in nonmetropolitan counties.

Beale collaborated with Donald Bogue on Economic Areas of the United States, based on their county-level delineation of State Economic Areas. Released in 1961, it remains the most comprehensive socioeconomic portrait of the U.S. to appear in a single volume.

Beale combined a legendary command of statistical data with firsthand knowledge from 50 years of travel that took him to over 2,400 U.S. counties. Conversations with USDA extension agents and other local officials allowed him to spot emerging trends and issues relevant to rural policymakers back in Washington. A love of American architecture led to a collection of over 2,000 county courthouse pictures. Several of his best photos are published as magazine covers and featured at the very popular County Courthouse web site.*

In 1990, the RAND Corporation published A Taste of the Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale’s Writings. Edited by Peter Morrison and reissued in 2002 by Penn State University Press, it includes notes from his field visits and a selection of previously unpublished papers. Beale received the USDA Distinguished Service Award in 1968 and the Secretary’s Award for Superior Service in 2003. He was made an honorary fellow of the Population Reference Bureau. In 2005, Beale received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Melungeon Heritage Association for his pioneering research on mixed-ancestry groups.

Calvin Lunsford Beale (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(10): 17.

*Please note: The original URL highlighting Beale’s county courthouse photos is no longer available, however these images can be researched via the Internet Archive.

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Jacquelyn Beyer

Jacquelyn Beyer, Professor Emerita of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, died on July 22. Jackie, as she was widely known, was a pioneer. Raised by her mother in a cabin in Colorado, her earliest ambitions were to be a foreign correspondent. Too young to fulfill her wish to enlist in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps on the outbreak of World War II, Jackie completed her B.A. (1944) in journalism at the University of Colorado, then joined the army and ran a photography lab in Germany. On return to the U.S., she earned an M.A. in Geography (University of Colorado, 1954). Unwilling to pursue the conventional goals expected of women (marriage or secretarial work) in the 1950s, she earned a PhD in Geography at the University of Chicago (1957) with Gilbert White, emphasizing resource management issues in the American West. She was one of very few women to receive the doctorate in geography in that era.

After short-term academic positions in the U.S., Jackie traveled and taught at the University of Cape Town. An important avocation in mid-life was piloting her own plane.

Beyer made long-term contributions at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (1970-1990), where she initiated the Geography and Environmental Studies Department, serving as its Chair between 1970-76 and 1980-84. Her innovations including introducing personalized, active learning approaches to geography, and one of the earliest courses nationally in feminist geography. She established a scholarship fund for women in geography which has supported more than thirty students. Contributions to sustain this program are welcome (CU Foundation/Women in Geography Endowed Scholarship, P.O. Box 7150, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80933-7150).

A fifty-plus year member of the AAG, Jackie led the way in promoting equity. As a Regional Councillor her achievements included writing the report that introduced the non-discrimination clause into AAG’s Constitution and By-Laws and securing funding to support the Committee on the Status of Women in Geography. Her commitments to women and sexual diversity were recognized by an Award for Significant Achievement from the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group and the AAG’s Enhancing Diversity Award, of which she was very proud.

Jacquelyn Beyer (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(8): 17.

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Mahmut Gokmen

Mahmut Gokmen, a PhD student in Geography at the University of Oklahoma, died July 21, 2008 in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 27.

Gokmen was born in Havza, Turkey on July 2, 1981. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Istanbul in 2002. He completed his master’s degree at the University of Akron in 2007 under the supervision of Ghazi-Walid Falah. At the University of Oklahoma, Gokmen was working on his PhD under the supervision of Darren Purcell.

Mahmut’s research interests included political geography, geopolitics, sovereignty, territoriality, and the history of geographical thought. He was the author (with Tyler Haas) of “Modern Mapping of Orientalism on the Arab World: National Geographic Magazine, 1990-2006” in The Arab World Geographer (volume 10, 2007). He received the Charles Standley Memorial Award for outstanding graduate student publication from the OU Department of Geography in April 2008.

Mahmut Gokmen (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(8): 17.

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Bill Hance

Professor emeritus and former chair of the department of geography at Columbia, Bill Hance, died on July 12, 2008. Hance was born in New York City. He served during World War II as a naval officer and later earned his PhD from Columbia University (1949). Hance was an active member of the American Geographical Society and served a term as AGS President from 1972-73. He also served on the faculty advisory committees of the American Assembly, the Columbia University Press, and the Smithsonian Institution International Program on Population Research, and on many Columbia committees including the University Senate.

Hance was a founding fellow and director of the African Studies Association. In 1967, he was named an honorary fellow of the AGS, and was honored by the Nigerian Society of Geographers for “distinguished contributions to the science of geography in Africa.” He gave visiting lectures on Africa at many of American colleges and universities in the 1950s, when the future of Africa was emerging an important topic of public debate in the U.S. in the years following WW II. Hance also served as a consultant to several government agencies, including the State Department and the Office of Naval Research.

Bill Hance (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(8): 17.

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David J. M. Hooson

David J.M. Hooson, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California at Berkeley, died recently at the age of 82. Born in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales, Hooson gained his undergraduate degree at Oxford and his doctorate at the London School of Economics. After four years as a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, he came to North America in 1956, first to the University of Maryland, then to the University of British Columbia, from which he moved to Berkeley in 1964.

Long-time dean of social sciences, chair of geography and of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, Hooson taught at UC Berkeley for 37 years. He continued to mentor staff and students, led an American Geographical Society Mediterranean tour in the summer of 2007, and at his death was teaching at the Fromm Institute of Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco. He chaired the IGU Commission on the History of Geographical Thought from 1980 to 1988 and the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science.

Hooson was a well-known authority on the former Soviet Union, notably its Central Asian republics, and his work influenced the development of geography within Russia itself. His books included A New Soviet Heartland? (1964) and The Soviet Union: People and Regions (1966). A prolific scholar, Hooson’s essays appeared in scores of books and periodicals within and beyond geography. His edited volume, Geography and National Identity (1994), has been called a path-breaking collection of global breadth. In his own essay, Hooson noted that the disintegration of the Soviet Union required redrawing “mental maps of this enormous slice of the earth’s surface” and rediscovering peoples whose regional attachments were “part of their life blood and their collective soul.” The reemergence of national identity the world over, he concluded, made the geographical dimension “fundamental, ultimately and increasingly inescapable, and to be ignored at our peril.” “The costs of geographical ignorance can be enormous,” he warned at a Berkeley commencement in 2001, “if also combined with arrogance, as many foreigners see the United States now.”

In addition to his contributions as teacher, mentor, administrator, and scholar, Hooson was known for his extraordinary personal warmth and generous spirit. He claimed his exuberant beard led some to see him as Darwin, others as Santa Claus. “If I can achieve such virtual fame simply by not shaving,” he told Berkeley geography graduate students, “think what you can do.”

David J.M. Hooson (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(7): 22.

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Denis Cosgrove

Denis Cosgrove died recently at the age of 59. He did much to enlarge and enrich cultural geography as a field of enquiry through wide ranging studies of geographical knowledge and imagination. Known for having little affinity with the positivistic approaches of spatial science, Cosgrove’s increasingly cosmopolitan vision had moved geography firmly toward the center of the humanities in recent years. His emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches helped broaden the scope of human geography and deeply informed the journal he cofounded, Ecumene.

Since joining the Department of Geography at UCLA in 2000, Cosgrove had served in the prestigious role of Alexander Von Humboldt Chair of Human Geography. This appointment followed positions at Royal Holloway, University of London (1994-2000), Loughborough University (1980-1994), and Oxford Polytechnic University (1972-1980). Cosgrove graduated from Oxford with a degree in geography in 1969. He later obtained a master’s degree in geography from the University of Toronto (1971) before returning to Oxford to earn a PhD (1976). He was about to become Chair of the Geography Department at UCLA in 2006 when he was first diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually take his life.

Cosgrove published a series of influential books exploring the manifold power of landscape in various historical and geographical settings, particularly in the design and engineering schemes of Renaissance Italy. Titles include The Palladian Landscape (1993) and an important collection of essays which he co-edited with Stephen Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape (1988). His most recent book, Apollo’s Eye (2001), was an ambitious exploration of visions of the Earth in the western imagination from antiquity to the present. He also authored Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984), Water, Engineering, and Landscape (1990), and Mappings (1999).

Cosgrove was deeply engaged with art history, landscape design, and visual culture studies. He conceived and curated an exhibition on John Ruskin at the Ashmolean Museum in 2000, and was a key participant in the AAG’s Geography and the Humanities Symposium, which took place at the University of Virginia in June of 2007.

Cosgrove received the Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1988 for contributions to human geography. He delivered the prestigious Heidelberg Hettner Lectures in 2005 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Tallinn in February of 2008. Cosgrove would have been Getty Distinguished Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2008-09.

Denis Cosgrove (Necrology). 2008. AAG Newsletter 43(6): 10.

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Norton Sidney Ginsburg

Geographer Norton Sidney Ginsburg, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, passed away recently of natural causes on July 30, 2007, at the age of 85. A native Chicagoan born August 24, 1921, he was an alumnus (BA, MA, and PhD) of the University of Chicago, earning his doctorate in 1949. Ginsburg was a former president of the Association of American Geographers, Senior Fellow and for a brief time Dean at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and Director of the Institute of Environment and Policy at the East-West Center.

Ginsburg served as a geographer in the U.S. Army Map Service during 1941-42 and in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942-46. He was a professor of geography at the University of Chicago from 1951 to 1986. In the 1960s, Ginsburg served as associate dean of the Social Science Division, and later as chairman of the Department of Geography (1978-1985). Following his retirement from the University he became Director of the Environment and Policy Institute of the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, a post he held for five years. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1983.

Ginsburg’s academic interests focused principally on the Far East. He was coauthor of The Pattern of Asia (1958), principal author of the Atlas of Economic Development (1960), and co-editor of seven multi-authored works on the economic development and urbanization of East and Southeast Asia. In 1990, a series of lectures he gave was published as The Urban Transition: Reflections on the American and Asian Experiences by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Ginsburg provided editorial oversight for Southeast Asian volumes of area handbooks published for the Human Relations Area Files in the 1950s. He also contributed as editorial consultant to the Aldine Publishing Company and the Denoyer-Geppert map company in the 1970s, and the Ocean Yearbook in the 1980s and 90s.

Ginsburg was a long-time member of the AAG, serving as secretary from 1963–64 before becoming president in 1969–70. In 1959, he received the Association’s Meritorius Achievement Award. He was also the subject of two interviews recorded in Geographers on Film (1971 and 1995).

Norton S. Ginsburg (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(7): 20.

Norton Ginsburg, long-time professor at the University of Chicago, died on 30 July 2007. Perhaps best remembered for his scholarly work and professional activities on various aspects of Asia and its urban and economic geography, Norton was always a Chicago man. He began his life on the north side of Chicago where he was born to immigrant Jewish parents and began his distinguished academic career in the Chicago public schools.

Following the example of his older sister, he received a scholarship and entered the University of Chicago in 1937 at the age of sixteen. There he quickly came under the influence of Robert Platt and Chauncey Harris, whose interests in regional and urban studies provided an intellectual and scholarly framework on which to expand his early interest in maps and international studies. In 1941 Norton was awarded the BA degree in geography, after which he moved to Washington, D.C., and accepted a position with the Army Map Service.

In January 1943, Norton joined the Navy and was soon commissioned Ensign in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He was sent to the Advanced Navy Intelligence School and to Japanese language school at the University of Colorado in 1944. After duty in the Joint Intelligence Center of the Pacific Theatre, he was assigned to the Sixth Marine Division in North China as the war in the Pacific was coming to an end. During his service in China, he had the opportunity to travel and to visit other cities and regions and to enhance his growing interest in China, its culture, and its geography. In 1946, he was transferred to the Department of State as a map intelligence officer in Shanghai, where he served until he was discharged as a Lieutenant from the U.S. Naval Reserve.

After completing his military service, Norton returned to the University of Chicago and began graduate study in the Department of Geography. He received the MA in 1947 and was admitted to the PhD program, which he completed in 1949 with a dissertation on Japanese prewar trade and shipping flows in the Pacific Basin (Ginsburg 1949a).

Academic Finishing and Entering the Professoriate

Norton’s interest in Asia had been galvanized by his wartime service and his thinking about the future and what areas of the world would be most significant. The Chinese revolution in 1949 came to a communist dénouement, the consequences of which for the United States were the subject of endless and contentious debates and arguments among policymakers and politicians. Whatever the implications for American foreign policy, it was clear to Norton that China and its neighbors Japan and Southeast Asia were emerging as critical areas for future study and analysis. In 1950 he headed to Hong Kong and Malaya as a Fulbright Research Fellow where he remained for a year and where he continued his Chinese language study. His career trajectory as scholar and teacher was shaping up with a strong focus on East Asia and its neighbors.

In 1951 the faculty of the Geography Department at the University of Chicago invited Norton to join them as assistant professor. Norton flourished in the Department of Geography, where his hard work and emerging path-breaking scholarship on the urban and economic geography of Japan, Malaya, and China were being increasingly recognized. The 1950s were a period of intense scholarly work for Norton, as he published energetically in mainstream geography journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geographical Review, and Economic Geography, as well as books and monographs. For example, in 1953 he published a monograph on Taiwan (or Formosa as it was then called) and in 1958 a book on Malaya with coauthor Chester Roberts.

The culmination and chef d’oeuvre of this period, however, was The Pattern of Asia (Ginsburg 1958), a more than 900-page textbook masterwork that Norton edited and to which he contributed a major section on Japan and Southeast Asia. This book, with its thematic treatment of the changing political and economic geography, aimed to elucidate the various problems and potentialities of the countries of Asia. Although appearing in only one edition, the book became the standard American textbook and a major reference source on Asia for a generation of graduate students during the 1960s and 1970s. Another important and well-recognized scholarly production was the Atlas of Economic Development published by the University of Chicago Press in 1960. This atlas, done at the behest of Bert Hoselitz and in which Brian Berry provided the statistical analysis, provided a broad spatial view of the varying levels and indicators of economic development of the countries of the world. As a pioneering effort at statistical mapping with a general focus on economic development indicators, it garnered a good bit of attention at the time of its publication.

Norton’s editorial competence and expertise was also moving in parallel with his scholarly output and reputation, and he was in demand as an editor and academic organizer. Norton was also increasingly drawn into writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica and for such outlets as the Area Handbook series that various branches of the U.S. government were producing for different parts of the world.

His academic career at Chicago progressed rapidly as he moved through the professorial ranks in short order: associate professor in 1956 and professor in 1960. In the late 1950s, as his talents for academic leadership and management began to emerge, he began to assume administrative responsibilities, first as assistant dean in the Social Sciences Division. Over the next two decades he would serve as associate dean of the College and the Social Sciences Division as well as chair of the Geography Department.

External Activities and Scholarly Leadership

In addition to his work at the University of Chicago, Norton took on active duties in a number of scholarly organizations. For example, he was very involved in the affairs of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), as review editor of the flagship journal, the Annals (1956–1960), and as the acting editor (1961–1962). In 1959 he received a citation from the AAG for “meritorious contributions to the field of geography.” From 1963 to 1966 he served as Secretary of the AAG. Norton was a member of the AAG Commission on College Geography from 1966 to 1969. In 1969 he was elected vice president of the AAG and succeeded to the presidency the following year (1970–1971). He also served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies (1958–1961). His involvement with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) led to membership in the SSRC Committee on Urbanization (1958–1965) and to service as Secretary of the SSRC/ACLS Joint Committee on Contemporary China (1959–1963).

Norton had long-standing interests in both maps and Asia, as seen in his early academic and military work, and these help explain his intellectual commitment to geography. He was involved as a consulting editor on Asia for Denoyer-Geppert, and his name appears on a number of wall maps of Asia that Denoyer-Geppert produced for classroom use. In addition, he was a consulting editor for the Aldine University Atlas (1969), a widely used and popular college atlas. Perhaps his most significant cartographic effort was editing and republishing a very important work that had appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Herrmann’s Historical and Commercial Atlas of China. Norton served as general editor for a reissuing of parts of this atlas, An Historical Atlas of China, with a long prefatory essay by Paul Wheatley, that Aldine Publishing produced in 1966.

In 1967 Norton was appointed to the Executive Committee of the U.S. National Committee for UNESCO, a five-year appointment. He served as Chairman of its Committee on the Environment from 1970 to 1972. Also in 1967, he was appointed as Chairman of the Urban Development Seminar of the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an arm of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). He served on the SEADAG Executive Committee for two years (1969–1970). In 1968 he was Fulbright lecturer at the University of Delhi. From 1973 to 1976 he served on the Committee on International Environmental Programs of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1971 Norton was presented with an unusual and very significant professional opportunity. The former charismatic and innovative president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, invited Norton to join him and a group of distinguished scholars at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. Norton was asked to serve as Dean of the Academic Program as well as Senior Fellow in the Center. This three-year appointment was to prove very important both personally as well as professionally. It was during this period that Norton met his future wife, Diana, and they were married two years later in 1973. It was here that Norton also came into contact with the esteemed scholar Elizabeth Mann Borgese, with whom he began an important scholarly collaboration in editing the annual Ocean Yearbook, an activity that he continued for a number of years. Other noteworthy achievements in 1983 were the awards of a Fulbright Lectureship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the spring followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship for scholarly study.

After returning to Chicago, Norton renewed his strong interest in Hawaii, where he had served as Senior Specialist at the East-West Center in 1967. In 1979, 1980, and 1982 he visited the Center as a Fellow in the Environment and Policy Institute. In 1984 he was visiting distinguished professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. Following his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1986, Norton was appointed Director of the Environment and Policy Institute in the East-West Center and served in that capacity for five years.

During this period he organized a number of professional conferences and oversaw the work of the Institute in its effort to bring together scholars and policymakers from Asia, North America, and the Pacific Basin to address various pressing environmental and related concerns. Norton was generous in inviting his former students and colleagues who had appropriate expertise to participate in some of these conferences and studies. In this way he was able to ensure that a geographic perspective was part of the intellectual discourse in addressing environmental issues in the Pacific Basin.

Out of this period came the edited volume, The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia (Ginsburg, Koppel, and McGee 1991) that focused on models and processes of Asian urbanization drawn from his long and fruitful scholarly collaboration with Terry McGee. In this volume, Norton and Terry, along with other colleagues, expounded on the idea of a distinctive form and process of Asian urbanization in which particular spatial patterns and forms emerged to reflect the social and economic forces at work in densely inhabited alluvial plains and basins that were undergoing rapid growth, development, and urbanization.

Norton’s own ideas on this concept were distilled from his long experience in Asia and his scholarly focus on the processes and forces that underpinned the rapid urbanization and changes in urban morphology that he had witnessed and studied in China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Those of us who were his students had listened to his lectures on this topic and had seen him at work in the field and in various conferences and seminars that he organized, where he often moderated and led serious discussions. Some of his thinking on the matter of the processes and dimensions of urban change in Asia were summarized in a comparative framework in a monograph published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Urban Transition: Reflections on the American and Asian Experiences (Ginsburg 1990). This monograph grew out of a series of lectures he presented at the Chinese University in the late 1980s. It was followed by another brief paper, Planning the Future of the Asian City (Ginsburg 1994), published by the Hong Kong Institute for Asia-Pacific Studies.

Support for Students and Colleagues

Norton was well known for his generosity and support for his students and colleagues and friends, which extended to both professional and personal associations, and enabled those who worked with him to realize they would have his full and enthusiastic support. Although he was often away and not always available to his students owing to his active engagements in numerous professional activities beyond Chicago, he could always be counted on to assist when deadlines were approaching, and he took a strong interest in the academic progress of his students and their accomplishments. Norton was a sometimes demanding and often rigorous classroom teacher. His assignments were long and sometimes daunting, but they were reasonable. He expected a seriousness of attitude and purpose coupled with hard work and he assumed that his students would demonstrate sufficient self-reliance and creativity to do their work in a timely and competent manner.

Many of Norton’s students did overseas field work. This commitment required additional time as well as financial resources to assist in the completion of foreign field research and sometimes language study. Norton was very skilled in working with students to direct them to appropriate funding agencies and to provide strong supporting letters and documents to help them compete for funding for overseas studies.

Norton’s association with and support for his students did not end after the completion of their formal studies and graduation. In fact, in many cases his friendship and support became greater after graduation. He was very helpful in assisting former students in job searches and advising on how best to manage an academic or other professional career. Once former students were advancing in their own careers, he was also exceptionally gracious and generous in offering critiques of their scholarly publications and in providing sage counsel on the advancement of a career.

He worked with a number of students from foreign countries, especially from various parts of Asia, and was known to all as a warm and sympathetic faculty supporter who could be counted on to give solid academic guidance as well as to provide a kind and friendly word for those who might have felt isolated and lonely in a faraway place. His commitment to foreign area studies and to assisting those from foreign places is seen in his lengthy and devoted service (1976–1985) on the Board of International House, a wonderful institution on the campus of the University of Chicago that serves as dormitory, cafeteria, recreational center, and meeting place for foreign and domestic students, dedicated to encouraging understanding and friendship among them.

Memorial Scholarship in Norton’s Memory

A memorial service was held for Norton in the library of the Quadrangle Club, the faculty club at the University of Chicago, on 1 December 2007. The setting was most fitting, as it was a place that Norton very much enjoyed and where he spent many pleasant hours on the tennis courts and with his colleagues. After testimonials from friends, colleagues, and former students, a University development officer announced the creation of an Odyssey Scholarship in Norton’s name to assist undergraduate scholarship students. This Odyssey Scholarship Challenge is a new scholarship fund at Chicago set up as a matching gift from an alumnus. It is most appropriate to honor Norton in this way, as he was a scholarship student at Chicago as an undergraduate and he was devoted, as noted earlier, to assisting his students by supporting their Chicago education. ¹ Norton’s family believes this is the most suitable memorial for a life that was devoted to improving the human condition through scholarly advancement and understanding. He is survived by his wife Diana, sons Jeremy and Alexander, daughter-in-law Cheryl, and brother Gilbert.

Norton Ginsburg will be remembered for almost half a century of distinguished scholarly work on the changing urban and economic geography of East and Southeast Asia, as well as for editing and guiding environmental and policy work focused on the Pacific Basin. He was a gifted teacher and mentor, and his colleagues and former students will recall him fondly as a caring and concerned person who served not only as a grand academic model, instructor, and advisor but as a close and supportive friend.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Norton’s widow, Diana, for her help in providing information and assisting with the accuracy of this narrative. Any errors are, of course, my responsibility. In preparing this memorial, a number of Norton’s former students and colleagues have offered thoughts and comments and for these I am most grateful. They include Baruch Boxer, Richard Edmonds, Gil Latz, Alec Murphy, James Osborn, Shue Tuck Wong, and Yue-man Yeung.

Notes

1. Those who wish to make a contribution to the Norton Ginsburg Odyssey Scholarship fund for a matching commitment should contact the Development Office at the University of Chicago (https://odyssey.uchicago.edu) or call 773-702-8884.

References

· 1. Borgese, Elisabeth Mann and Ginsburg, Norton, eds. 1979–1987. Ocean yearbook, Vol. 1–6, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 2. Borgese, Elisabeth Mann, Ginsburg, Norton and Morgan, Joseph, eds. 1989–1996. Ocean yearbook, Vol. 7–12, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 3. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1947. Ch’ang-ch’un. Economic Geography, 23: 290–307.

· 4. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1948. Ch’ing-tao. Economic Geography, 23: 181–200.

· 5. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1949a. Japanese prewar trade and shipping in the Oriental Triangle, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 6

· 6. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1949b. Manchurian Railway Development. The Far Eastern Quarterly, 9: 398–411.

· 7. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1951. China’s railway network. Geographical Review, 41: 470–74.

· 8. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1953. The economic resources and development of Formosa, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations.

· 9. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1955. The great city in Southeast Asia. American Journal of Sociology, 60: 455–62.

· 10. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1957. Natural resources and economic development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 47: 197–212.

· 11. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1958. The pattern of Asia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

· 12. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1960. Essays on geography and economic development by Brian Berry and others, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 62

· 13. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1961a. Atlas of economic development, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 14. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1961b. The dispersed metropolis: The case of Okayama. Toshi Mondai, 52: 631–40. [Municipal Problems]

· 15. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1965. “Urban geography and non-western areas”. In The study of urbanization, Edited by: Hauser, P. M. and Schnore, L. F. 311–46. New York: Wiley.

· 16. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1966. An historical atlas of China by Albert Herrmann, Chicago: Aldine.

· 17. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1969. Aldine university atlas, Edited by: Fullard, Harold and Darby, H. C. Chicago: George Philip, and Son, Aldine. Consulting ed.

· 18. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972a. How China sees herself. The Center Magazine, 5: 1–6.

· 19. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972b. The mission of a scholarly society. The Professional Geographer, 24: 1–6.

· 20. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972c. “Planning the future of the Asian city”. In The city as a center of change in Asia, Edited by: Dwyer, D. J. 43–59. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

· 21. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1973. From colonialism to national development: Geographical perspectives on patterns and policies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63: 1–21.

· 22. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1975. Asia: Visual-relief Asia (map), Chicago: Denoyer-Geppert.

· 23. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1990. The urban transition: Reflections on the American and Asian experiences, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.

· 24. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1994. Planning the future of the Asian city: A twenty-five-year retrospective, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. Occasional Paper No. 36

· 25. Ginsburg, Norton, Holt, Sidney and Murdoch, William, eds. 1974. Pacem in Maribus III: The Mediterranean marine environment and the development of the region, Malta: University of Malta Press.

· 26. Ginsburg, Norton, Koppel, Bruce and McGee, T. G., eds. 1991. The extended metropolis: Settlement transition in Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

· 27. Ginsburg, Norton and Lalor, Bernard, eds. 1984. China: The 80s era, Boulder, CO: Westview.

· 28. Ginsburg, Norton, Osborn, James and Blank, Grant. 1986. Geographic perspectives on the wealth of nations, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 220

· 29. Ginsburg, Norton S. and Chester, F. Roberts Jr. 1958. Malaya, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

· 30. Ginsburg, Norton. 1990. Resources/environment: Perspectives on critical issues, Environment and Policy Institute, East-West Center. Working paper No. 24

· 31. Leung, C. K. and Ginsburg, Norton, eds. 1980. China: Urbanization and national development, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 196

Pannell, Clifton W. “Norton S. Ginsburg, 1921-2007: Teacher and Scholar of Asia, Mentor, Editor, Academic Administrator, and Director.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99, no. 4 (2009): 805-809.

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John Brush

John E. Brush, a leading human geographer during the last half of the 20th century, passed away on February 20, 2007, in Medford, New Jersey. Born on September 2, 1919, in Jefferson, Pennsylvania, Brush grew up in India, where his parents served as Baptist missionaries in Kharagpur, Bengal. His love of cartography began by mapping his boyhood hikes in the Himalayas. He earned both an MA (1947) and a PhD (1952) in geography from the University of Wisconsin. A Professor Emeritus of Geography at Rutgers University, Brush served on the faculty for 35 years, where he also served as department chair.

Brush’s research touched on Wisconsin, New Jersey, and the cities of India, but his professional and personal interests took him across a wider range of places, from Africa to the British Isles, China, France, Russia, and Scandinavia. His research awards included a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and several Senior Fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies for research in India.

John E. Brush (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(6): 15.

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Leslie Hepple

Professor Leslie Hepple, faculty member in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, passed away recently at the age of 59. He was one of the longest-serving faculty members at the school. Hepple’s areas of early work involved spatial autocorrelation and spatial econometrics. He extended that work through major ESRC-supported research programs on Bayesian spatial econometrics, developing both theory and algorithms. His command of theory led government officials to call upon him to attempt to resolve policy issues ranging from rate support grants to census undercounting.

In addition to spatial analysis, Hepple’s interests extended to a broader range of subjects and methods in human geography. A 1986 paper on the revival of geopolitics was recently celebrated in the Progress in Human Geography series “classics in human geography.” His undergraduate courses on both geopolitics and Central America were well-known at Bristol, and he pursued an interest in historical geography through studies of English landscape evolution much in the manner of those by H.G. Hoskins. One of his former students, Derek Gregory, remembered his former teacher as possessing “a wonderful gift for clear exposition combined with such good humour and gentleness.” At the time of his death, Hepple was working on a revised approach to spatial interaction models.

Leslie Hepple (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(3): 21.

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