In Memoriam

Paul F. Barrett

On October 15, 2004, Paul F. Barrett died following a lengthy battle with cancer. Paul leaves behind his wife, Annette Love Barrett and a stepson, Johnathan Powell. He was sixty years of age. Paul was a long-time member and former chair of the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago

Paul was educated in Chicago, completing elementary and high school in Chicago’s Catholic system. He earned the B.A. (1966) and M.A. degrees in history at Loyola University and the Ph.D. at the University of Illinois-Chicago (1976). Paul was the eleventh person to complete a history dissertation at the new UIC. Paul was a member of an especially productive and distinguished group to finish their studies at the UIC during that period, including Roger Biles, Hasia Diner, Blanche Glassman Hersh, Arnold Hirsch, Dominic Pacyga, Leslie Tischauser, and Deborah White. Faculty who most influenced Barrett, reports classmate Pacyga, were Perry Duis, Melvin Holli, Richard Jensen, Peter d’A Jones, and Glen Holt, then at Washington University and the Chicago Historical Society. During their time together in graduate school, remembers Hirsch, Paul “was exceedingly and unfailingly generous–with his time, research, or anything else.” Hirsch added that Paul was also “the gold standard when it came to common sense.”

Paul focused his dissertation and first book on the politics of street construction, public transit, and automobile popularization in Chicago between the 1890s and 1930. Originally titled “Straphanger’s Dream” and retitled The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago (1983), the editor at Temple University Press insisted (perhaps accurately) that younger readers would not recognize the term “straphanger.” Two questions dominate that book. Why, Paul asked, had Chicago’s politicians lavished so much money on streets and traffic control? And why, he also asked, had those same politicians held transit officials to a five cent fare and forced them to provide money-losing service to the city’s periphery? Considerably simplified, Paul’s answer was that Chicago’s politicians perceived the automobile as private, and democratic. By contrast, trolley operators suffered from a decades-long reputation for poor service and public corruption. Space limitations forced Paul to excise portions of an especially moving chapter that opened with a young girl falling to her death from a moving trolley and closed with the girl’s father and priest collapsing over her casket at the funeral parlor. Often, Paul wrote in simple, moving passages that conveyed the grief, anger, and passions of the city’s ordinary residents as well as its leading business and political figures.

Paul was highly principled in matters that historians care about deeply, especially the fullest description of events, thorough documentation, and control of manuscript content throughout the editorial process. In retrospect, stories of Paul’s commitment to those principles seem amusing. In the early 1980s, Paul was negotiating the final details of his Automobile and Public Transit with editors at Temple University Press. In particular, the senior editor asked Paul to reduce the length of text and footnotes. Paul regularly produced chapters some 80-100 pages, double-spaced in length and another 40-50 pages of single-spaced footnotes. (Paul wrote each of those drafts on an Underwood manual typewriter). At one point, Paul threatened to withdraw the manuscript from the press rather than accept another round of footnote reductions. Not even an impending denial of tenure at IIT altered Paul’s view of the matter. Eventually, the editor suggested a compromise. The press would place a note at the top of his still-copious footnotes to the effect that Paul maintained a typescript version of those notes and would make them available upon request. One of the book’s reviewers, Gail Farr Casterline, noted “the splendid range of sources used . . .” and complimented Paul’s “grasp of public transportation as a phenomenon whose impact on the city, its people, and the public psyche extended far beyond its function of giving rides.” No one who knew Paul would have asked him to write a “thesis driven” manuscript.

A decade later, Paul still held high the ideas of a complete narrative and thorough documentation. In articles for the Journal of Urban History published in 1987 and 1999, Paul prepared lengthy drafts and equally lengthy footnotes. Once again, editor and coauthor asked Paul to give way on matters of length, especially the footnotes. (By 1999, Paul was greatly accomplished in word processing albeit on an early-model computer to which he clung until it no longer worked).

Nearing the end of his career, Paul remained committed to the scholarly habits of his youth. Between the late 1990s and 2003, Paul prepared drafts of chapters on airline regulation during the period of the late 1930s to the early 1970s. Paul produced more than twenty drafts of one of those chapters–and once again, each of those drafts was lengthy, and each rested on Paul’s thorough documentation. On reading a draft, editors at the Ohio State University Press sought a diminution of text and still-abundant footnotes. In reply, Paul told them that he might as well substitute a cartoon for the chapter. In the end, Paul succumbed to the entreaties of editors, coauthors, and his own growing conviction that university presses were emulating the behavior of their commercial counterparts.

Amazingly, Paul never complained of fatigue during those many rewrites. He granted that editors were “doing their job.” In a period, moreover, during which social and cultural history were in the ascendance, Paul remained focused on development of a narrative and analysis that foregrounded ideas, interests, local residents, and diverse political actors.

As a faculty member and department chair at IIT, Paul emphasized the virtues of the humanities. Anyone who has taught at an engineering university recognizes the efforts of senior administrators to capture the ever-changing directions of industry for their students. Since the 1940s, the goal of engineering educators has been to produce outstanding technologists who are comfortable with the language and methods of science and equally comfortable in the proverbial “corridors of power.” Paul never denied those goals. He insisted, however, that engineering preparation include a solid grounding in the humanities. “Paul believed that studying humanities,” an IIT colleague reported to the Chicago Tribune, “makes [students] think about the fact that when they go to work . . . there are lives that are affected by what they do.” In the scramble for credit hour production that characterizes all or most contemporary universities, Paul, as chair of the humanities department, argued for literature, philosophy, and history. As part of that commitment, Paul postponed his own research on cities and airports to conduct a study of humanities education in the nation’s engineering colleges. Putting in long days at IIT, Paul was  a dedicated and stimulating instructor. Students, reports colleague Tom Misa, “loved his history of Chicago class.” Prior to the most recent period of residential change in Chicago, adds Misa, Paul “could hear someone talking and immediately tell them the name of their home Catholic parish.”

Paul was also willing to put in lengthy and uncomfortable days to preserve the manuscript underpinnings of historical scholarship. In the early 1990s, reports Dominic Pacyga, the brother of an office worker at IIT discovered employment records (1880s-1940s) of Libby, McNeil and Libby, a major pork packer in the Chicago stock yards. In all likelihood, the records had been abandoned in those ruins since the early 1960s, and dust and dirt had enveloped the building and the records. Paul telephoned graduate school friend Pacyga and one of his former professors, Mel Holli, to help find a home for the records. The three of them spent what Pacyga characterizes as “one of the hottest days of the summer” filling more than one hundred boxes. In turn, they carried the boxes to a chute leading to a truck that delivered the materials to UIC’s special collections department.

After learning that his cancer would not respond to treatment, Paul turned increasingly to his religious faith. In addition to regular prayer, Paul took an active role at St. Fidelis Church in his home neighborhood on Chicago’s near northwest side. On grounds that retirement parties were for persons who were retiring, not dying, Paul did not want money spent “on him.” He asked colleagues and friends to send a donation to St. Fidelis, 1406 N. Washtenaw Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.

Whatever Paul’s views of editors and presses and whatever the editorial battles fought and lost, The Automobile and Urban Transit remains one of the standard books in the field; and his chapter on airline regulation and deregulation challenges the conventional interpretation both of the origins of “mass” airline travel and the origins of airline deregulation. Despite a personal “style” that was usually diffident and mostly playful (editors excepted), Paul was an original thinker, a committed scholar, and a delightful force for what he characterized as old-fashioned scholarship. He had hoped to live long enough to vote for John Kerry and John Edwards. His quick wit and intellectual power will be missed by students and colleagues at IIT; and I will miss Paul’s warmth, intelligence, and our many collaborations. 

&emdash;Mark H. Rose
Florida Atlantic University

David Syrett

Distinguished Professor David Syrett of Queens College died on October 18, 2004. He was sixty-five years old. David was part of a family of historians. His father was the noted historian, Harold Syrett, and his brother John was also a historian. He is survived by his wife, Elena Frangakis-Syrett; his sons, Peter, Matthew, and Christopher; his grandchildren, Hayley and Marco; and his brothers, John and Matthew.

David did his undergraduate education at Columbia University, and his doctoral work at the University of London. He joined the Queens faculty in 1966 and was made Distinguished Professor in 2000. The author of ten books with four more in press and over eighty articles, David was an expert on both the British Navy during the American Revolution and naval warfare of World War II. His work on the Battle of the Atlantic was based on meticulous research of the 49,000 decrypted messages from German U-boats. In the process of his long scholarly career, he won the admiration of the leading scholars of military history in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The recipient of many honors, Syrett was especially proud of being a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Council of the Navy Records in England.

David was most at home in the archives. Every summer he buried himself in the British archives until he had mastered every detail of the Battle of the Atlantic. He carried his scholarly accomplishments lightly, however, and was always ready to aid his colleagues and fellow scholars. In David’s personal relations and in his teaching, he was frank, unceremonious, and outspoken. His students appreciated these qualities and filled his classes. His colleagues appreciated these same qualities which he often demonstrated with force and emotion. Even when they differed with his opinions, his colleagues appreciated his honesty and openness. They will remember him as a distinguished scholar, a generous colleague, and a unique and authentic person.  

&emdash;Frank Warren
Queen’s College