Necrology, 2008

1943-2008

Joyce Temple Ward lived her entire life in Nashville, where she was born in 1943. She graduated with high honors from George Peabody College in 1965 and three years later began a teaching career that would last forty-one years, first at Franklin High School, then for the next thirty-seven years at Harpeth Hall School. For fifteen of those years she was the chair of the Foreign Languages Department. Her love of antique lands was shared with her students during fifteen trips of study abroad from 1983 to 2006. Not only did her students receive expert guidance around Italy, Greece, and Egypt, but they were also admitted through the iron gates of Chicago House, the home of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute's Epigraphic Survey at Luxor. Honors fell upon Mrs. Ward throughout her career: she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year at her school in 1984, the same year that she was named Tennessee Latin Teacher of the Year by the Tennessee Foreign Language Teachers Association. She was the first holder of the Owen Chair for Excellence in Teaching in 1994 and three years later was given the Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence by Peabody College. A devoted member of CAMWS, she retained in her library nearly thirty-five years' worth of Classical Journal. She died on August 18, 2008, after a valiant battle with a rare form of t-cell lymphoma.

— Ward Briggs

Additional Obituary

It seems that for each octo- or nonagenarian we memorialize each year, we must remember one called away from us at an age which even the ancients would consider unripened. John T. Quinn received a B.A. from Notre Dame in 1984, an M.A. in 1986 and a Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation on Florus. He began his teaching career at Hope College in 1995, where he published on his academic specialty, translation, but where his true devotion was to the students in his Latin or Greek or Coptic classes. He is remembered for the extraordinary passion he brought to his teaching (and even to the papers he read at CAMWS meetings), which was rewarded with grants from the NEH, the U.S. Department of Education and the Fulbright-Hayes Group for Study Abroad. The students he led during summer tours of Greece and the alumni he guided through the monuments of ancient Rome declared that cold marble seemed almost to breathe with life when John's eyes lit up at a site that a figure of antiquity, sometimes his beloved Horace, might himself have witnessed. John died while running at the lunch hour on June 19, 2008.

— Ward Briggs

Frank H. Longstreth

Frank H. Longstreth was a pillar of the Western Reserve Academy in Shaker Heights. Born to an old Main Line Philadelphia family, he did graduate work at Penn after service during Word War II in the Marine Corps, whose lapel pin he proudly wore on his crisply tailored blazers and suit jackets. He came to Western Reserve in 1948 and stayed as a teacher and campus fixture for 44 years. Known across campus as "Stretch," he was as handsome and well-dressed as a Gentleman's Quarterly model, even when his white hair gave him the aquiline appearance of our national symbol. He was devoted to Broadway show tunes and college fight songs, along with a quiver full of barbed lines from old movies, all of which he employed to encourage and amuse his students both in the classroom and the athletic fields. He was honored by CAMWS as a Teacher of the Year. He died at the age of 86 on March 19, 2008.

— Ward Briggs

1915-2008

Hazel Estella Barnes was trained in classics at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (B.A. 1937), close to her home in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where she was born on 16 December 1915. She went on to Yale where she received a Ph.D. in 1941 in a class that included Henry Immerwahr, Henry Hoenigswald, and Christopher Dawson. Her passion was for Greek philosophy and after stints at Ohio State University, the University of Toledo, and Pierce College in Athens, Greece, she arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1953. It was well before this, however, in 1949, at the age of 34, that she first read the French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and her life was changed. "How was it that from my first introduction I felt such empathic affiliation with Parisian intellectuals whose lives . . . were so unlike my own, both in external events and in intimate lifestyle?" she asked in her 1998 autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture in Existentialist Autobiography. She set about translating Sartre's magisterial work, Being and Nothingness (1956) and laterSearch for a Method (1963). Though many assumed a gulf between the Greeks and the Existentialists, Barnes clearly did not. In fact she felt her classical training predisposed her to Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus because they so frequently explained their philosophy in terms of classical figures like Sisyphus, Prometheus, and Medusa. In fact, Barnes and Camus had both written dissertations on Plotinus. Like the Greeks the Existentialists denied any fixed barriers between literature, philosophy and psychology. Finally, Greek philosophy was consumed by describing the authentic life and "the high value the Greek philosophers placed on reason unites more than it separates them from the French Existentialists." Though Barnes maintained her classics credentials with books like Hippolytus in Drama and Myth(1960) and The Meddling Gods: Four Essays on Classical Themes(1974), her great achievement was the popularization of her beloved Existentialists, not only through her translations, but also through her important studies, An Existential Ethic (1967), Sartre (1973), andSartre and Flaubert (1981).

At Colorado, Barnes moved from the Classics Department to humanities and ultimately to philosophy. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 and two years later became the first woman to be named a Distinguished Professor at CU. She received the university's highest award, the University of Colorado Medal and in 1991, CU established the Hazel E. Barnes Prize, worth $20,000 to the recipient whose activity shows "the enriching relationship between teaching and research." Following her retirement in 1986, she traveled and lectured widely. For her 90th birthday she corrected what she considered a blemish on Athenian tragedy by re-writing the end of Euripides'Alcestis, which was subsequently published in Amphora. She died on March 18, 2008, at her home in Boulder.

— Ward Briggs

1960-2008

It is especially sad when those who devote themselves to leading their fields into the future are denied a fair portion of that future for themselves. Allen Ross Scaife was a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was born in 1960. He majored in Classics and philosophy at William and Mary and received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1990. A Fulbright year in 1985 allowed him unfettered time at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he developed research and materials for the many and diverse courses he taught at the University of Kentucky from 1991 until his death. He will be remembered by the world at large for his work as editor of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities. His website set the standard for non-print publications. He also co-founded Diotima, where he collected and made available to the world the materials he used so successfully in his course on women in antiquity. He also helped found the Suda on Line for Byzantine Greek Lexicography, Educe, a scanning technology to read unwrapped papyrus rolls, and he collaborated in the high-resolution digital imaging of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad. At the University of Kentucky he was instrumental in founding the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, a project to introduce his colleagues to using computers in their research. He took as much joy in watching his three sons play soccer as they took in playing it. Sailing and hiking vacations in his native Virginia gave him special pleasure and special time with his family. He was claimed by cancer on March 15, 2008, but the future of our research will forever be indebted to him.

— Ward Briggs

The two great loves of Charles J. Zabrowski's professional life were the teaching of classical Greek to undergraduates and the investigation of the Byzantine manuscripts of Aeschylus and their attendant scholia. These interests were nurtured at Canisius College in Buffalo, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1967. He went on to receive an M.A. in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Toronto. He spent 1973-74 as Seymour Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and received his Ph.D. from Fordham in 1984. He pursued these passions at Elmira College, then at Boston College, then from 1979 to 1985 at Creighton, where he joined CAMWS. In 1987 he moved to Gettysburg College where he was a familiar and beloved figure, teaching his class and strolling about the campus in his academic robes, in which he always taught his classes. He rose to full professor, served as secretary of the faculty and was chairman of the department from 1998 to 2004. He lost his long battle with lung cancer on January 30, 2008.

— Ward Briggs

1927-2008

James J. Williams was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on Christmas Eve in 1927 and graduated from Emory University. He received an S.T.M at Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, an M.A. at Northwestern University in Evanston and an M.A.L.S. at Rosary College in Chicago, after which he was ordained as a pastor of the Methodist church. After marriage to his wife Catherine in Charlotte in 1951, he moved to Elmhurst, Illinois, where he was an associate professor and librarian at Elmhurst College from 1960 to 1994, teaching Greek, classical literature and theology. He and his wife led study tours for students and adults to Greece, Italy and Ireland through their travel company, Dolpin Travel. Williams retired in 1994 to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He died in Green Bay, Wiscosin, January 20, 2008, at the age of 80.

— Ward Briggs