NECROLOGY 2008-2009

The numbers of CAMWS friends and members felled by Apollo’s arrows are mercifully small this year, but the proportion of the distinguished and the dedicated remains, as ever, high.

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 later Search 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), and Sartre 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 travelled and lectured widely.  For her 90^th 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 18 March 2008 at her home in Boulder.

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 4 November 2007 of complications that followed a stroke ten years earlier.

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 19 June 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 18 August 2008 after a valiant battle with a rare form of t-cell lymphoma.

Avete atque Valete!

Respectfully submitted,

Ward Briggs, CAMWS Historian