Mark A. Maschhoff

Mark A. Maschhoff, Associate Professor of Geography at Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis, Missouri, died in September of 2011 at the age of 71.

Maschhoff received a bachelor’s degree from Concordia Teacher’s College in 1961 and in 1965 earned a master’s degree from Bradley University. He received his PhD in 1973 from St. Louis University. The philosophy of education was his main area of professional interest, and his research involved the development of innovative teaching methods.

A longtime faculty member at Harris-Stowe State University, Maschhoff developed the geography program there, increasing the number of geography majors from 25 to 150. He developed a strong program in physical geography, his specialty, but also increased offerings across a broader range of subfields including cartography and urban geography.

Maschhoff was well-known at Harris-Stowe for bringing new technologies into the classroom. He implemented the “Goals 2000” geography standards at Harris-Stowe, and pioneered methods of team teaching. He was particularly well-known for working with underachieving students and using perceptual behavior as a technique for increasing learning comprehension and the student’s self-image.

Mark A. Maschhoff (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(7): 30.

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Clyde Woods

Clyde Woods, Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), died this past summer.

Woods received his PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA where he studied with Ed Soja. Since his graduate student days, he had been an active member of the geographic community. He research was centered at the nexus of regional planning, African American studies, and social justice. As a longtime member of the AAG, Woods not only sought to focus attention on the plight of poor communities of color, but he also actively encouraged and mentored black geographers in order to diversify the discipline.

Woods was also Director of the Center for Black Studies Research at UCSB. His work demonstrated his overarching belief that the purpose of public social science is to explore and strengthen the links between knowledge embedded in communities and the knowledge disseminated by universities. “Clyde Woods was an admired colleague, professor, and student mentor, and he will be deeply missed by all the members of our UCSB family,” said Chancellor Henry T. Yang. “Dr. Woods was engaged in two long-term research projects within our Department of Black Studies, one focusing on rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and the other on creating a network of community members and scholars studying race and policy issues in the Los Angeles area. He was also actively involved in Haiti relief efforts; the recent earthquake in Haiti touched him deeply, and he was passionate about helping the people of Haiti.” He joined the UCSB faculty in 2005 following appointments at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Maryland.

Woods was the author of two important books, Development Arrested: Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta (Verso, 1998), an interdisciplinary work that reframed the history of the Mississippi Delta by unearthing and interpreting the blues epistemology of its poor black residents, and Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, co-edited with Katherine McKittrick (South End Press, 2007). In addition, he edited a special issue of the American Quarterly focused on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, “In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

At the time of his death Woods had also completed a manuscript entitled, “Development Drowned and Reborn,” a study of post- Katrina New Orleans that his colleague and friend, Laura Pulido, will see through the publication process. Finally, Woods was also working on a book on the history of Black Los Angeles, which Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Laura Pulido hope to complete as a collaborative process. If people are interested in working on this project they should contact Ruth or Laura.

Clyde Woods (Necrology). 2012. AAG Newsletter 47(3): 36.

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Nicholas Helburn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stephen J. Lavin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Allan Rodgers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Peter H. Nash Sr.

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

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

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

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

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

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Charles F. Lane

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

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

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

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William Beetschen

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

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

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James Wheeler

James O. Wheeler, the Merle Prunty, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, died at his home in Athens, Georgia, on Thursday, December 9, 2010. Born in Muncie, Indiana, on March 7, 1938, he was the son of educators Emerson Franklin Wheeler and Ruby Rachel McCreery Wheeler. He attended Indiana public schools and received his undergraduate degree from Ball State Teachers College (now Ball State University). After teaching English and geography in junior high and high school, he began graduate work at Indiana University, where he was awarded the M.A. in 1963 and the Ph.D. in 1966.

Wheeler’s early teaching career at the college level included positions at Indiana University (Gary), Ohio State University, Western Michigan University, and Michigan State University. In 1971, he joined the faculty of the University of Georgia’s Department of Geography, where he served as department head from 1975 to 1983. He advised graduate students and taught until his retirement in 1999, and his active professional life of writing and research continued until his death.

Wheeler served as head of two divisions of the Association of American Geographers, first as chair of the East Lakes Division and later as president of the Southeastern Division. He published numerous research articles and authored two widely used textbooks, Economic Geography and Urban Geography. He was a founding editor of the journal Urban Geography, which he co-edited from 1980 to 2003. In addition, from 1992 to 2003 he served as editor of the Southeastern Geographer.

Wheeler was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi and received the Creative Research Medal from the University of Georgia, Honors from the Association of American Geographers, and the Southeastern Division of the AAG’s (SEDAAG) Research Award, Outstanding Service Award, and Lifetime Achievement Award.

James O. Wheeler (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(2): 45.

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Roger P. Miller

Roger P. Miller, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, died on May 30, 2010 at the University of Michigan Medical Center from complications to injuries he sustained in a motorcycle crash. Born in Chicago on March 29, 1951, Miller graduated from the University of Chicago Lab School (1968), attended Oberlin College (1968-70), the San Francisco Art Institute (1970-71; photography and film), and University of California- Berkeley (1971-72; A.B., English Literature) before turning to Geography at Berkeley (1973-79; M.A., PhD), working closely with Alan Pred and Clarence Glacken. Miller will be remembered as one of the “New Urban Historians.” He joined Theodore Hershberg and the Philadelphia Social History Project at the University of Pennsylvania for dissertation research, and taught at Penn’s Department of Regional Science (1977-78), and the University of Colorado-Boulder (1979-80) before joining the University of Minnesota Geography Department in 1980. Miller’s specialties included the history of city planning, European and North American Cities, urban and historical geography, Scandinavia, and social theory. An award winning teacher, he was elected to the University of Minnesota’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. His course “The City in Film,” based on analysis of full-length commercial feature films, was immensely successful. Other teaching included “Geographical Perspectives on Planning,” “Global Cities,” “Cities, Citizens, and Communities,” and “Historical Geography.” His recent research focused on the historical population geography of Sweden and included regular work with colleagues at the University of Stockholm, Gotland University in Visby, and the University of Lund.

Roger P. Miller (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(6): 18.

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