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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C. Barron McIntosh

C. Barron McIntosh, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, died recently following a long battle with cancer. Born in Edgemont, South Dakota in 1916, McIntosh graduated from Huron College in 1939 and taught in Sandhills high schools until 1949. He also served in the U.S. Navy. McIntosh was appointed Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Nebraska in 1958 and he remained there for the rest of his professional life.

McIntosh published a series of articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in the 1970s that established his reputation as an original and accomplished historical geographer. Meticulously working from the United States Land Office Records, he constructed maps of the Nebraska Sandhills that revealed new patterns of settlement. His later book, The Nebraska Sandhills: The Human Landscape (1996) became the definitive study of the
settlement of that region.

C. Baron McIntosh (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(7): 21

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Ronald Weinkauf

Ronald A. Weinkauf, emeritus professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, died recently at the age of 71 following a lengthy illness.

Weinkauf earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a master’s degree from the University of Oregon. He received his PhD from Oregon State University in 1963. He joined UW-La Crosse in 1979 and retired twenty years later as a full professor.

Weinkauf specialized in satellite remote sensing and GIS. He developed the geography and earth science department’s remote sensing curriculum, which is still being taught as part of the program in GIScience. His National Science Foundation grants helped launch the department’s GIS computer laboratory facilities in 1989. Weinkauf started the GIS internship program with the former Environmental Mapping and Technical Center (which became the Upper Midwest Environmental Science Center), a part of the U.S. Geological Survey. He also received grants to conduct workshops in remote sensing and earth science for K-12 teachers in the La Crosse, Wisconsin area.

Weinkauf was involved with many professional organizations throughout his career, including the AAG, North American NOAA Polar-Orbiting Users Group, National Science Foundation, Wisconsin Geographical Society, Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, and the Wisconsin Land Information Association.

Ronald A. Weinkauf (Necrology).2008. AAG Newsletter 43(1): 14.

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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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Bradford Washburn

Bradford Washburn, former director of the Museum of Science in Boston and an accomplished mountaineer and mapmaker, passed away recently at the age of 96. Washburn published many articles and photographs of his explorations in the magazines Life and National Geographic before being named director of the New England Museum of Natural History in 1939. Over the next 40 years, Washburn re-created the institution from the ground up, and the transformation into a leading museum for science education necessitated the name change that took place during his tenure. Ioannis N. Miaoulis, the museum’s current director, recently explained that Washburn’s effect was to introduce “physics, geology and astronomy to exhibits in an integrated and interactive way.”

An accomplished mountaineer and photographer who had scaled both the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc by the age of 16, Washburn would later lead teams of mapmakers on pioneering missions to Mount McKinley and the Grand Canyon. In exploring the Grand Canyon, Washburn used lasers and reflecting prisms to measure contours and depths, a process which he described as mapping “a mountain upside down.” Among Washburn’s numerous books is the co-written “Mount McKinley: The Conquest of Denali,” which showcases his photographs.

After retiring as museum director in 1980, Washburn produced maps of Mount Everest’s summit using global positioning devices. His survey in fact helped to correct the height of the world’s tallest mountain, to 29,035 feet. For his work in cartography and photography, the Royal Geographical Society awarded Washburn its Cherry Kearton Medal in 1988.

Bradford Washburn (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(3): 21.

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Marie Tharp

Marie Tharp, an oceanographic cartographer who drew pioneering maps of the world’s oceans and whose observations from the late 1950s through the 1970s helped scientists reconsider the geology of the seafloor, has died. She was eighty-six.

Tharp was born July 30, 1920, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, into a mapmaking family. Her father, William, was a surveyor who made soil classification maps for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Following advice to find something to do that she loved, Tharp earned a bachelor’s in English and music, with four minors, from Ohio University in 1943; a master’s in geology from the University of Michigan; and a degree in mathematics from the University of Tulsa while working as a geologist for an Oklahoma oil company.

She moved to New York in 1948 and joined Columbia’s geology department as a research assistant. Bruce Heezen, who would later be her collaborator on revolutionary sea floor maps, arrived two weeks later.

Mapping the vast, hidden seafloor was “a once-in-the-history-of-the-world opportunity” for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s, Tharp recalled decades later. She had been recruited to study geology at the University of Michigan only because so many men were in the military during World War II. Because women weren’t allowed to sail on research ships in the 1940s and ’50s, Tharp remained behind, painstakingly plotting sonar readings of the ocean floor often sent back by Heezen, a marine geologist with whom she spent three decades in a personal and professional partnership.

Over five years, as she pieced together a puzzle of the North Atlantic Ocean, an enormous mountain range with a puzzling peculiarity took shape. What became known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge showed signs of a crack down the middle that led Tharp to conclude that the seafloor was spreading, a radical notion at the time.

Her early observations and maps encouraged scientists to reexamine the theory of continental drift: the belief that the continents once had been one giant land mass that was slowly pulled apart through the movement of tectonic plates. Their work expanded to include the South Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, Antarctic, and Pacific oceans. It culminated with the map of the world’s oceans, published weeks after Heezen died of a heart attack on a research expedition in 1977.

After retiring, Tharp ran a map-distribution business in South Nyack, New York, and wrote several articles on Heezen’s life.

Marie Tharp (Necrology). 2006. AAG Newsletter 41(10): 23.

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Mingma Norbu Sherpa

Mingma Norbu Sherpa was born October 31, 1955, in Khunde village in the Sherpa homeland of Khumbu within what is now Sagarmatha (Chomolungma/Mt. Everest) National Park. Because he spoke several local languages and English, he was working as a translator for visiting trekkers and conservationists in his teens. He became a protégé of Sir Edmund Hillary who in 1953 became the first Westerner to scale Mount Everest. Mingma was in the first class of the first school established by Hillary around Everest. He continued on to graduate from Lincoln College (now a branch of New Zealand’s University of Canterbury), in 1980. He earned a master’s degree in natural resources management in 1985 from the University of Manitoba. As a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan in 1987, he created a plan for environmental education in Nepal. Mingma, along with Chandra Gurung, was central to the development of the conservation area concept in Nepal. In 1985 a team including Mingma and Chandra proposed and planned the establishment of Annapurna Conservation Area where Mingma later served as the first director. Mingma and Chandra felt that the conservation area approach would not reach its full potential until local residents assumed full responsibility for conservation area management as they now have in Kanchenjunga Conservation Area. Mingma hoped that this would spread to all of Nepal’s national parks including Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park. He became a ranger there in 1980 and within six months became the park’s first Sherpa warden. Mingma joined the WWF in 1989 to direct programs in Nepal, Bhutan, and the Terai Arc region of Nepal and India. Among other projects, he led efforts to protect endangered wildlife, including the Bengal tiger and the greater one-horned rhinoceros.

Mingma Norbu Sherpa (Necrology). 2006. AAG Newsletter 41(10): 6.

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Fred Broome

Fred Broome, born February 18, 1940, a longtime employee of the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, passed away quietly from cancer on December 2, 2006, near his home in Augusta, West Virginia. Broome was the U.S. government’s first employee with the title of “Computer Mapping Specialist” and was relied upon for his expertise in geospatial techniques. He played key roles in developing the address coding guidelines of the 1960s, the GBF/DIME program of the 1970s, assisted in creating TIGER in the 1980s, helped develop the Bureau’s automated cartographic system, formulated the concept of map image metafile (MIM) language, and played a substantial role in the development of the GPS and imagery update techniques currently in use.

Broome served the Census Bureau in several roles throughout his tenure, including as Chief, Mapping Operations Branch; Chief, Geospatial Research and Standards Staff; and lastly as Chief, National Geographics Partnership Team, Geography Division. He retired from the Census Bureau in 2003 after retiring from the U.S. Army Reserves as a lieutenant colonel in 2000.

Broome also played a key role on the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) where he was devoted to building the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and where he also served as Chair of the Subcommittee on Cultural and Demographic Data. Broome provided technical support to the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health for an important study of breast cancer on Long Island. Broome taught GIS for the Center for Disease Control’s Maternal and Child Health conferences and also served as an adjunct faculty member for the Department of Geography at the University of Maryland and for George Mason University, where he taught automated cartography and GIS.

Frederick Roland Broome (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(2): 20.

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Benjamin Moulton

Benjamin Moulton, longtime chair of the Department of Geography and Geology at Indiana State University died September 30, 2006 at age eighty-nine in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Professor Moulton graduated from Clark University in 1939, earned a master’s from Butler University in 1941 and a second master’s from Indiana University in 1945. He received a PhD from Indiana University in 1950. Before joining the faculty at Indiana State University in 1961, he taught at Butler University, University of Florida, Florida State University, Western Reserve University, Flint Community College, and Eastern Michigan University. He served as professor and chairman of the Department of Geography and Geology from 1964 to 1983. He founded the master’s programs in geography and geology and the PhD program in geography at Indiana State University. The graduate programs were founded with a focus on satellite remote sensing and computer spatial analysis and set the new graduate program apart from others. When he retired in 1983, thirty-five graduate students were in residence.

Professor Moulton published seventeen articles, reviewed more than forty books, taught graduate courses in geography at six colleges and universities, directed twelve field courses to Alaska and the northwestern United States, led annual field trips throughout Indiana, served on more than twenty-five Indiana State University committees, and directed in-service institutes for teachers of earth science. He worked with fourteen science fairs in Michigan and Indiana and was a judge in ten others. He was honored by the National Council for Geographic Education for his outstanding contributions to undergraduate and graduate education in geography and for his excellence in mentoring students. Upon his retirement, the Benjamin Moulton Award was established at Indiana State University for students demonstrating excellence in graduate academic prowess. Moulton remained an active participant in departmental functions throughout his emeritus years.

Benjamin Moulton (Necrology). 2006. AAG Newsletter 41(11): 22.

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