Hamilton College
Skip Main Navigation
Skip Section Navigation Alumni Review Current Issue Back Issues Features Finding the Right Fit Faces Behind the Façades Not Your Father's Dining Hall Departments Around College Field Notes Bookshelf The Alumni Class Notes Marriages & Unions Births & Adoptions Necrology ENews Extra February 2007 January SPECIAL EDITION January 2007 November SPECIAL EDITION October 2006 September 2006 July/August 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 February 2006
Contact Information

Alumni Necrology


1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
2000s

The College has recently been informed of the deaths of the following alumni. Their memorial biographies will be included in the next issue of the Alumni Review: Douglas W. Fletcher ’33 (August 16, 2005); James A. Lawson ’38 (September 27, 2006); G. Roger Weeden ’39 (August 24, 2006); Charles B. Eames ’42 (June 30, 2006); John C. Reynolds ’44 (September 17, 2006); Edmund A. LeFevre ’46 (April 27, 2006); Lewis F. Cole, Jr. ’49 (August 11, 2006); Edward L. King ’51 (September 5, 2006); Richard A. Hehmeyer ’53 (April 21, 2006); Ralph S. Schoenstein ’53 (August 24, 2006); Richard G. Barker ’58 (August 22, 2006);  David C. MacGregor ’63 (September 8, 2006); David O. Hakanson ’67 (September 27, 2006); Jeffrey M. Holden ’96 (May 27, 2006).

The deaths of the following alumni have been reported or ascertained. The Necrologist would welcome further information so that an appropriate memorial biography may be published in a future issue: Riho Terras ’62 (November 28, 2005); Charles R. Schramm III ’69 (January 23, 2005); Donald E. Taylor ’74 (January 29, 2003); Mary E. McKeldin ’79 (December 28, 2003).

Friends and Faculty


David O. Butcher, a member of the Department of Philosophy from 1978-83, died on Aug. 15, 2005. Born in Brooklyn in 1950, he relocated with his family to Los Angeles three years later. He received a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. His dissertation, on subjunctive conditional modal logic, prepared him to shift into computer science after he left Hamilton. He made the transition at Potsdam College of SUNY and spent the rest of his career as a member of the Department of Computer Science at Sonoma State University in California.

Professor Butcher’s friends, colleagues and many students remember him as a cheerful, quick-witted man, who was generous to a fault. He was a gifted teacher and scholar, able to make the fields of logic and cybernetics accessible to his students. In accordance with his family’s wishes, tributes in David Butcher’s memory can be made to Hamilton for the David Butcher Memorial Fund.

He is survived by his mother, nine siblings and a large circle of friends, including Cynthia Jones.

— Frank Anechiarico ’71, the Maynard-Knox Professor of Government and Law

Jacques Guerlin de Guer, a professor of French in Hamilton’s Junior Year in France program in Biarritz from 1957-87, died on July 8, 2006, at the age of 90. A charter member of the teaching staff in Biarritz when the program was founded in 1957 by Marcel Moraud of Hamilton, he originally taught civilization then moved on to conversation classes. He also served as guide for the yearly groups of Hamilton students, introducing them on field trips to the many treasures of the Basque country in southwestern France. From 1961-86, Jacques and his wife Christiane hosted students in their home.

—  John O’Neal, Professor of French