Alan D. MacPherson

Alan MacPherson, Professor of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo, died recently at the age of 51. He had served as Chair of the Department of Geography from 2001-2007. He was also Director of SUNy-buffalo’s Canada-United States Trade Center (CUSTAC). MacPherson was born and raised in Inverness, Scotland. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography from the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom in 1979, and a master’s degree in planning from Edinburgh College of Art in 1981. In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in geography from the University of Toronto, where he also earned his doctorate in 1988. MacPherson’s principal research interests concerned the relationship between technological innovation and regional economic development, with special emphasis on export development and Canada-U.S. trade. His teaching included undergraduate and graduate courses in international business and economic geography. He became an Associate Professor at SUNy-buffalo in 1988.

Alan D. MacPherson (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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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.

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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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Henry L. Hunker

Henry Louis Hunker, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, died on April 10, 2009. Hunker began his long association with Ohio State University in 1949. He completed a PhD there in 1953, was appointed Professor of Geography, and later served as Professor in the School of Public Administration. He retired in 1994 following 41 years of service. In 1957, Hunker was Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, and in 1972-1973 was a battelle Memorial Institute Fellow. He served in various administrative positions at Ohio State, including Assistant Dean of the College of Commerce and business Administration 1966-68; Director, Center for Community and Regional Analysis 1968-1970; Associate Dean of the College of business 1989-90; and Director of the Ohio State Summer Program at Oxford University in England 1983-1985. Hunker’s work in economic geography appeared in many professional and popular journals. He authored several books, including Industrial Development, Concepts and Principles (1974), and Columbus: A Personal Geography (2000). His courses attracted future business leaders in Columbus and Central Ohio. Hunker also served his profession as editor of The East Lakes Geographer from 1963-72.

Henry L. Hunker (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 44(7): 19.

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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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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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