William Ainsley

William Frank Ainsley, Distinguished Professor of Geography, Department of Geography and Geology, University of North Carolina-Wilmington, has died. During a distinguished 36-year career at the University of North Carolina- Wilmington, Ainsley taught hundreds of students, both undergraduate and graduate, who benefitted from his outstanding abilities as a teacher and mentor. His considerable contributions were recognized with three significant awards: Ainsley was named North Carolina Geography Educator of the Year in 2003, received the University of North Carolina Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence in 2004, and was awarded a University of North Carolina- Wilmington Distinguished Teaching Professorship in 2005. He was an active officer for the Pioneer America Society, receiving the society’s Henry H. Douglas Distinguished Service Award in 2003. Ainsley’s research and teaching interests were wide-ranging. His substantial scholarship and teaching experience allowed him to author geography textbooks that have become the standard in public school systems across North Carolina. Among his many interests were immigrant farm colonies and preservation of historical buildings and sites. Friends, colleagues and former students will remember him as a huge Buddy Holly fan who gave his annual “Buddy Holly lecture” to geography classes each February 3, the day of Holly’s death. Ainsley held numerous degrees, including an A.B. degree in Biblical Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1966; a Masters of Divinity, Southeastern Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC, 1969; a Masters in Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1972; and a PhD in Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1977.

William Ainsley (Necrology). 2011. AAG Newsletter 46(1): 46.

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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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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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Daniel J. Hogan

Daniel J. Hogan, for 35 years as a Professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Campinas, Brazil, near Sao Paolo, has died. A major contributor to the field of population and environment, Hogan trained many top Brazilian demographers and was part of the first (and only) Committee on Population and Environment at IUSSP in 1990-94, which helped pave the way for the development of both PERN and the new field of Population and Environment. He organized and hosted the first international conference on the topic in Campinas in 1992, which included the first significant presentation of findings from the initial 1990 survey of migrant colonists in Ecuador, along with other early case studies on population and environment in the Philippines, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cameroon, Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Argentina and Peru.

Hogan was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, former president of Brazilian Population Association (ABEP), and served as Professor and Founding Researcher of the Unicamp Population Studies Center (NEPO) and the Environmental Studies Center (NEPAM). Hogan was also an active member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), the Population Geography commission of the International Geographical Union (IGU), and Population & Environment’s editorial board.

Daniel J. Hogan (Necrology). 2010. AAG Newsletter 45(9): 22.

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Burke Vanderhill

Burke Gordon Vanderhill died on May 24, 2010. He was born in La Porte, Indiana, on January 15, 1920, and grew up in Bellaire, Michigan where his father was a telegrapher and station agent for the Pere Marquette Railroad, later the Chesapeake and Ohio, inspiring Burke’s lifelong interest in trains and railroads as well as his love of geography. Vanderhill attended Kalamazoo College, Michigan State University (B.S, with Honors), the University of Nebraska (M.A.), and received his PhD in Geography from the University of Michigan where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force. During 1942-45, he served in the 8th Air Force near Ipswich, East Anglia, England. Upon returning to the U.S., Burke used the GI Bill to complete his degrees. He came to Tallahassee in 1950 to join the Florida State University Geography Department. Vanderhill retired in 1995 after 45 years of service to the university community. His research interests varied, but his primary focus was on the northern fringe of agricultural settlement in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and later Alaska, areas he returned to many times camping with his family.

Burke Gordon Vanderhill (Necrology). 2010. AAG Newsletter 45(10): 22.

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Donald J. Patton

Donald John Patton died on May 15, 2010 in Boulder, Colorado. Born May 18, 1919, in Chicago, he studied geography at Harvard University and served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After earning his PhD, Patton held positions as a researcher, lecturer, consultant, and professor, working for various government agencies and universities in and around Washington, D.C. and at Colorado University in Boulder. He joined the faculty at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1969 and retired there in 1989 with the distinction of Professor Emeritus. Throughout his professional career, Patton published many reports, articles, and book chapters. He contributed to several atlases and also served as editor of the Professional Geographer. Florida’s water resources were a special area of interest for him, and his life’s work demonstrated his love of scholarship and the earth sciences.

Donald J. Patton (Necrology) 2010. AAG Newsletter 45(7): 15.

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Bruce C. Ogilvie

Bruce Ogilvie, a former longtime employee at Rand McNally in Skokie, Illinois, and chief editor of some of its best known publications, died of natural causes on Tuesday, May 11, 2010, at the age of 94. Born in Avon, New York, Ogilvie received undergraduate degrees from the University of Maine in Farmington (1935) and Rhode Island College (1938). He was a graduate student at Clark University when World War II broke out and in 1942 joined the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. as a cartographer. He later received a direct commission in the U.S. Navy Reserve, serving as a Line Officer Afloat in the North Atlantic Theater and with the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office in Washington, D.C. He later worked for the national mapping division of the U.S. Geological Survey in the Department of the Interior. Ogilvie received his master’s degree in 1948 and his PhD from Clark University in 1956. During his two decades with Rand McNally, Ogilvie was chief editor and coordinator for The Time-Life Atlas, The International Atlas, and The Children’s World Atlas. Known simply as “the geographer” at the map-making giant, he brought to creation thousands of maps, globes and atlases. Ogilvie had recently finished an autobiography about his service in the Navy. The book, Getting the Cargo Through: The U.S. Navy Armed Guard on Merchant Ships in World War II, is scheduled to be published this summer. Ogilvie resigned his Navy commission in 1955 as a lieutenant senior grade and returned to Clark University to complete his PhD. During various years from 1947 until 1987, Ogilvie taught at the University of Georgia (Athens), Chico State College (California), the University of Chicago, George Mason University, and Mary Washington University. In 1978, he became Supervisory Geographer, National Mapping Division, U.S. Geological Survey, before retiring in 1986.

Bruce C. Ogilvie (Necrology). AAG Newsletter 45(7): 15.

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The Professional Geographer

Robert W. Marx

Robert W. Marx, former Chief of the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, died following an illness. Marx served as the Geography Division’s Chief from 1983 to 2003, interrupted only by a three-year period as Associate Director in the 1990s to prepare for the 2000 Census. He was the architect of the Census Bureau’s TIGER System, which began in the early 1980s as a collaborative effort with the U.S. Geological Survey. Marx was known as a trailblazer who sought new ways to advance the importance of census geography through technological advances that were made practical through useful applications. By making spatial data for the nation available, the TIGER effort opened the way for GIS development and pioneered an entire new industry. Bob Marx began his GIS career in the early 1960s while a student in geography and urban planning at the University of Minnesota, studying under John Borchert. To cover his educational expenses, he worked in the offi ces of Hodne Associates, Architects and Planners, preparing land use and comprehensive plan maps for small communities in Minnesota and Illinois under the auspices of the former “Section 701” program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In this capacity, he used the precursor to modern automated GIS methods – mylar base maps and clear overlays emblazoned with Zipa- Tone shadings and Presstype letters – to create the various “views” that illustrated combinations of information integral to the planning process. After joining the Census Bureau in 1966, Marx helped launch the Bureau’s then fl edgling Metropolitan Map Series, which provided the base for the Address Coding Guides that covered the 145 largest urban centers of the United States for the 1970 decennial census. Although crude by today’s standards, these two systems – comprising the base map information of streets, street names, address ranges, rivers, lakes and their names, railroads, governmental unit boundaries and names, census tract boundaries and numbers – once entered into the Census Bureau’s computers and enhanced with the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) technologies, this series evolved into the Geographic Base Files (GBFs) covering the 287 largest urban centers of the 1980 census, and then to the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files that covered the entire United States, Puerto Rico, and the associated Island Areas of the 1990 census and Census 2000. During his more than 36-year career at the Census Bureau, Marx received several awards for exceptional performance, including the Department of Commerce’s Gold and Silver Medals, and the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award. A memorial/tribute session in honor of Bob Marx is currently being organized at the AAG Annual Meeting for the evening of Wednesday, April 14. Consult your conference program for place and time.

Robert W. Marx (Necrology). 2009. AAG Newsletter 45(3): 14.

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