I want to thank Vucan and Rada Vucic for sponsoring the lecture, and to all who helped organize this event.
I have some pictures about my father's life, and things that he liked to do in life.
1. My father was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1921, where his mother was from. He grew up in Springfield, Missouri, where his father ran a dry-goods store until it failed during the Great Depression.
In high school, he competed on the swimming and tennis teams. I believe this photo is at a public swimming pool. The man is a private coach for the girls, one of whom was favored to qualify for the 1940 Olympic team—an Olympics that was never held because of World War II. My father said that they practiced during the summer at the same pool, and the coach would occasionally give him some tips.
The tennis photo shows my father and his next-door neighbor, great friend, and—I think—high-school-team doubles partner, Sam Dickey.
2. Dad attended Dartmouth College, where he majored in geography—but really designed his own planning major—with an honor's thesis on a land-use plan for Hartford, Vermont. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1942, and graduated summa cum laude in January 1943. Graduation was accelerated by a semester so that students could join the armed forces to fight in World War II.
He spent the summer of 1942 in Boston, where he had a job with the New England office of the National Resources Planning Board. His boss was Victor M. Cutter, president of the United Fruit Company (and Dartmouth alum).
My father told me that he was served the best coffee of his life when he went to dinner at Mr. Cutter's home on Beacon Hill. The Cutter family had lived in Central America and their basement held 1 ton of coffee beans that they had brought back from Central America (a by-product of the stranglehold that United Fruit had, under the direction of Mr. Cutter, on Costa Rica, Guatemala, and other countries in Central America.)
3. In Denver, he and a few others ran a briefing room to keep soldiers and officers informed about the progress of the war. This experience may be one of the sources of his love of maps. He also learned about air-photo interpretation. They were taken by cameras like the one shown, a Fairchild K-17 aerial camera.
4. He took a night course at the University of Denver from Carl Feiss, head of the Denver planning commission, and he was adopted by the Feiss family during the period that he was in Denver. He described the Feisses as ``my personal USO, during my time in Denver.'' He often went to their house after class, where the conversation on planning continued.
He also took a correspondence course on planning administration. It took a full year to complete, and he said that he both worked hard at it, and that it was one of the best courses he ever took. It was one-on-one, taught by J. Marshall Miller, who was a Professor of Planning at Columbia University.
[Miller considered it ``most desirable that planners of America and planners of other countries seek ways and means of meeting together more often.'' Convinced that the reconstruction of Western Europe might provide a useful model for American cities struggling with deteriorating downtowns and unprecedented suburbanization, Miller believed that American planners should continue a dialogue among equals with their European colleagues instead of restricting themselves to attempts to teach American lessons to their peers around the world. ``James Marshall Miller.'' (2021) In Transatlantic Perspectives, Retrieved November 9, 2021, from Transatlantic Perspectives.]
5. In 1945, he was stationed in Asheville, NC in radio school, where he learned Morse code (which he may have already known because he had been an Eagle Scout). In 1946, he landed at Cornell as part of the first MRP class. I believe he thought about going to MIT, but there was either a language requirement or a math requirement that he needed to pass, and Cornell didn't have that requirement.
6. This photo show the first MRP class in 1946; they graduated in 1947.
Tom Mackesey became a close friend, and mentor to my father. At one time the two of them had a small planning-consulting firm.
7. For part of 1947, he studied at the Department of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool. When he returned to America in Sept. 1947, he was appointed planning director of Broome County, NY, where he stayed until 1950. In 1950-51, he was one of the second cohort of Fulbright Scholars, a group that also included Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
8. Sometime in the fall of 1947, my father returned to his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, where he was pressed into giving a lecture about the Marshall Plan. My mother was teaching French at Drury College in Springfield, and was in the audience for my father's talk. She came up afterward to ask a question, and the rest, as we say, is history.
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10. In 1950-51, they lived in England, where Dad was a Fulbright Student studying public administration at the London School of Economics and town planning at University College. The ship they took looks a little sea-sick inducing. My father loved Morris Minor cars, after owning one during my parent's stay in London. Later, in Ithaca, he owned at least one more.
11. In 1951, my parents moved to Ithaca when my father joined the Cornell faculty. They lived there ever after, except for some sabbaticals and post-retirement gigs in other countries, which we will see in a moment. My father was Chair of City and Regional Planning from 1952 to 1962, and he occupied possibly the largest office on campus. My memories of it are mostly from when I was only a few feet tall, and so it looked cavernous to me, but I think it was probably 20' x 20' with 14' ceilings. As you can see, it was like an Ali Baba's cave of books—just crammed with them. The shelves were a custom-made depth, so the books were actually two-deep—you're only seeing half of them in the photo.
12. The first sabbatical involved three months at Berkeley, and then to Europe to seven cities in seven different countries. To take care of my sister, age 4-5, and me, 2-3, they took along a neighbor's daughter who had just graduated from Ithaca High School. The VW Microbus had three bench seats, so my parents were in the front, au pair Kathy Illencsik in the middle, and my sister and me in the back. And if things were still too noisy, my parents could open the large sliding roof, and all the noise would be blown out the back.
13. The second sabbatical was back to The Hague for 9 months, staying with the same family with whom we had lived in 1959, and then three months of travel.
14. Two more sabbaticals took my parents to London and to Athens, Georgia. After his retirement, my father took six stays abroad of a few weeks to a few months. For two of them, he was hosted by people who had been visitors to his department at Cornell: Professor Ho from Beijing, and Sergei Oshigov from Moscow. My parents particularly enjoyed their four stays in Australia.
15. My father wrote 14 books. One book, ``Cities of the American West,'' received the 1980 Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association for the year's best book on American History (despite my father being a self-taught historian). One book that seemed to be near and dear to his heart was the book about the competition for the plan for Canberra, Australia. During one his stays in Australia, he found 47 of the 137 entries that had been submitted to the competition.
16. One of my father's lifelong passions was sailing. He learned to sail as a camp counselor in Minnesota, where they had C-scows. He built a sailing kayak as a teenager. His first real boat was the one pictured here. It had a Snipe rig, but was not a Snipe. For a time, he moored it in the inlet at Stewart Park, which is pictured in the upper left. (The other two pictures are at Hart Lake, Pa.)
17. In the early 60s, he raced in the Star fleet on Cayuga Lake. His crew was Dave Cutting, who ran Cutting Motors (which carried Buick, Pontiac, Opel, and Hillman, and later added Honda in the early 1970s). Dave was probably my father's closest friend. Their friendship was strained at one point because Cutting Motors was originally located in the Clinton St./Cayuga St. area, along with several other car dealerships; it is the area where Pritchard Automotive is still located. My father was on the Planning Board, which passed an urban-renewal measure that forced Cutting Motors and several other dealerships to move. Dave was upset at the time, but years later, he told me that it was the best thing that ever happened to the business, because it allowed them to have a much bigger lot on the Elmira Road—the current McGuire Honda dealership. My father was not that successful a sailboat racer, but did win a couple of trophies in the local fleet; the picture here was at one of those trophy ceremonies.
18. For 23 years, the family boat was this Catalina 27, which my parents got a lot of use out of, sailing maybe 60 or 70 times during the course of each summer.
19. Just a lovely photo of the boat. You can see why Ithacan's love Cayuga Lake.
20. Another passion was wine tasting. My parents and three other couples went on six wine-tasting trips that lasted two to three weeks. Of course, this was back in the days when all arrangements were done through the postal system, so organizing hotel rooms, visits to wineries, van rentals, and picking the routes they would use was a massive undertaking that started months before each of the trips.
21. Most of you will know of my father's passion for maps, which included his collection of antiquarian maps and views that he had started during his first stay in England (enabled by the buying power in post-war England of his dollar-denominated stipend from the GI Bill). My sister and I grew up in a house whose walls were filled with old maps. As a 10-year old, I accompanied my father to an antiquarian map shop in London, where he purchased a copy of the 24-sheet 1746 John Rocque map of London—and I was sworn to secrecy to never reveal to my mother that he had spent $325 on it (a relatively large sum in 1966).
As prices of maps rose, as a way to continue collecting, he started a business, Historic Urban Plans, to sell reproductions old maps and views. The Rocque map of London was the priciest item in the catalog. He donated a copy to his Department, which hung it on a large wall in one of the conference rooms. My father told me that during committee meetings there, and during Ph.D. defenses, if things got too boring, he would look up at the map and mentally take a favorite walk through London.
22. All good things come to an end, and in 1999 my father put the collection up for auction. The photo shows my parents, with part of the collection, at Swan Galleries the day before the auction.
23. Another passion was the Bastide towns of Southwestern France, which he visited multiple times from 1951 to 2009. These photos are from a show at Sibley with some of the photos that he took during those visits.
24. Three of the photos from a 1966 visit, the summer of his second sabbatical leave. My parents deposited my sister and me in a summer camp in Switzerland, and spent two weeks living it up in the South of France.
25. Dad's final trip to Europe was in the Fall of 2009, when he was 88. He went by himself, rented a car, drove about 2500 kilometers, and visited and took photos in 22 of the Bastides over 17 days.
26. Dad loved cameras, and always owned several. At one point, he had what is called a medium-format camera that was his favorite for a while, but the camera from which he got the most use—and most enjoyment—was this very compact Pentax XG-1. The amazing thing about this camera is that it has a 208X zoom capability. He had rigged up a way to attach it to the window of his car, and spent a lot of time at Stewart Park at this osprey-nesting site
27. He was particularly proud of this sequence, which shows an adult osprey teaching one of the fledglings to flap their wings!
28. Pictures from every decade. The second of the 1943 images is a gouache painting done in 1943 at the U.S. Army Reception Center at For Leavenworth, Kansas. My father wrote, "The artist was named Robert Gilman who worked—as did I—as an interviewer of new inductees. He had been an aspiring artist in civilian life, and almost every day he pinned up one of his paintings in his interview booth. During a break one day when I was standing and looking into his booth I noticed this painting and asked him if it was for sale. He said yes. I asked how much. He replied, `$1.50.' I bought it, sent it home, and later as a gift my mother had it matted and framed. It has been hanging in my bedroom for 50 years. The title was `Dilettante.' The two numbers can be read as 20/400—the very measure of my own left eye and, of course, meaning very shortsighted. Someone had to point out to me that Gilman must have used me as a model and that the title was not meant to be a compliment. I find that this is a good thing to have staring me in the eyes first thing in the morning as a reminder that not everyone thinks I am as great a person as I might believe."
29. My parents visited the continent during their year in London.
30. A picture from when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska.
This medal accompanied the Henry Hope Reed Award, which he received posthumously in 2021. About a month after my father passed away, I received an e-mail message out of the blue, which said, ``Please call me about an academic honor that your father has received posthumously,'' and was signed by the Dean of the College of Architecture at Notre Dame. My first thought was, ``What? ... Are computer criminals getting so clever that they are now specially targeting the families of recently departed academics?'' A little Googling suggested that it was something that was on the up and up. I could hear my father's voice in the back of my mind when I called Dean Polyzoides, though, ``Don't give him your credit-card number!''
31. Keeping his eye on the lobsters at a picnic in 1964
32. With friends on the Canal du Midi
33. A family photo a few months before my mother died.
34. Laughing together 54 years apart
35. A little of the humor that may be familiar to those in my father's department. The one in the upper left was a present Dad gave to Porus Olpadwala when Porus was Dean, during the time that the Provost was trying to disband the College.
36. A birthday celebration in Sibley Hall two years ago. The Rocque map of London that I mentioned earlier is visible in the background of the center photo.
37. Hanging an exhibit in Sibley
38. My sister found this on my father's office door when she went to clean it out. Whoever it was, thank you for the thought!
39. At a picnic table in front of the old Ithaca Yacht Club building, one of his favorite places to be in the world.
Thank you all for watching!