Deaths |
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August 25, 2015, Volume 62, No. 02 |
Julian Bond, Pappas Fellow
Julian Bond, the civil rights activist and former NAACP chairman, died of complications of vascular disease on August 15 in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. He was 75 years old.
Mr. Bond was born in Tennessee. He attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1965, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, but his fellow lawmakers refused to let him take office. He took his seat in 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. He served in the Georgia House of Representatives until 1975, followed by six terms of service in the Georgia Senate, ending in 1986. In 1971, he founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he helped to oversee for the rest of his life.
Mr. Bond came to Penn as a Pappas Fellow in the spring of 1989 (Almanac November 29, 1988). He taught courses in the history of the civil rights movement at Penn, among other universities. He served as chairman of the board of the NAACP from 1998 until 2010.
Mr. Bond is survived by his wife, Pamela Horowitz, and five children.
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Howard Brody, Physics
Howard Brody, professor emeritus of physics at Penn, died on August 11 of complications from Parkinson’s disease at Bryn Mawr Hospital. He was 83 years old.
Dr. Brody was born in Newark, New Jersey. He earned his bachelor of science in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1954), where he also played on the varsity tennis team. He then earned a master of science (1956) and a doctorate (1959), both in physics, from California Institute of Technology.
He taught physics at Penn from 1959 until his retirement in 1999. Famous for his insights into the physics of tennis, he wrote several books on the topic. Science Made Practical for the Tennis Teacher was published by the U.S. Professional Tennis Registry in 1986. Tennis Science for the Tennis Player was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1987 and is still in print.
Much of Dr. Brody’s research focused on the interaction between the tennis ball and racket, including the optimal racket size and stiffness. He found that on larger rackets, the percussion center is closer to the physical center of the racket head, making larger rackets easier for many players to use. Some of his findings upended accepted beliefs: he found that looser racket strings allow for the ball to be hit with greater power than tighter strings.
Dr. Brody was a member of the sports scientific committee of the U.S. Tennis Association. He was also inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame as an educator.
Dr. Brody is survived by two daughters, Victoria Stevenson and Deirdre Bernstein, and five grandchildren. Donations may be made payable to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, for the Lisa Lin Brody Foley Fund, and mailed to Laura Weber, Penn Arts and Sciences Office of Advancement, 3600 Market Street, Suite 300, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
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David Premack, Psychology
David Premack, professor emeritus of psychology at Penn, died on June 11 in Santa Barbara, California. He was 89 years old.
Dr. Premack was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned his BA in chemistry and liberal arts (magna cum laude, 1943), his MA in experimental psychology and statistics (1951) and his PhD in experimental psychology and philosophy (1955). He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946.
Dr. Premack held faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota; the University of Missouri; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Santa Barbara and Harvard before joining Penn as a professor of psychology in 1975. He also established a primate study center in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Premack’s career in psychology spanned a major revolution in the field. In his early work, he was a major contributor to the dominant American behaviorist enterprise with his “Premack principle,” which stated that any behavior A that is more common than another behavior, behavior B, can serve as a reinforcer for B. In his mid-career, he played a major role in the cognitive revolution by embracing it and by providing some of the best ideas and experiments to support it.
The behaviorists held that humans were just very complicated animals, with nothing qualitatively different between humans and animals. Dr. Premack showed that chimpanzees were more cognitively sophisticated than previously believed, by showing that they could comprehend and produce conceptual relations using a “language” of visual symbols.
In 1978, with his Penn graduate student Guy Woodruff, he introduced the idea of a “theory of mind,” an understanding that there are other minds. The two presented evidence for this theory in chimpanzees and gave birth to a major area of research in child development and other parts of modern psychology that are flourishing today. While Dr. Premack showed much greater intelligence in apes than had been previously thought, he also noted some uniquely human features, such as the syntax of language and the prevalence of intentional teaching as a fundamental activity. He is almost unique in psychology in his combination of theoretical and empirical excellence, and in being a contributor to two strongly opposed views of what psychology is about.
Dr. Premack retired from Penn in 1990 and moved to France, where he studied cognition in young children with his wife, Ann. They eventually returned to the Santa Barbara area. In 2005, he was designated a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society.
Dr. Premack is survived by his wife, Ann, and three children.
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Evan Rose, Urban Design
Evan Rose, professor of practice in urban design at Penn, died after a long illness on July 13 at his home in Brooklyn, New York. He was 50 years old.
Mr. Rose grew up in New Jersey. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1986 and his master’s degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He began his career in San Francisco’s planning department. As senior urban designer, he authored the award-winning San Francisco Waterfront Urban Design and Access Plan and initiated, authored and implemented San Francisco’s acclaimed Downtown Streetscape Plan.
In 1997, Mr. Rose joined the San Francisco firm SMWM, where he led the urban practice for 11 years and built the New York office. In 2007, he was diagnosed with ossifying fibromyxoid tumor, a rare form of cancer, and in 2008 he moved to New York for treatment. That year, he launched Urban Design+. In 2012, he launched SITELAB Urban Studio with Laura Crescimano.
Mr. Rose joined the Penn faculty in 2011 as a full-time professor of practice in the School of Design. He taught the Public Realm studio for second-year urban design students. In May of 2015, as part of the School’s graduation activities, PennDesign students awarded him with the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Outstanding Teaching, a citation given in recognition of distinguished teaching and innovation in the methods of instruction in the classroom, seminar or studio (Almanac May 26, 2015).
Mr. Rose was also an adjunct associate professor of architecture at Columbia University, where he taught in the graduate urban design program. He served as a board member for the San Francisco AIA and the California Council of the AIA, was a past president of the Architecture and Design Forum at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he also sat on the board of directors, and was a regular critic for architecture and urban design studios at MIT, SCI-ARC, UCLA, CCA, Stanford and UC Berkeley.
Mr. Rose is survived by his wife, Josslyn Shapiro, and their son, Ryder. An event to remember Mr. Rose and his work will be held by SPUR in San Francisco on September 25 (http://www.spur.org/blog/2015-07-20/memoriam-evan-rose); a memorial service in New York City is being planned for the fall. In lieu of flowers, his family requests donations be made in his honor to Team Evan at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Cycle for Survival (http://mskcc.convio.net/site/TR?team_id=50300&fr_id=2490&pg=team).
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Donald Schotland, Neurology
Donald Schotland, professor emeritus of neurology at Penn, died on August 13 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He was 85 years old.
Dr. Schotland earned his AB in 1952 and his MD in 1957, both from Harvard University. He was a resident in neurology and fellow in neuropathology at Columbia University, where he was also a member of the faculty from 1962 to 1967.
Dr. Schotland was a pioneering researcher in neuromuscular disease who trained a generation of academic neurologists. He joined the Penn faculty in 1967 as an associate professor of neurology. In 1971, he was promoted to professor of neurology. He eventually became director of the Henry Watts Center for Neuromuscular Research. In 1998, he retired from Penn.
Dr. Schotland is survived by his sons, John, Gr’86, M’96, Tom and Peter, Gr’01, and four grandchildren.
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E. Craig Sweeten, Alumni Relations
E. Craig Sweeten, W’37, the legendary former senior vice president for Development and University Relations at Penn, died on August 7 at the age of 100.
Mr. Sweeten graduated from Penn’s Wharton School and as Bowl Man of his class, he was elected one of four “Honor Men” in his senior year. He was the class’s perennial president, starting in his freshman year.
Mr. Sweeten began working for the University of Pennsylvania two days after graduation and was a member of the administration until his retirement in 1981. He began as an alumni field worker with the University’s Bicentennial Campaign until its culmination in 1940, when he was appointed to the University’s Placement Service as assistant director and later as director.
A lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, he served in the Pacific and other stations for four years during World War II.
During his career, he served as director of Colonial Penn Insurance Co., Bellevue Stratford Hotel, Walter B. Gallagher Co. and the Good Neighbor Foundation of Bay Village in Florida.
In 1956, he was named Penn’s director of development (Almanac February 1956). In 1965, he became vice president for development and public relations, in which capacity he was responsible for the operations of the Offices of the Director of Development and the Director of Public Relations (Almanac April 1965). For 11 years, State Relations was also his responsibility, and he was almost as much at home in Harrisburg as he was on campus.
Mr. Sweeten became senior vice president for Program for the Eighties in 1975 (Almanac October 7, 1975). This encompassed the supervision of the University’s five-year, $225 million fundraising campaign, which was completed on schedule on June 30, 1980 (Almanac July 10, 1980).
In January of 1981, the University of Pennsylvania presented Mr. Sweeten with the Alumni Award of Merit, calling him “a man nationally respected for his experience and insights in the art of raising funds for higher education, and whose immeasurable contributions gave the University energy and direction…” (Almanac January 13, 1981).
When he retired from the University, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania named a building on Locust Walk to house the General Alumni Society, the department of Alumni Relations, the Alumni Council on Admissions and The Pennsylvania Gazette as the E. Craig Sweeten Alumni House (Almanac July 14, 1981).
Mr. Sweeten spent the next 20 years in the Pocono Mountains in Skytop, Pennsylvania, where he served as a Trustee of East Stroudsburg University and a director of the Pocono Medical Center. He was named “Man of the Year” by the Pocono Chamber of Commerce.
The Sweetens moved to Venice, Florida, where Mr. Sweeten was an elder of the Venice Presbyterian Church and a member of the local Venice/Nokomis Rotary Club. For four years, he was president of the local Penn Alumni Club and on the board of directors of the Sarasota Ivy League Club.
In 1990, the Sweetens moved to Bay Village, a long-term continuing care retirement community in Sarasota, Florida. There, Mr. Sweeten was active in the Pine Shores Presbyterian Church. He had been married for 37 years to Nancy Rafetto Leech Sweeten, former vice dean of Penn’s College of Women and a lecturer in the English department at Penn, who died in 2005.
Mr. Sweeten is survived by two daughters, Barbara Lynn Schabel and Jane Elizabeth Gillis, CW’70; a stepson, Douglas Leach, WG’83; six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Pine Shores Presbyterian Church, 6135 Beechwood Avenue, Sarasota, FL 34231.
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Don Yoder, Folklife Studies, Religious Studies and American Studies
Don Yoder, professor emeritus of folklife studies, religious studies and American studies at Penn, died of natural causes on August 11 at his home in Devon, Pennsylvania. He was 93 years old.
Dr. Yoder was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in religious studies from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his early career, he taught at Franklin and Marshall College and Muhlenberg College. In 1949, he co-founded the Pennsylvania Folklife Center with Alfred L. Shoemaker and J. William Frey. In 1950, they established the Kutztown Folk Festival, the first ethnic festival of its kind.
Dr. Yoder taught at Penn for four decades and directed 60 PhD dissertations. In 1956, he joined the Penn faculty as instructor and assistant professor of religious thought. In 1966, he became associate professor of religious thought. In 1974, he became associate professor of folklore and folklife and in 1975, he attained the rank of professor of folklore and folklife. In 1996, he became professor emeritus. Dr. Yoder chaired Penn’s graduate program in folklore and folklife from 1966 until 1969. He then served as co-chair of the graduate program from 1969 until 1971. In 1986, he won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (Almanac April 15, 1986).
Dr. Yoder was responsible for the introduction of the term “folklife” to its present academic use in the United States, and he helped to found the Center for American Folklife at the Library of Congress.
He was the co-owner of the Roughwood Collection with his cousin, William Woys Weaver. He has published seventeen books and countless articles on Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture. According to his colleagues, he was widely known in Europe and his work influenced the German composer Paul Hindemith and the German-American writer H. L. Mencken. Dr. Yoder was considered the dean of German-American genealogy. A self-described “incurable Pennsylvanian,” he devoted his life to the study and cultural preservation of the folkways of his native people and inspired new generations in reviving and maintaining the spirit of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Dr. Yoder is survived by his cousin, William Woys Weaver.
A memorial service will be held at Haverford Friends Meeting, 855 Buck Lane, Haverford, PA 19041 on Saturday, October 24 from 10:30-11:30 a.m. |
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To Report A Death
Almanac appreciates being informed of the deaths of current and former faculty and staff members, students and other members of the University community. Call (215) 898-5274 or email almanac@upenn.edu
However, notices of alumni deaths should be directed to the Alumni Records Office at Room 517, Franklin Building, (215) 898-8136 or by email at record@ben.dev.upenn.edu
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