Necrology, 2015

Dr. George Labban, Jr., 93, of Davidson, died on Sunday, July 19th at The Pines at Davidson. He was born October 15, 1921 in Houston, Texas, the son of George and Mary Attra Labban and grew up in Corsicana, Texas where he completed his public education. He enrolled directly in the University of Texas, subsequently earning B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees.

During World War II, he served four years in the US Army as an officer primarily in the 763rd Field Artillery Battalion in the European theater. Afterward, he taught at Baylor University and at the University of Texas.

In 1952, he joined the faculty at Davidson College where he formed and chaired the Department of Classics, spending 33 years of rewarding service in the classroom and with his students on the ancient sites in Greece and Italy. Due to a progressively painful spinal disorder, he found it necessary to retire on medical disability in 1985. He was a longstanding member of Davidson United Methodist Church. His wife, Mary Ann Labban, preceded him in death. Surviving him are his sons George "Ged" (Cindi), and John (Paula);

grandchildren Courtney Ross (Jake), Jeffrey (Allyson) Labban, Caroline (Tim) Mittmann, Curtis (Catey), Briggs, Jamie, and Harrison Labban; grandchildren Grace Ross, Mason Mittmann, and Harper Labban; and sister Tressa Watkins.

A graveside service will be held at 1 pm on Wednesday, July 22nd at Mimosa Memorial Cemetery in Davidson and visitation with the family following from 2:00 to 3:00 at The Pines at Davidson.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to The Pines at Davidson (Resident Support Fund) or Davidson United Methodist Church.

CAMWS is sad to announce the passing of Dr. Carin Green. Carin was an active member of CAMWS for more than 20 years, serving as the CAMWS Vice President for Iowa, the Chair of the Committee for the Promotion of Latin, and as a member a multitude of CAMWS committees. She will be sorely missed. Ave atque Vale, Carin.

With great sadness and heavy hearts, we report that Barbara F. McManus passed away in the early morning of June 19, 2015, from complications related to cancer. Her death is a particularly painful loss to CAAS. She served our organization in many capacities, with a rare combination of dedication and vision: as President in 2005 and Webmaster from 2005-2010; and as a member of its Awards and Program Committees. CAAS was proud to honor her with an ovatio in 2001, and by establishing the Barbara F. McManus Leadership Award in 2011.

After graduating from the College of New Rochelle summa cum laude in 1964, Barbara joined its faculty in 1967, while still a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard, which awarded her a PhD in 1975. Before retiring from CNR as a full professor in 2000, she made a distinctive mark on its academic landscape by teaching innovative courses in classics, comparative literature and women's studies; directing the writing program in its School of Arts and Sciences; and leading efforts to integrate technology into classroom teaching.

Barbara's impressive roster of vanguard scholarly publications includes books on women in early modern England, feminist theory and classics, and the pioneering American classicist Grace Harriet Macurdy, as well as articles in several learned journals. In 2012, the Women's Classical Caucus, for which she labored impressively as its co-chair and secretary-treasurer, recognized her outstanding achievements in research by launching the annual Barbara McManus Award for the best published article in gender studies each year. She won major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities: her NEH-funded Teaching with Technology initiative led to the creation of the VRoma Project, a virtual city and community for classics students worldwide, on which she collaborated closely with her longtime CNR classics colleague Ann Raia.

In 1994 she received the CNR Alumnae Association's Ursula Laurus award; in 2014 its Woman of Achievement award, as a shining example of "Wisdom for Life". In 2012, the Classics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, hosted an international interdisciplinary conference in her name to recognize her scholarship and teaching, with the support of grants from the National Science Foundation and CAAS itself.

On the morning of her death, Adam Blistein, Executive Director of the Society of Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association), paid warm and moving tribute to Barbara's valuable contributions [http://apaclassics.org/apa-blog/memoriam-barbara-f-mcmanus] from 1983 onwards: on its Committees on the Status of Women and Minorities, ad hoc Committee on Outreach and Outreach Prize; on its Board of Directors; and as its Vice President for Professional Matters, where she single handedly created the APA census on classics department staffing and enrollments. In 2009 the APA honored her with its Distinguished Service Award for her extraordinary achievements on behalf of our discipline and profession.

Barbara's devoted work for CAAS on many fronts, and in particular her caring support of CAAS colleagues, ranks high among her stellar accomplishments. According to an ancient Greek maxim, the measure of one's life is not its length but its goodness. Barbara F. McManus—exemplary daughter, sister, wife, mother, colleague, scholar and beloved friend—illustrates those words, in all that she has done and been. Her invincible spirit abides, and we strive to fulfill the ideals that she so memorably embodied.

• Obituary: apaclassics.org

1923-2015

(This obituary was written by Ward Briggs for the Society of Classical Studies and was originally posted here.)

Charles Henderson, Jr., was born in Lynchburg, VA, on August 22, 1923, but was reared in Charlottesville, VA. He graduated from Davidson in 1942 at the age of 19. He attended one semester of graduate work at the University of North Carolina before enlisting in the Navy, reaching the rank of lieutenant (promoted to lieutenant commander in the Reserve after the war) and served aboard the Buckley-class destroyer escort U.S.S. Manning. Following the war he returned to the University of North Carolina where he received his M.A. in 1947, working under his mentor, B.L. Ullman (1882-1965). He remained as a graduate student and teaching fellow while completing the coursework for his doctorate, but in late 1948, the university administration imposed a loyalty oath on graduate students, in hopes of forestalling a stricter oath with harsher penalties that might come from the trustees or the legislature. The oath was aimed at a prominent Communist teaching assistant in the Romance Languages Department. He and Henderson were the only two graduate students in the University who refused to sign. Henderson was kept on for 1949-50, but his stipend was cut and he was only allowed to grade correspondence coursework. In spite of this difficulty, the Navy promoted him and he found a job at Washington Square College at NYU, where in 1955 he was able to complete "A Lexicon of the Stylistic Terms Used in Roman Literary Criticism," his three-volume, 903-page dissertation (surely a record and one that graduate students should not be encouraged to break).

With Ullman's enthusiastic support, the newly-fledged Ph.D. was hired to a permanent position at UNC in 1955, following the publication of a portion of his dissertation, "Cato's Pine Cones and Seneca's Plums. Fronto p. 149 vdH.," TAPA 86 (1955) 256-267, an indication of the high quality of his work. He was known at Chapel Hill as a generous adviser to graduate students and an effective teacher who instilled great affection in his undergraduates. An able administrator, he was dean of student affairs from 1960 to 1963, and secretary-treasurer of the APA from 1962 to 1965. He edited a two-volume Festschrift for Ullman in his last year in Chapel Hill, but he was not a prolific publisher. He is perhaps best known for his revisions (the first in 1962) of Ullman and Norman E. Henry's high-school textbook series, Latin for Americans, a series begun in 1941 and still in print and in use, updated for the twenty-first century, at the time of his death. Henderson decamped for Smith College in 1964, where he spent more than two decades as a beloved teacher, nurturing classics students and encouraging the best of them to pursue graduate studies in Chapel Hill, which many of them did. At Smith he was chair of the Classics Department (1967-74) and assistant to the President (1972-7).

He spent the early part of his retirement sailing his boat, sometimes alone, about the Mediterranean, and the later part maintaining his great aunt's home and large garden on the York River in Maine, a job that would have taxed a man half his age. In his late seventies he wrote an article in which he described his own struggles with the loyalty oath along with those of other classicists caught up in the McCarthy era: Harold Cherniss, Ludwig Edelstein, Moses Finley, G.M.A. Grube, Bernard Knox, Naphtali Lewis, Brooks Otis, William H. Willis, and others (TAPA 131:353-62). Though he wrote of his pride in being associated with such a group of notables, he averred that he was one of its lesser lights. He attended his last APA-SCS meeting in New Orleans in January 2015. There he prophetically spoke of it as his "'cygnea vox' at the APA. He died at his home in York Harbor on April 19, 2015 at the age of 92.

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From Linda Montross at the National Latin Exam:

With heavy heart it falls to me to let my Latin teacher friends from all over the country know that Christine Sleeper has passed on to the Elysian Fields. She was my friend since 1970 when she began her FCPS teaching career at Herndon High School; she was a Founding Mother of the National Latin Exam in 1976, and continued actively as a member of the Writing Committee until her move to New Hampshire in 2010. This picture was taken at the last ACL Institute she attended in Los Angeles at Loyola in 2009. Her mottoes were Carpe Diem! Labor Omnia Vincit! Gaude!; the last was also her car's license plate! Her family published a book about her most wonderful life in 2009. The following quote from Christine appears in the chapter on teaching: "Mine has been a lifelong love affair with Latin. It is a vibrant, multifaceted subject. When you teach Latin, you teach about life--about philosophy, mythology, language and derivatives. You learn about ancient times and ancient thought. If you know how things were before, you know what's good about today. If you've had Latin, you're a better writer; a better speaker, and a better person." Among Christine's many honors were Virginia's Distinguished Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in 1980, the APA Exellence in Pre-Collegiate Teaching award in 1999, and ACL Merita Award in 2002. Requiescas in pace, mea amica carissima!

September 20, 1916-February 15, 2015...98 years young!

For more about Christine Sleeper, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/09/19/after-three-decades-of-teaching-christine-sleeper-still-keeps-latin-lively-and-her-students-love-it/2a2a39c9-d5d7-4f13-9980-3f83ac2166a6/

• Obituary: washingtonpost.com