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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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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