MIDDLETON-Louis James Maher, Jr., 84, Emeritus Professor of Geology and Geophysics at UW-Madison, died peacefully at home on August 22, 2018, after a long illness. He was born on December 18, 1933, in Iowa City, Iowa, to Louis James and Edith Hamm Maher. He attended rural school and University elementary and high schools in Iowa City, participating in band and debate, making lifelong friends, and graduating in 1952.
He began to fulfill a lifetime goal by taking flying lessons from a WWII veteran… Read More » in a Piper Cub on a grass strip near his home. Lou attended the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where he majored in Geology and participated in the marching band. He enjoyed field camp, living in a tent near Deadwood SD and learning geological mapping.
He claimed he was the only one who didn’t find a dinosaur fossil! He graduated from Iowa in 1956 with Highest Honors and Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship, greatly benefiting his further studies.
Lou married Elizabeth Jane Crawford, his high school sweetheart, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City on June 7, 1956. Theirs was a typical geologist’s honeymoon where Lou went out every day to map the mountains near Buffalo WY for his Master’s thesis. A request for permission from the local Draft Board to leave the country for an oil company summer undergraduate internship in Venezuela in 1955 had proved a pitfall, as Lou was drafted after completing the course work for his MS degree.
He trained as a clerk in the Counter Intelligence Corps at Fort Holabird MD, and Jane joined him in an apartment in Dundalk. He became an expert typist and learned about erasing errors all the way through a sheaf of copies. Expecting to be sent to Germany, Lou was instead stationed in historic La Rochelle, France, where despite an uncertain political climate he and Jane profited from extensive travel and life in a flat in a charming old country house.
Lou took hundreds of slide photos which he used later in his classes. After the Army, Lou and Jane moved to the University of Minnesota for Lou’s PhD studies in Palynology, which involved retrieval and analysis of pollen grains preserved for thousands of years in sediments and yielding clues to climate change. The couple spent a summer in Durango CO while Lou finished the sampling for his dissertation.
Their first son was born in Minneapolis in 1960, and Lou was awarded the PhD in 1961. Lou and Jane enjoyed a NATO post-doc in Cambridge, England, where a second son was ushered into their home by a midwife in 1962. They made lifelong friends in the supportive neighborhood.
Lou and Jane came to Wisconsin in 1962 in the midst of massive hiring at the University of Wisconsin. The Geology Department was welcoming, and he began his long career of Introductory Geology lectures in Science Hall to large classes of undergraduates from many fields. Young men and women from farms and small cities found out they had always been interested in geology.
Science Hall proved to be in the path of many Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Lou’s windows were boarded up as a precaution, and classes were often disrupted by tear gas. On one occasion, a protester barged into Lou’s class and demanded to be allowed to make an impromptu speech.
Lou offered his class a chance to vote on whether to continue a review for a quiz or hear the speech. In 1966, Lou and Jane welcomed their daughter to the family. Each semester, Lou took his students on a day-long bus and hiking tour to Devil’s Lake State Park and many other interesting geological features near Madison.
On the fall trip, the bus made a stop for bushels of apples. Lou led a cross-country summer field trip for undergraduates. Various students drove their own cars from one field site to the next, and students worked on their maps on drawing boards in their tents by lantern light.
Tent life was not his favorite, but he was dragged into it on numerous occasions throughout his life. He also facilitated post-summer-session family camping or cabin living over many years once the children were in school. Among the highlights: a trip with the two boys in early spring snow to sample Molas Lake near Durango and visit the Grand Canyon; and incident-filled family camping trips to Jasper Park, Glacier, and Yellowstone, and to the Canadian Maritimes.
Lou earned his flying license at Morey Field, Middleton, in a University-owned Cessna 170. When he was asked to prepare a semester of experimental classes on video, he took off with a graduate student to acquire a treasure-trove of air photos of the West which enriched his classes and other presentations throughout his career. They are available at geoscience.
wisc. edu/~maher/air. html He wrote of the trip in the AOPA magazine in 1968.
He was a member of the EAA. Lou was known as somewhat of a character, riding his small Honda motorcycle to the campus in all weather, and later driving a vintage red MG sports car surprisingly acquired from his brother-in-law. Son Jim looked in on his dad’s class while a student and was amazed at his showmanship.
Lou developed a Pollen course for students from several disciplines and published numerous articles on the topic, besides editing an online journal and developing a sub-specialty in Remote Sensing. After the first phase of the department’s new building, Weeks Hall, was built, Lou acted as building manager and fussy mom, guarding the new furnishings and making sure the fountain in the courtyard was kept functioning. He was Department Chair for several years and particularly fought for fair treatment for the increasing number of women faculty.
He served on University and Departmental committees and chaired the Building Committee for the second phase of Weeks Hall. He retired in 2003. Lou’s professional travels included Canada, the British Isles, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and India.
He loved raft trips on the Yampa and San Juan Rivers, and visited many national parks. During the empty-nest years, Jane and Lou rekindled their love affair with France, spent weeks in cottages, experienced new adventures, and treasured their favorite spots, such as La Rochelle, Cahors, and the Massif Central. Lou was a loner more than a joiner, although he held memberships in numerous academic and scientific societies.
He was a Fellow of the AAAS and the GSA, and loved field meetings with the Friends of the Pleistocene. He and Jane were supporters of their church, Saint Dunstan’s; American Players Theatre, the History of Cartography Project, Operation Migration, Friends of Pheasant Branch Creek, Friends of the Arboretum, and many other civic and environmental organizations. Lou loved going out on geology expeditions with his special friends, Dave Mickelson and the late Bob Dott and Jim Knox.
Dave asked Lou to co-author his prize-winning 2011 book, Geology of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Jane, and by their children, Louis James Maher III (Laura) , Rochester MN; Robert Crawford Maher (Lynn Peterson), Bozeman MT; and Barbara Ruth Maher-Flatt (Roger), Fond du Lac. Mourning the loss of their grandfather are Elizabeth Lillian Maher, Maxwell Lloyd Maher, Andrew Michael Flatt-Kuntze (Justin), Henry Peterson Maher, Christina Aileen Murray (John), and Katherine Marie Flatt.
Lou is also survived by his loving sister-in-law, Rachel Crawford Mills (Vincent), Cedar Rapids IA, and their families. And Lou always wanted to remind us that he liked his cat, Oberon, very much, even when he could no longer remember Obie’s name. Lou was predeceased by his sister, Geneva Ann Maher, and his parents.
Lou suffered from dementia during the last twelve years of his life. The Celebration of Life for Lou Maher will be October 6, 2018, at Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, 6205 University Ave, Madison, with visitation at 9:30 am, Eucharist at 11 am, and light lunch at noon. The family especially thanks Senior Helpers and the SSM Adult Day Health Center for their gentle ministrations.
In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to SSM ADHC; The Alzheimer’s Association or The Alzheimer’s and Dementia Alliance; the UW Geoscience Field Camp Fund (UW Foundation); Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church; or a charity of your choice. Please share your memories at www.
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