| George Richard Rumney 04/25/09 Memorial Gathering & Reception: 08/29/09 |
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Posted: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:19 pm
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George Richard Rumney, 94, of Groton Long Point, CT and Sarasota, FL, died April 25, 2009, in Sarasota. He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Holly Chase, his three children and their spouses, and two grandchildren.
George was born Dec. 9, 1914, in Buffalo, NY, the only surviving child of George Roskell Rumney and Laura Edna (Jose). George sang in the boys choir at the Church of the Good Shepherd and was troop bugler in Boy Scout Troop 5. After his father's death in 1923, and his mother's remarriage, the family moved to Windsor, Ontario, where George played trumpet in the school orchestra and later in the studio band for radio station CKLV.
He developed a keen interest in birds, spending much of every day in the woods or fields with his mother's opera glasses. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1940 with a major in Geography and enrolled in graduate school, but World War II intervened.
George enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained in the de Havilland Moth in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He enrolled in the Navy's Officer Candidate School at Northwestern University, graduating in April 1942 as an ensign, and reported to the Sub Chaser Training Center in Miami. Assigned to the SC513, he was promoted to Lieutenant JG, and in the spring of 1943 was given command of a subchaser (the SC1006) with patrol duty in the Hawaiian Islands. He later commanded a small tanker, joining up with a convoy of thirteen vessels headed across the Pacific, and an ocean-going tug, which hauled materiel barges to the Marshall Islands.
George submitted a request for a change of duty to the Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C. and applied for discharge when the war ended.
He married Mary Margaret Meloche of Ann Arbor, MI, on January 9, 1943, at Christ Church, San Diego, California. The couple had three children and in 1948 settled in Storrs, Conn.
Returning to Ann Arbor after the war, George completed his Ph.D. and in 1947 accepted a teaching position at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Dr. Rumney was recruited a year later by the University of Connecticut, where he was in charge of re-establishing the geography program at the University. George wrote Climatology and the World's Climates; Macmillan, Collier-Macmillan (New York, London; 1968) soon followed by The Geosystem: Dynamic Integration of Land, Sea, and Air (Brown Co.; 1970).
Climatology..., became a standard college text reprinted in several editions. He taught UCONN's first oceanography course and with four other faculty members from different disciplines, lobbied the college and state legislature to support marine sciences. The Marine Sciences Institute (MSI) was founded at UCONN's Avery Point campus in Groton, Connecticut, and UCONN became a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Sea Grant university.
George received research grants including two Fulbright fellowships awarded in the 1950's, one for study in Iran and the other for study of the Canadian Shield. In 1979, the American Philological Association provided funding to investigate the effects of the southwest monsoon in Dhofar, then a remote region of the Sultanate of Oman, on the Arabian Sea. He was accompanied by his second wife, Holly Chase, a specialist in Middle Eastern ethnography, whom he married in 1978. He described their different disciplines as complementary, with his "handling the clouds and rocks." Together, they made study trips throughout Oman, Turkey, Tunisia, India, and Sri Lanka.
Recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the New England St. Lawrence Geographical Society in 1982, George continued to travel after retiring in 1983, delving into the maritime culture and history of Portugal and making trips to Costa Rica's cloud forests and the Australian outback.
Chairman of the Groton Long Point Conservation Commission for more than a decade, he kept an office at the Marine Sciences Institute, attending seminars and following the progress of an increasingly international group of graduate students.
As professor emeritus he wrote for various professional journals and the Encyclopedia of Climatology, and for Encyclopedia Britannica on the history of climatology.
George is survived by his wife Holly Chase; and his children: Mary Ann Rumney Besier and her husband Rudolph of Old Lyme, Conn.; Susan Rumney Barney and her children Austin Dunham, III, and Amanda Brandegee of Bloomfield, Conn.; and George Roskell Rumney, II, and his wife Jocelyne Racicot of Bowie, Md., and by step grandchildren Christine Besier of East Haddam, Conn.; Kurt Besier of Old Lyme, Conn.; and the Reverend Bettine Besier of Quaker Hill, Conn., their spouses and ten step great-grandchildren. His close friends Ken and Kelly Forman of Sarasota and their seven wonderful children also mourn his loss.
A memorial gathering and reception will be held Saturday, Aug. 29, at 11 a.m. at the Marine Sciences Institute and Technology Center, 3rd Floor, University of Connecticut, Avery Point Campus, Groton, Conn. Entry is from the plaza.
Donations in memory of Dr. George R. Rumney to support the Fund for Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut may be made to The UCONN Foundation, Inc., 2390 Alumni Drive, Unit 3206, Storrs, CT 06269. |
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