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| The College Magazine - Winter 2006 | |||
Thomas McDonald, Class of 1948 Discharged in late 1946, Mr. McDonald attended the University of Virginia briefly and then entered the New School for Social Research in New York. There he studied philosophy under Karl Löwith and Hans Jonas. In 1958, after serving as a lecturer at the New School, he taught for three years in the University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education. Following a year in Europe, he joined the St. John’s faculty in 1963. He taught for several years in the 1970s and 1980s at the college’s campus in Santa Fe, NM. He also served as a visiting professor at East Texas State University and as a visiting fellow at the Kennedy Center for Bioethics at Georgetown University. An authority on Kant, he spent his 1976-1977 sabbatical year in Germany. He retired in 1991, but continued to teach part-time. Santa Fe tutor Jim Carey (class of 1967) had Mr. McDonald for his freshman math tutorial in 1963, and felt very fortunate to have known him as a tutor and a colleague. “He was in, my opinion, the finest tutor who ever taught at St. John’s,” Mr. Carey said. Howell Cobb, Class of 1944 After the war, Judge Cobb earned an LL.B. from the University of Virginia 1948. He attended the University of Texas Law School to prepare for the Texas Bar Examination and in 1954 was hired by the firm of Orgain, Bell, & Tucker in Beaumont. He became a partner in 1956. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan appointed Cobb a U.S. District Judge. He served for 20 years, assuming senior status as a sitting judge in March 2001. Judge Cobb is survived by his wife, Amelie; six children; and 21 grandchildren.  John Mack, Class of 1945 Mr. Mack was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1924 to Josephine and John George Mack. He served two tours as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Infantry in World War II in the South Pacific and was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Mr. Mack’s studies at Annapolis were interrupted by the war. He began at St. John’s as part of the class of 1945, but received his diploma in 1948. He became a very active supporter of the college, serving as a member of the Board of Visitors and Governors and as national fund-raising chairman. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1950. Mr. Mack began a long career as a marketing executive at Welch’s Grape Juice, followed by Procter & Gamble, Clairol, Bristol-Myers, and Gillette. From 1976-1992 he was president of Carter-Products, Carter-Wallace, in New York City. During his career, he was president of the Wave Hill Environmental Center in Riverdale, N.Y., and was elected to the Township Committee of East Amwell, N.J., where he served as Deputy Mayor. While living in Concord, he was a trustee of the Thoreau Society, trustee of the Thoreau Farm Trust, and a member of the Historic District Commission. Mr. Mack is survived by his wife, Lorna Carey Mack; by his sisters, Anne Dean and Mary Hurst; by his four daughters, Pamela Mack, Sheila Mack, Carey Weber, and Lorna Sheridan; and by seven grandchildren. Theodore X. Barber, Class of 1947 Doing post-graduate work at Harvard, Dr. Barber read a paper in a British medical journal describing how hypnosis had improved an “incurable” skin condition of a teenage boy. The case, he later wrote, “indicated that the royal road to solving the mind-body problem” was hypnosis. Dr. Barber served as president of the Massachusetts Psychological Association and of the Hypnosis Division of the American Psychological Association. He received numerous awards, including the Presidential Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Hypnosis, by the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (2002). Two of his most widely read books are still in print: Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach (1969), and Advances in Altered States of Consciousness and Human Potentialities (1976). In his work The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery with Startling Implications (1993), he showed how birds have intelligence equal and sometimes superior to that of humans. Born in 1927 to Greek immigrant parents in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Barber graduated from high school at age 15 then enrolled at St. John’s. He earned his doctorate in psychology at American University in Washington, D.C., and then moved to Boston to do post-graduate work at Harvard. Henry Clay Smith, Class of 1934 For 38 years, he was a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. He taught, conducted research, and published books on industrial psychology, personality development, and sensitivity to people. His early work on the effects of music on productivity of assembly line workers helped make music part of the background of daily work life. Among his publications were three major textbooks and numerous articles. Dr. Smith strove to achieve a rich, balanced life in the manner of his idol, Thomas Jefferson. He designed and built a house based around a three-story tower, which was his home for the past 30 years. His self-improvement projects ranged from yoga to developing a legacy blueberry patch and reading 19th-century novels. He was an avid player of tennis, golf, and croquet. The last of his writing projects, a biography of Thomas Jefferson, was in progress as his illness progressed. Dr. Smith is survived by his wife, Nancy, three children, eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Tania Forte, A85 After leaving St. John’s, Tania studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and completed a Ph.D. there in 2000. Her doctoral work concerned transactions, land, and histories in a small Arab village in the Galilee. Her research during the last few years centered on the production and use of images of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—the conflict through the lens of the television camera, one might say. She was also working on a book on the everyday practices of three generations of Palestinian women in the Galilee. In all this work, she saw people producing stories and images, and she was fascinated with how these verbal and visual accounts served both to represent the world and to define the identities of those producing them, in short, how people create themselves by the histories they tell. Tania’s own history was itself an extraordinary tale. Her grandparents came from Gaza, Turkey, Iraq, and Italy; her parents, Clément and Daisy, were born in Egypt, were exiled by Nasser after the 1956 Suez war, and eventually immigrated to France. Tania grew up in France, but she was born in London and kept a British passport—her only passport—all of her life. Tania would probably have allowed her British passport to quietly expire, were it not necessary to have some passport: such things were of little importance to her. Thus she wrote in a little piece called “Weedlings”: “Since I’m not very good at nationalities I have not changed it [her passport] through years of living in four other countries, where the last thing anyone would suspect about me is that I am a subject of Her Majesty.” She was one of those people who seem to belong nowhere and everywhere. Tania entered St. John’s in Annapolis as a Febbie in 1982. I graduated that year and hardly knew Tania in the few months we were both at the college. But when she came to Ben Gurion University, we spoke about the college constantly. Like most of us, she felt a great sense of loyalty and debt towards St. John’s and believed it to be a central locus for her intellectual formation. Indeed, I can remember a conversation shortly before she left for Minnesota in which she said that it was becoming increasingly clear to her how genuinely different we are from our respective colleagues because of those four years in Annapolis. I hope I will be forgiven for speaking just now in the first person, but Tania was a very good friend. And here I must say that Tania’s intellectual gifts were equaled by her capacity for friendship. As a friend she was warm and generous, she knew how to laugh—she had a wonderful laugh—but she also knew how to demand. She would not allow her friends to fall into easy self-pity, moral or intellectual laziness. The goodness of her friendship was in its being both pleasing and elevating. Also Noted:
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Copyright © 2006 St. John’s College
