In Memoriam
Robert W. Twyman
William C. Hartel, Ph.D.
Brenton Hoyt Smith, Ph.D.
Ronald E. Shaw, Ph.D.
W. Eugene Hollon, Ph.D.
Bowling Green State University
Robert W. Twyman, Professor Emeritus, died on September 20, 2001 at the age of 82. A member of the Bowling Green faculty from l948 to l985, Bob Twyman was a highly respected teacher and scholar. He was the first recipient of the campus-wide Distinguished Teacher Award. His major publications were The History of Marshall Field and Company and The Encyclopedia of Southern History, which he co-edited with his late colleague, David Roller, and which received the Founders Award of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society. He was Chair of the History Department from l959 to l965 and was active in University governance and professional organizations, including the Ohio Academy of History, which he served as President in 1977.
Bob Twyman was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1919 and did his undergraduate work at Indiana University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He married Betty Jane Williams in 1944. She predeceased him in 1998. They had one son, Jeffrey, of Bowling Green, and two grandchildren. In June 2001, Bob married Edith M. Anders, who survives.
Dr. William C. Hartel died on April 26, 2001. He had retired in December of 2000. He arrived to teach history at Marietta College in 1965 after receiving his doctorate from the Ohio State University. In his thirty-five years of teaching at Marietta he won numerous teaching awards, initiated and directed Marietta’s first-year program for many years, and directed the Marietta’s Perspectives lecture series. A specialist in the French Revolution and radical American social movements, Bill was best known for his dedication to students and the lasting relationships he had with many of them. He is survived by his wife Barbara Hartel, two children, and two grandchildren.
Brenton Hoyt Smith taught European history at Miami University from 1961 until his retirement in 1994. He was born in Orange, New Jersey, on May 1, 1925. He received his bachelor’s degree in international relations and history at Yale University in 1946 and a masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. After several years of teaching, he devoted himself to research on his doctoral dissertation on France’s defeat and the Vichy armistice of 1940. By the time he received his Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of Michigan, he was teaching at Temple University, where he remained until his appointment at Miami. The focus of Brenton’s teaching was 20th-century European diplomatic history, particularly that of France. Brenton’s values and virtues were those esteemed in college faculty of an earlier time. Although he wrote little, he was an omnivorous reader. He had an expert, albeit eccentric, appreciation of the arts: Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in music and the French impressionists in painting. (He claimed that J. S. Bach constituted the definitive argument for the existence of God; he argued that the significance of Westminster Abbey was that Claude Manet had painted it in a variety of lights.) He traveled extensively in Europe and hoped to spend his seventy-fifth birthday in Paris, but he died a few days too early on April 23, 2000.
Ronald E. Shaw died April 4, 2001, at the age of 77. He had been ill with cancer. Ron came to Miami University in 1954 after earning his doctorate from the University of Rochester. He taught western civilization, American social and economic history, and the history of the early American republic. He directed many graduate students, led the mentor program for American history teaching fellows, and coordinated the department’s undergraduate honors course. A former student remembered Ron’s legacy as a teacher in a letter to Ron a few days before his death: “There were so many things even in that first history class that made a lasting impression on me. Your passion for the subject, and the way you told the story.” The first W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami, Ron retired in 1993. A nationally known scholar, he wrote Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era in the United States, 1790–1860 in 1990. His Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians in 1965 and was reprinted several times. Before teaching at Miami, Ron taught at Wayne State University and served in the Army from 1943 to 46.
University of Toledo
From the UT News, June 11, 2002:
Dr. W. Eugene Hollon, Gilmer, Texas, professor emeritus of history, died May 19 at age 88. He joined the university in 1967 and one year later was appointed Ohio Regents Professor of History, a designation recognizing outstanding academic and professional work. Hollon was a noted scholar on the history of the American West from the Andrew Jackson administration to the Civil War. He wrote several books, including Zebulon Montgomery Pike, The Lost Pathfinder (1949), The Southwest: Old and New (1961) and The Great American Desert Then and Now (1966), which was a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. While at UT, he helped establish the history department’s doctoral program. Hollon retired in 1978. Several of his former doctoral students contributed articles to a 1980 book, The American West: Essays in Honor of W. Eugene Hollon, which was edited by Dr. Ron Lora, UT professor of history [and past president of the Ohio Academy of History].