Obituaries
Please alert us to the recent death of any other Rhodes Scholar by emailing communications@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.
David Stanley Staiger, aged 91, died peacefully on December 10, 2019, at Glacier Hills Senior Living Facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he lived with his beloved wife, Ann. Dave left Port Huron for a year of college at Michigan State before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a three-year varsity letter winner on the football and track teams. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, in his senior year Dave was awarded both the 1951 Big 10 Medal of Honor and a Rhodes Scholarship. That was the year he also met Ann Seibold, whom he married on August 20, 1954. After two years at New College, Oxford, England and two years in the Army in Georgia, Dave spent three years working toward his Ph.D. in economics at MIT under the guidance of Paul Samuelson. He and his family moved to Washington DC in the summer of 1959 to take a job at the Federal Reserve Board, where Dave helped to install and operationalize the first-ever computer at the Board of Governors.
Robert K. Massie, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who wrote respected biographies of Russian royals, including “Nicholas and Alexandra,” which became a movie. He died on Monday at his home in Irvington, N.Y, at 90 years old.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Yale and another degree in Modern History at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before serving in the Navy.
Bill Sterling attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 1961 and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Art's formal education and multiple careers spanned seven decades. After being honorably discharged from the United States Army in 1947, he was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned a B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering and served as class president. Subsequently, as a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Oxford University in England, earning an M.A. in Physics. Art then returned to MIT to earn a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked at Phillips Petroleum's Atomic Energy Division in Idaho, and at Westinghouse's Astronuclear Laboratory in Pittsburgh, where he developed nuclear space propulsion technologies for NASA.
In 1968 Art joined Allis-Chalmers (A-C) Corp., where he enjoyed an 18-year career in commercial engineering management, with assignments in Milwaukee, WI; London, England; and Birmingham, AL. While at A-C, he earned an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago. After retiring in 1986, he taught evening courses at Cardinal Stritch University and Marquette University. That led to his next career as Dean of Cardinal Stritch University College of Business and Management. He retired again 13 years later to follow in his wife's footsteps by enrolling at Marquette University Law School, earning a J.D. in 2005 at the age of 77 (Sheila was only 62 when she earned her J.D. in 1993). Together, they worked as defense counsel, taking assigned cases from the Wisconsin State Public Defender's Office. Art continued his law practice into his late-80s.
More impressive than Art's academic and career achievements was his passion to help others and give back to the community. He was a member of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee (RCM) and was dedicated to their mission of connecting people and resources for common good. In addition, he served on the RCM Scholarship Committee and mentored Rotary Scholars. Art, who suffered from macular degeneration, also served on the Board of Directors for Beyond Vision, a not-for-profit company with the mission of creating jobs for people with no sight or limited vision.
Outside of his professional commitments, Art was an accomplished musician who enjoyed a lifetime of making music. He loved playing the violin, clarinet, piano, and cello. In 2000, he attended the Third Annual Cello Congress in Baltimore, playing with 200 cellists from around the world. He had a beautiful tenor voice and performed eleven concerts with fellow musicians for residents of Saint John's on the Lake retirement community during the eight years he lived there.
James Patrick Griffin passed away in Oxford on 21 November 2019.
Having obtained a BA from Yale University in 1955, Jim came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College (1955–58). He was then a Senior Scholar at St Antony’s College (1958–60), obtaining his doctorate in 1960. He lectured at Christ Church from 1960 to 1966, and was then appointed a Fellow in Philosophy at Keble in 1966, a position he held for 30 years. He was then appointed White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, becoming a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Keble in 1996, and was also an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi.
Husband of the late Catherine and father of Nicholas and Jessica. Beloved Grandpa of Isabel, George and Kate.
From Keble News.
Carl graduated from MIT in 1952 and was then awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, which he used to earn his PhD in Physics from Oxford University in 1956. After four years of research at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., he took a research position in Solid State Physics at MIT. In 1967, he joined the physics faculty at Northeastern University, where he taught and continued doing research until his retirement.
Find out more about Carl's life and work.
At a picnic one spring day in 1977, John Churchill told a Yale faculty member that he had gotten a job at Hendrix College and was moving back to Arkansas, where his infant son would grow up without an accent. “The joke blew right past him, clear and clean,” Churchill later told a crowd at Hendrix.
By 1977, Churchill had been a Rhodes Scholar, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and was finishing up his dissertation for a Ph.D. from Yale University. He spent the next 24 years at Hendrix, where he twice served as interim president, and his pickled okra won a blue ribbon at the Faulkner County Fair. Then for 15 years he was the chief executive officer of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society, in Washington, D.C.
Churchill, 70, died peacefully in his sleep at a hospital in Nashville, 42 miles east of his home in Dickson, where he moved after retiring in 2016. He had been battling a septic infection, according to the family.
Born April 1, 1949, John Hugh Churchill spent the first few years of his life in Hector, where his father, Olen R. Churchill, was superintendent of schools.
The family moved to Little Rock, where John Churchill took an interest in the girl next door, Jean Hill. They began dating at the age of 16, later married, had three kids and remained together the rest of his life.
Some of their fondest memories were living in a cottage in Kirtlington, about 12 miles north of Oxford, while John was studying in England.
Years later, John Churchill would occasionally torment his children with exotic dishes like pickled herring.
Churchill graduated from Little Rock’s Hall High School before attending Southwestern (now Rhodes College) at Memphis, where he was captain of the football team, conference champion at throwing the discus, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
For 17 of those 24 years at Hendrix, Churchill served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. He had also been dean of students at Hendrix and taught philosophy throughout his time there.
Ann Die Hasselmo, who was president of Hendrix for nine years, said Churchill was “a prince of a man,” brilliant, ethical and humane.
“There aren’t many people about whom I can say this, there is nothing laudatory or flattering that you can say about John Churchill that would not be true,” Hasselmo said. “He was a remarkable, an amazing human being. Those of us who knew John and Jean mourn with the family and count ourselves fortunate to have walked a bit down the path with him.”
Richard E. Stewart died at age 85 on October 13. Mr. Stewart graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University where his father was president of the University, after which he earned Congratulatory First-Class Honors in Roman Law at Queen's College Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Following Oxford, he served in the U.S. Army providing legal assistance to soldiers of the U.S. Army 43rd brigade of Hawaii which had been distinguished for its bravery during WWII. He then earned his jurisprudence degree with honors from Harvard Law School in 1959.
He was the Superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department from 1967 to 1971, and became a leader in insurance in the United States and recognised internationally.
He initiated legislation that transformed insurance regulation in New York State and nationwide. Among his innovations were an exploration of the potential of no fault auto insurance, establishing an insurance pool to make essential fire insurance available to residents of urban ghettos, a program to make auto insurance more widely available, to protect consumers against insurance cancellation and against loss due to insurer insolvency and changed property liability insurance rate regulation to an open competitive and antitrust basis. Governor Nelson Rockefeller described Stewart as "the best Superintendent of Insurance in the history of the State."
He went on to be Senior Vice President and General Counsel of First National City Bank, now Citibank and Citigroup. In 1973, he became Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Chubb & Son. In 1981 left to start his own firm, Stewart Economics, Inc., a consulting firm that specialised in insurance and insurance regulation. His major work became consulting for legal teams involved in major controversies such as water pollution and the national breast implant cases.
He was a member of the Special Panel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Presidential Campaign Practices (1974) and the United Nations Panel of Experts on Transnational Bank Failure.
He was a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Associates, The Century Association in New York City and the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.
In 2006, when he reduced his work load, Mr. Stewart began a new life in San Francisco where he became involved with the effort to protect the city's waterfront from over-development. He played a major role in a pair of ballot measure campaigns in 2013 and 2014 known as the "No Wall on the Waterfront" where voters overwhelmingly rejected excessive waterfront height increases and approved permanent waterfront preservation rules. He now leaves a beautiful and protected waterfront for all to use and enjoy.
Besides his varied and consequential achievements, positions and accomplishments were his extraordinary memory of past events and people, keen, sharp intellect, wide-ranging, broad comprehension of current issues and ability to place them into historical and even philosophical context, and despite his increasing health problems, remain upbeat, acknowledging his frailties but never complaining about them or letting them interfere with his life, remaining and continuing to have a very positive outlook on life and a confidence in the people around him including his doctors and their medical interventions. He was always willing and interested in trying new things and embracing the newest technological innovations with an almost child-like fascination and pleasure in so doing.
Mr. Stewart is survived by his two cats, Kitzmiller named after his childhood cat, and Lionel, and his wife and scuba diving companion Barbara Dickson Stewart.
Published in San Francisco Chronicle.
Kit was born in Matara, Sri Lanka on 28 of October 1942 and passed away peacefully on 10 of October at Mercy Hospice, Auckland after a long battle with cancer. Kit studied sociology at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Sorely missed by his family and friends. At his request, Kit was farewelled in a private ceremony.