Necrology 2005-2006

Submitted by Ward W. Briggs, CAMWS Historian

Nine notable members have passed from us since our last meeting. All are special, all represent the best of our association's dedication to teaching and scholarship, all are deeply missed.

Mary E.H. Barnes of Sandhills Community College in Pinehurst, North Carolina, died on February 10, 2005. He had been a member of CAMWS for thirty years.

Royce L.B. Morris was born in Calhoun County, Mississippi in 1938. He graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961, where he joined Eta Sigma Phi. He subsequently taught Latin from 1962 to 1965 at Cleburne Public Schools in Cleburne Texas before receiving an M.A. in Classics from the University of Mississippi in 1966. His wife of 48 years was his high-school sweetheart. He followed his professor, William H. Willis, from Oxford to Durham, where he received a Ph.D. in papyrology in 1975.  He ended his collegiate teaching career where it began, at Emory and Henry College, after thirty-two years of service during which he was awarded an NEH grant, received the college's Excellence in Teaching Award, was elected president of the Classical Association of Virginia, and in 1973 established a class in the Art and Archaeology of Rome that included a trip to Italy.  The class has offered a remarkable opportunity for a generation of students who mourn the passing of their guide and mentor. He died on March 29, 2005

Briggs Leon Twyman was a native of Kansas City, Missouri. While his older brother Jack became a star basketball player at the University of Cincinnati and entered the NBA Hall of Fame, Briggs received both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He began his teaching career at Colorado Women's College in 1969 and after receiving his Ph.D. in 1972, moved in the next year to the history department of Texas Tech in Lubbock, where he retired as Associate Professor Emeritus in 2003. He died at 66 on May 1, 2005 in Lubbock.

The sudden passing of Christina Elliott Sorum shocked the many members of this Association who had followed her career from her undergraduate days at Wellesley from which she graduated in 1967 and her distinguished graduate career at Brown, where she received her doctorate in 1975. She had been a member of CAMWS from 1975 to 1981, during her tenure at North Carolina State. Although she moved to Union College in 1982, she maintained her contact with the Association during her rise from chairman of the department at Union to Frank Bailey Professor of Classics and in 1994, Dean of Arts and Sciences, in 2000 dean of faculty and vice president of academic affairs in 2000.  Her articles on Sophocles and Euripides were insightful and clear, her teaching gained her awards at both N.C. State and Union, as well as a Pew Memorial Trust Research Grant. She was the dean we all would wish for our colleges. She said, “Faculty must participate in their disciplines outside the walls of the College, and we deans must provide the opportunity for them to do good scholarship and research.�? May 16, 2005 brought a far too early end to such an enlightened administrator.

Luckily, some of our members are not seized early. Effie Douglas was a Latin legend in Indiana even deep into her nineties when she died on 25 August, 2005. She taught for over half a century, first at Flora High School in Flora, Indiana, and then at Carroll High School in Fort Wayne. She founded the first Indiana chapter of the JCL and was a longtime chair of the Indiana JCL's scholarship committee, giving her name to the Effie Douglas Membership Award, given each year to a deserving high-school student, ensuring that her name will be associated with Latin achievement for generations to come.

The name of Edmund G. Berry will always be synonymous with classics at the University of Manitoba. A native of Leslie in Abberdeenshire, Scotland, Berry emigrated to Canada as a boy with his family. He graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1936, receiving the Prince of Wales Prize for the highest grades in the college. In the next year he moved to the University of Chicago, where he completed a dissertation on Moira and Tyche in Greek literature under Werner Jaeger in 1940 with a Daniel L (not Paul) Shorey Fellowship.  In 1940 he moved to Manitoba, rising to Professor of Classics in 1956. In 1961 he was named Head of Classics, a position he held for 17 years.   He published over 40 articles in his 55-year career at Manitoba and is best known for Emerson's Plutarch, published by Harvard University Press in 1961. He received a Guggenheim grant in 1951 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1971. He died November 3, 2005.

Barbara Anne Boyle Hardin died on November 13, 2005. Born in Wichita, Kansas, she moved to Oklahoma City in 1964 and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oklahoma in 1974. In 1985 she received a Master's in Educational Administration from the University of Memphis in 1979. She taught at Germantown High School in Germantown, Tennessee, where she chaired the Foreign Languages Department from 1987 to 2003. In 2004 she was named Humanities Teacher of the Year for the State of Tennessee. This was the capstone of a career filled with honors, including being named a distinguished teacher in 1990 and 1998 by the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, and Foreign Language Teacher of the Year by the University of Memphis in 2003. Throughout her distinguished career, she embodied for students, colleagues and friends alike, the wisdom of her personal motto, “carpe diem.�?

What can be added to the numerous tributes to one of the greatest scholars of our time, David Roy Shackleton Bailey, born in December 1917? As E.J. Kenney wrote, he was a “lover of facts�? who devoted his life to “the establishment and explication of Latin texts.�?  He attended Lancaster Grammar School where his father was headmaster, received a first class Cambridge in Classical Languages, then after switching to Sanskrit and Pali, received a second first in Oriental Languages.  Following work in British Intelligence in World War Two, Bailey became University Lecturer in Tibetan at Cambridge in 1948, where he published an important edition of Buddhist hymns. By 1955 he had returned to classics and shortly published his first great book, Propertiana, an invaluable compendium of information and insight not only on the elegist but on editing Latin texts in general.  In the next fifty years he published editions of Horace, Lucan, Martial, Valerius Maximus, Quintilian.  He would ultimately edit over thirty Loeb editions. His greatest work, indeed one of the greatest works of classical scholarship in the twentieth century, was his edition of Cicero's letters in 10 volumes. In 1968 he moved into CAMWS territory, joining the University of Michigan. Seven years later he decamped to Harvard as Pope Professor of Latin.  Apparently the CAMWS call was so alluring that when he retired from Harvard in 1988, he returned to Ann Arbor, where he died on November 28, 2005.  Though in truth there is no recorded connection between Bailey and CAMWS, we should be nonetheless enthusiastic in celebrating the life and accomplishments of this truly great scholar who was in our midst.

Deborah June Mason was not known primarily as one who taught Latin; according to her students, she “taught life�?; Latin was the means by which she did so. Her own life began on November 15, 1947 in Campbell County, Virginia. After graduating from Randolph-Macon Women's College in history, she began her 22-year career at Altavista High School in Altavista, Virginia teaching history, but when the Latin teacher was felled by a heart attack, she took over his classes. A resolution from the Virginia House of Delegates notes that she always encouraged her students “to contribute to their community and aspire to their full academic potential.�?  Unmarried and with no children of her own, she called her students her “babies,�? and for ten summers took them to Italy to see and touch the monuments that made their classwork come to vivid life. She also took her students to different parts of America doing relief work for Habitat for Humanity, DAWN, American Red Cross Tsunami Relief, and in the last year of her life she led her students in volunteering for the Katrina Relief Program. Small wonder that she was named Campbell County Teacher of the Year in 1994 and the Central Virginia Governor's School Outstanding Educator in 1995. Small wonder that on February 11, 2006, her death was grieved by her students as sorely as they also joyously celebrated her life.