In Memoriam

Robert R. Barker ’36, a Wall Street executive who served two terms as president of the Board of Overseers and whose name graces the Barker Center for the Humanities, died Nov. 8 at a hospice in Stamford, Conn. He was 87.

Together with his wife Elizabeth, Barker funded more than half of the $25 million Barker Center project.

Barker served as an overseer for six years and was president of the board for two. He was also a director of the Harvard Management Company and a leading member of the Committee on University Resources.

He raised money tirelessly—for the Harvard College Fund, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University Arts Museums and various academic departments.

“He felt that he didn’t just go to Harvard for four years—he went for life,” said Sidney R. Knafel ’52, who served with Barker on a gifts committee in New York.

Barker was born in Brookline and raised in Argentina and Switzerland. He graduated from the College magna cum laude.

Barker was a Wall Street executive and an expert on educational endowments. He worked for J. P. Morgan in New York, later becoming a partner with William A. M. Burden & Co. before going on to found Barker Lee and Co.

Clarence Douglas Dillon

Clarence Douglas Dillon ’31, a longtime ambassador and diplomat who during the Cuban missile crisis served as one of a handful of top White House advisors deciding the fate of the world, died Jan. 10 in New York City. He was 93.

A two-term member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Dillon was described as “one of Harvard’s most distinguished graduates of the 20th century” by Dillon Professor of Government and former Kennedy School of Government Dean Graham T. Allison.

Dillon served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s undersecretary of state for economic affairs for two years and ambassador to France for six.

He was then selected by President John F. Kennedy ’40 to be Secretary of the Treasury. There he played a large part in the trade expansion of the 1960s by introducing legislation to increase exports and control inflation, and spearheaded a large series of tax cuts aimed to stoke economic growth.

One of Dillon’s most crucial roles in public service, however, had nothing to do with the United States economy. He was picked by Kennedy to be a member of a small council to determine the United States’ response to the Cuban missile crisis, according to Allison.

“He was included in this little circle of 13 people who were thinking about blowing up the world,” Allison said.

Dillon still took time out to give back to his alma mater.

Allison recalled sending a tape of a presentation on the Cuban Missile crisis that his class had done to Dillon, and that the former secretary had written him back a “very kind” letter detailing how he himself agreed and disagreed with the presenters.

Dillon served two terms on the Harvard Board of Overseers, the University’s second highest governing body, from 1952-58 and from 1966-72, and was President of the body from 1968-72.

Mason Hammond

Mason Hammond ’25, a Harvard professor and House master who during the 1940s hunted down art stolen by Nazis during World War II, died Oct. 13, 2002. He was 99.

Hammond, who was the Pope professor of Latin Language emeritus at the University, accrued a lengthy list of distinctions throughout his life, including a Rhodes Scholarship and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, presented to him by former University President Neil L. Rudenstine in 1994.

From 1942 to 1946, Hammond traveled through Sicily, Italy and Germany as a Monument, Fine Art and Archives Officer working to recover art that had been stolen by the Nazis. For his work, he received the French Legion of Honor Award and was honored by the Italian and Dutch governments.

After World War II, Hammond headed the School of Classical Study at the American Academy in Rome. He twice served as the director of Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence.

Hammond’s scholarly resume boasts an impressive list of works. He particularly enjoyed translating the works of Plautus, a Roman comic playwright.

“He was by nature a historian, a pure scholar,” said his daughter, Anstiss Hammond Krueck.

Hammond served as master of Kirkland House from 1945-55 and was Lowell House’s first senior tutor, according to his daughter.

“He was not just a dry and shriveled scholar; he enjoyed the company of his fellow men very much,” Krueck said.

He loved the Signet Society and the communal table at the Harvard Faculty Club, she said.

Hammond used his commanding voice at Commencement, where he was the “caller” who calls the classes to parade.

“He was mortified when he was asked to use a bullhorn,” Krueck said.

After retiring from Harvard, Hammond devoted himself to Harvard’s history, researching inscriptions all over campus.

Ernst Kitzinger

Former University professor and renowned art historian Ernst Kitzinger died of a stroke in his Poughkeepsie, N.Y. home on Jan. 22. He was 90.

“He put the study of Medieval and Byzantine mosaics on the scholarly map of American art history,” said Christine Kondoleon, a close friend and the curator of Greek and Roman art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Kitzinger fled to England from Nazi Germany in 1935, where he settled into a job as an unpaid assistant at the British Museum.

After the Battle of Dunkirk, though, he was interned as an enemy alien and shipped to Australia.

Upon his release in 1941, Kitzinger traveled to the U.S. to work as a junior fellow at Harvard’s newly-created Center for Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Except for a brief absence spent serving with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and London, Kitzinger remained at Dumbarton Oaks for 22 years, and served as director of Byzantine studies from 1955 until 1967.

In 1967, Kitzinger took up a post nearer Harvard Yard as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor.

He remained at Harvard in this capacity until his retirement in 1979.

Raymond P. Lavietes

Raymond P. Lavietes ’36, a Harvard basketball star and the namesake of Harvard’s basketball pavilion, died of lung cancer Jan. 12 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 88.

Lavietes was an avid philanthropist, who both donated money to and volunteered at organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club and the United Way.

His greatest philanthropic dedication, however, was to Harvard’s basketball program.

The Ray Lavietes Basketball Pavilion was dedicated in 1996 after a $3 million gift by Lavietes funded a major renovation of the facility.

He supported the program in other ways too, befriending players and hosting parties for Harvard teams at his Connecticut home when they were in town to play against Yale. At one time, Lavietes served as chair of Friends of Harvard Basketball.

“He was constantly asking me and [Harvard Men’s Basketball Coach Frank Sullivan] about the quality of life of the people in the basketball program… He did little things, like dropping off cookies and candies,” said Harvard Women’s Basketball Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith.

Lavietes grew up in New Haven, Conn. His family owned a basket-making company in nearby Shelton.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a diplomat and scholar whose career included stints teaching government at Harvard and serving as a New York senator, died in Washington, D.C., March 26 of complications of an appendectomy. He was 76.

Moynihan’s prolific writings on race and politics in America made him a controversial yet widely-respected figure in politics and academia.

Former University Marshal Richard M. Hunt described Moynihan as an “incredible intellectual figure who had so many ideas about so many things.”

Moynihan served as assistant labor secretary during the administration of President John F. Kennedy ’40, and was an urban affairs adviser to President Richard M. Nixon. He was Nixon’s ambassador to India in 1973-1975 and served as chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations in 1975-1976.

Moynihan taught at Harvard from 1966 to 1977, starting as director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT, and later teaching in the government department.

After winning a senate seat in New York in 1976, he returned to Cambridge to teach his government seminar “Ethnicity in Politics” the day after his victory celebration.

Students knew Moynihan as much for his absence from Cambridge as for his presence here. He spent about half of his time as a professor on sabbatical or shuttling between Washington and Cambridge.

Moynihan, who wrote or edited a total of 18 books, was well-known for his studies of American race relations.

In a 1965 report to President Lyndon B. Johnson titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” commonly known as the “Moynihan Report,” Moynihan pointed to the increase in the number of single-parent families as a fundamental reason for poverty and instability in African-American communities.

The report earned him the wrath of civil rights leaders who accused him of racism. Those accusations would dog him through his first senate race in 1976, when he defeated veteran Republican Senator James L. Buckley. He was re-elected three times.

In a statement, University President Lawrence H. Summers remembered Moynihan as a man “at the center of national and international debate on some of the most important and difficult issues of our time,” who “made profound contributions both to the life of the mind and the life of the nation.”

John Rawls

John Rawls, Conant professor emeritus and one of the most influential political and moral philosophers of the 20th century, died at his home in Lexington on Nov. 24, 2002. He was 81.

Rawls is credited with reviving the social contract tradition in philosophy, and his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, is considered a staple of undergraduate reading lists.

It argues persuasively for a political philosophy based on equality and individual rights. It describes the reconciliation of liberty and equality, concepts that were viewed as fundamentally at odds for much of the 20th century.

“His achievement in moral and political philosophy is certainly the largest achievement in the English-speaking world since John Stuart Mill’s,” said MIT Professor of Social and Political Philosophy Joshua Cohen, whose dissertation was advised by Rawls.

Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel remembered Rawls as “a quiet but towering voice for a more tolerant and generous way of organizing modern democratic societies.”

“In my first year as a young assistant professor at Harvard, the phone in my office rang,” Sandel wrote in an e-mail. “The voice on the other end said, ‘This is John Rawls, R-A-W-L-S.’ It was as if God himself had phoned to invite me to lunch, and spelled his name just in case I didn’t know who he was.”

A month before his death, Rawls became the second living philosopher to have a Cambridge Companion volume published on him.

In 1997, Harvard awarded Rawls an honorary Doctor of Laws degree and two years later President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton presented him with the National Humanities Medal in a special ceremony at the White House.

Rawls held the post of assistant and associate professor of philosophy at Cornell from 1953 to 1959 and professor of philosophy at MIT from 1960 to 1962.

Rawls, who first joined the Harvard philosophy department in 1962, taught until 1995, when he suffered the first of several major strokes.

He continued to work for three years after his first stroke. Since that time, Margaret Rawls and other colleagues have continued to compile and edit his partially competed works.

“He wasn’t just a moral philosopher, but a person of transcendent goodness, so good that he made you feel it was a privilege to be a contemporary of his,” said Thomas Nagel, university professor at New York University.

Perry David Rlickman

Perry David Rlickman, the balloon-tying, whistle-blowing, sometimes pushy and off-color clown known as “Perri the Hobo” who worked in Brattle Square the last two summers, died in late March. He was 51.

Rlickman’s body was found on March 22 in the basement room where he lived in Allston.

The engineer-turned-entertainer worked as a clown for more than two decades in New Orleans. But after he was jailed for drug possession in Louisiana, he came north in 2000. He lost his street performer’s permit in Provincetown, Mass. for his offensive antics, retaining the counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to win it back.

Then he came to Cambridge, arriving at Brattle Square every morning in a taxi cab and tying as many as 200 balloon animals and flowers each day.

He was known for his shrill whistle and for his sometimes-offensive gags, grabbing women’s rear ends and flirting with them, nastily telling off people who didn’t give him money and making fun of gays mercilessly.

“He crossed the line often but never crossed the line with someone who wouldn’t put up with it,” says Tom Newell, a fellow Brattle Square street performer. “He never walked up to a woman and grabbed her butt who didn’t smile. He read people well. He knew whose butt he could grab.”

Rlickman was born in Bluefield, W. Va., in 1951, to a Jewish doctor and a musician who fled Germany during World War II. One of seven children, he joined the Marine Corps after high school and served in Vietnam.

Marian H. Smith

Marian H. Smith ’04, a product of an upbringing that spanned continents and who drew unlikely personalities together through her warmth, vibrancy and love of different cultures, died in a suicide on Dec. 6, 2002. She was 19.

Born in Kenya but raised in Somalia and Luxembourg, the Winthrop House resident spoke six languages and was learning a seventh. Her desire to develop a greater understanding of humanity led her to study social anthropology.

She kept up a packed calendar of engagements, often scheduling lunch dates on the fly as she walked to the Yard. Her frequent trips exploring Boston took her to many restaurants and clubs.

Recognized for her sense of style, Smith looked equally at home in high fashion and in finds from the Salvation Army. Friends often complimented her on the Hanes t-shirts she decorated with feathers in her dorm room.

Thought to be the unifying force in her blocking group, Smith brought an intense personality to her many friendships and a charm that made people feel special in her company.

And when Smith laughed, friends said, she was never embarrassed to lose inhibitions.

“She would just guffaw. She was not ruled by social convention,” one friend said.

According to friends, Smith was not only beautiful but also had a talent for recognizing beauty in unlikely places.

Although Smith had not decided on a future career, her friends said she talked about working in high-end fashion or becoming a talk show host.

Friends said Smith’s ability to bring people together came from her diverse upbringing.

Born on Dec. 28, 1982, in Mombasa, Kenya, while her parents were on vacation there, Smith spent her first eight years in Somalia and then moved to Luxembourg, where she graduated from the European School of Luxembourg. Her family moved to France after she came to Harvard in the fall of 2000.

Smith traveled several times to Denmark and had talked about living there later in life.

She considered taking time off last year to travel and study in Europe.

Smith’s interest in anthropology followed in the footsteps of her father, Lars Christian Smith ’70, who also concentrated in anthropology at Harvard.

But her friends said her choice of academic pursuit was also motivated by “a desire to know humanity.”

At Harvard, Smith worked at the Graduate School of Design library and participated in other campus activities including the Bee (a female final club), and the Women in Business club.

Eileen J. Southern

Eileen J. Southern, the first female, black professor at Harvard, died Oct. 13, 2002 in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. She was 82.

Southern is best known for her 1971 work, The Music of Black Americans: A History, which is still widely credited as one of the definitive texts in the field.

“She single-handedly brought the civil rights movement to musicology,” said Carol Oja, president-elect of the Society for American Music.

Between 1973 and 1990, Southern published the influential scholarly journal, The Black Perspective in Music.

In April, Southern received the National Humanities Medal. In 1975, Southern was appointed to a joint professorship in Afro-American studies and music by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. One year later, she became the second chair in the history of the fledgling Afro-American studies department, a position which she held until 1980.

Southern’s tenure at Harvard was often marred by conflict, which she wrote about in an essay, “A Pioneer: Black and Female,” published in the 1993 anthology Blacks at Harvard. Southern wrote of her efforts to garner respect both for herself and for the young department.

Southern retired from the Faculty in 1986.

Robert Tonis

Robert Tonis, who led the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) through its transformation into a professional police force, died April 11 at the age of 94.

Tonis, who was HUPD’s chief from 1962 to 1975, was known as Harvard’s “Renaissance Cop.”

A three-decade veteran of the FBI who helped investigate the infamous 1950 Brinks robbery, Tonis was appointed HUPD’s third police chief in 1962.

Tonis took over the department as campus policing was undergoing its biggest revolution since its inception in the 1890s.

As the tumultuous 1960s evolved and campus riots swept the nation, it became increasingly clear that the University would need a more professional police force.

During his tenure, HUPD officers became the first department in the state to be granted special state police status as campus officers, greatly expanding their authority and powers of arrest.

The campus unrest of the late 1960s tested Tonis and his newly professionalized department. His quiet and steadfast leadership through the troubles on campus earned him the enduring respect of both students and faculty. Numerous times, HUPD officers helped quell riots in Harvard Square, and carefully policed protests in the Yard.

Perhaps the defining moment of the new era in campus policing came on April 9, 1969, when students occupied University Hall and forcibly ejected the deans from the building. He publicly opposed the administration’s plan to send in 400 state and local police to break up the protest.

“As far as the University police are concerned, we didn’t want to do anything about it, but they’re way over our heads now,” Tonis said at the time.

Following the bloody bust, in which 250 students were arrested and more than 75 injured, Tonis, near tears, circulated among the traumatized protesters in the Yard apologizing for the violence and urging the students not to retaliate.

Ever the jazz and classical music lover, Tonis kept a radio on his desk so he could listen to the Boston Symphony as he worked.

He retired in 1975 when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 66, although he continued to dine regularly in Adams House for many years.

George A. Weller

George A. Weller ’29, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Daily News and former editorial chair of The Crimson, died in Rome on Dec. 19, 2002. He was 95.

“He was really a breed of man that one rarely encounters now,” said Anthony Weller, his son.

Some of his best-known work brought him to the battlefields of World War II, including the Nazi invasion of the Balkans and the fall of Singapore to the Japanese.

Weller won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for war correspondence for a story on the world’s first major surgical operation in a submerged submarine, an appendectomy during which the crew had to make use of a tea strainer and spoons.

After the war, Weller defied a ban by the U. S. government against visiting the Japanese cities that had been struck by atomic bombs.

Weller was the first Western civilian reporter to enter Nagasaki after it was devastated by a nuclear bomb in August 1945.

He also covered the signing of the armistice aboard the USS Missouri which ended WWII.

In 1933, Weller wrote Not To Eat, Not for Love, a novel about undergraduate life at Harvard.

Alfred E. Vellucci

Alfred E. Vellucci, the former Cambridge mayor notorious for his zealous feuds with Harvard, died Oct. 17, 2002 in Cambridge City Hospital. He was 87.

Vellucci’s conflicts with Harvard began in 1956, his first year on the Cambridge City Council, when he proposed separating the University from Cambridge.

His most famous threat was a plan to purchase Harvard Yard by eminent domain and pave it over for public parking, thereby solving Cambridge’s parking problems.

Vellucci, who grew up in Somerville, developed contempt for everything Harvard early on.

Vellucci once drove to New Haven for the Harvard-Yale football game and found his way to the Bulldogs’ locker room to deliver a beat-Harvard pep talk.

According to Cambridge political pundit Robert Winters, Vellucci’s attacks on Harvard were not merely personal but also bore political utility.

This policy supplemented his populist approach to politics well, winning him three terms on the Cambridge School Committee and a seat on the city council from 1955 to 1989.

He was elected mayor in 1971 and served three more two-year terms in office.

“He was one of the most engaging and entertaining members of the city council,” Winters said.