Necrology, 2007

Peter G. Theis taught Greek and Latin at Marquette University for 29 years, enlivening his classes with his good humor, his love of Latin, and his passion for teaching. He was the president of the Milwaukee Latin Teachers Association, the Wisconsin Latin Teachers Association and the Wisconsin Foreign Language Teachers Association. He was an ardent fan of the Milwaukee Brewers and a devoted family man. He died at the age of 77 on December 30, 2007.

— Ward Briggs

William Thomas "Tom" Jolly

1929-2007

William Thomas "Tom" Jolly was a native of Helena, Arkansas, where he was born in 1929. He devoted his career to the students of his alma mater, Rhodes College. Following his graduation in 1952, he received a master's from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. from Tulane. He returned to Rhodes in 1965 and for twenty years (1973-1993) he held the fort alone, teaching all the Greek and Latin at the college, before a rescue party in the form of Kenneth Morrell was called in. Morrell said that Jolly was "a professor among professors," who manifestly earned the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1991. Like many great teachers, his devotion to his students often extended beyond the classroom. Said one of his students, now a commander in the Navy, "A number of his students when in graduate school had some tuition paid or cars repaired by Tom." He died at the age of 78 on November 4, 2007, of complications that followed a stroke ten years earlier.

— Ward Briggs

1918-2007

Nancy Pearce Helmbold came out of Abilene, Texas, where she was born in 1918 to a typewriter salesman and his wife, a born teacher with a special gift for languages. Although she had swept the Texas state high-school Latin contest four years in a row, she graduated from the University of Texas in 1939 with a degree in liberal arts because Latin was "too square." She began work for the FBI as a secretary in San Antonio, where she translated Spanish calls and letters. During the occupation of Japan after World War II, the harbor of Tokyo and many of the islands that were scenes of the most intensely fought battles were filled with Japanese mines. Nancy learned Japanese in order to translate the nautical documents that located these mines. Her language skills literally saved lives from 1946 to 1950. But as her colleague Peter White said, "Her life was devoted to teaching Latin." Thanks to the G.I. Bill, she was able to leave Japan for Berkeley in 1950 where she continued her study of East Asian languages, but a couple of Latin courses changed her direction for life. She received a Ph.D. in 1957 and a year later married the Berkeley Hellenist William Clark Helmbold in 1958. She taught at Mount Holyoke and the University of Oregon before joining the University of Chicago in 1963 following her husband's departure from Berkeley. In Hyde Park, she taught Latin at all levels, including intensive summer courses, and was known as famously stringent in maintaining standards for punctuality, precision and intensity. Her specialty was Latin 301 to 303, the introductory sequence for graduate students not in the classics. Even after her retirement in 1989, when she received the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for her teaching, she continued teaching well into her eighties. Her great passion outside the classroom was grand opera which she attended over fifteen times a year with two of her former students. She said, "I would like to think that some of my students will read Latin poetry for the rest of their lives." Her colleague Elizabeth Asmis said that her passion for teaching Latin "never left her." Nancy Helmbold died of natural causes on October 30, 2007.

— Ward Briggs

James R. Jochum taught Latin in the secondary schools for 28 years. At New Albany High School in Indiana he taught three levels of Latin and one of English. He had a master's degree he was a lifelong Catholic. He died at the age of 57 on October 9, 2007.

— Ward Briggs

1924-2007

Naidyne Brown Bridwell was a familiar figure at CAMWS meetings for as long as any of us can remember. Born in Kentucky in 1924, she received her B.A. summa cum laude from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky, and taught at John Hersey High School in Illinois for nearly four decades. She retired from high-school teaching in 1984 when she moved to Denver with her husband Bill (Wilburn F.), who died in 1995. At Regis University she was one of the most energetic and effective state vice-presidents in CAMWS. Her regional newsletter set a standard for all. For these and her lifetime dedication to teaching she received many awards, including a CAMWSovatio in 1995. When she died on September 24, 2007, the classical world lost one of its most dedicated teachers and ardent supporters.

— Ward Briggs

Additional Obituary

1924-2007

Were we to devote all four days and 68 paper sessions to memories of the person, the contribution, and the dear personality of Sandy McKay, we could not exhaust the reservoir of expertise, wisdom and kindness that characterized one of this association's most accomplished and beloved members. Alexander Gordon McKay was born on Christmas Eve in 1924 in Toronto. His grandfather was Chancellor of McMaster University on Hamilton, Ontario. Sandy attended Upper Canada College then Trinity College at the University of Toronto as a Duke of Wellington Scholar, where he graduated with honors in Classics. He decamped to Yale as a Kellogg Fellow where he received an M.A., thence to Princeton as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, receiving the A.M. and Ph.D. After stints at Wells College, The University of Pennsylvania, Mount Allison, Waterloo, Western, and Manitoba, he joined the faculty at McMaster in 1957, where he served for 33 years as chairman of the department from 1962 to 1968 and again in 1976 to 1979, and Dean of the Humanities from 1968 to 1973. He was President of CAMWS in 1972-3, his elegant and crisp Latin style graced the ovationes for over ten years, and he received a CAMWS ovatio himself in 1978. He was resident of the Classical Association of Canada in 1978-80, The Vergilian Society of America in 1973-4, and in 1988 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. His early interest in Aeschylus was soon displaced by devotion to Virgil, resulting in over 15 books, more than 80 articles and over 100 book reviews, but he will be especially remembered as the indefatigable annual bibliographer of Virgil, whose lists in Vergilius regularly ran into the hundreds of items. He also served the Virgilian Society as a guide on numerous tours for nearly fifty years, drawing devoted members to the Society. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and received honorary degrees Manitoba, Brock, Queens, and McMaster. He continued to teach even after his retirement in 1990 and in 1992 he was honored with a Festschrift that focused on his beloved Virgil, his constant companion until Sandy's much grieved passage across the Styx on August 31, 2007.

Manibus date lilia plenis,

purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotis

his saltem accumulem donis et fungar inani

1938-2007

Robert Joseph Rowland, Jr. (1938-2007) was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University, New Orleans. A graduate of LaSalle College (1959), he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1961, 1964), while working as an instructor at his alma mater (1959-65). He remained in the Philadelphia area as instructor and assistant professor at Villanova (1961-7) before he began a well-travelled and distinguished career as an expert on Sardinian history and archaeology. He moved to the University of Missouri, where he was associate professor of classics (1967-72), associate professor of history (1972-4) and professor (1974-84). To this period belong not only numerous studies of Sardinia and Ritrovamenti Romani in Sardegna (1981), but also the beginning of his long and meritorious service both to CAMWS as president of the Southern Section (1982-4) and the APA as president of the Friends of Ancient History, but especially to the Vergilian Society of America as Executive Secretary (1980-91), which led to the founding of the journal Augustan Age and his editing of Vergil and the American Experience (1987). In 1984 he moved to the University of Maryland as professor and chair of the Classics Department (1984-91). There he burnished his reputation with Studies in Sardinian Archaeology (edited with Miriam S. Balmuth) in two volumes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984-6) and served as President of CAAS (1989-90). In 1991 he moved yet again, this time to Loyola University in New Orleans as Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His last major publication was The Periphery in the Center: Sardinia in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds(Oxford: Archeopress, 2001). He died on March 14, 2007.

— Ward Briggs