Julia S. Phelps
April 18, 1916-October 4, 1995

In a small café in Munich on August 8, 1935, just down the street from where the Hitlerian Putsch had been staged 12 years earlier, a Harvard graduate student and tutor, recently and somewhat grandly anointed a contributing editor of the Boston Transcript for which he had just covered the Italo-Abyssinian fracas at the League of Nations in Geneva, was introduced to a rising Radcliffe junior, relaxing over a glass of beer after taking in a stirring performance of Wagner's Dei Valkyrie.

And so, proper introductions having been made, Reginald Henry Phelps of Harvard met Julia Gray Sears of Radcliffe. The initial meeting quickly led to joint walking expeditions, bicycle-riding excursions, and additional opera performances until she returned to the United States. He continued on to Berlin, Prague, and Danzig, combining dispatches to the Boston newspaper with tourism and generally ignoring the Nazis who, to keep the American dollars flowing, were keeping a low profile.

Decades later, Reginald Phelps was to recall that "a genuine congeniality of tastes and a common love of everything German" made a subsequent old-fashioned Cantabrigian romance blossom. The young couple tooled around New England in a Tin Lizzie while seeking out H.H. Richardson-designed buildings, the subject of Julia's senior thesis. And after Julia graduated with an honors degree in philosophy in 1937, she formally became engaged to that scholarly tutor she had met two years earlier in the Munich café.

But first there was the summer of 1936. Julia Sears was in Spain studying Spanish art at the same time the Franco fascists seized control of some areas of the country. She was incommunicado for several weeks while frantic family members in England and Portugal and a distraught suitor in Munich repeatedly besieged the US government to do something to effect her release. As she later related the incident, she was essentially smuggled out of Spain to Portugal and placed on a cattle boat headed for Germany. "Making the best of a bad situation" and bolstered by her knowledge of the German language from private schooling in Boston and several "grand tours," she turned her attention to the study of medieval German art.

This subsequently led her to change the focus of her major intellectual interest, philosophy, to fine arts, and, as she later wrote, "The training in both the history of philosophy and the conceptual structure of thought and valid judgment formed an indestructible basis for all of my study and teaching of art history." In other words, she approached art history with the intellectually rigorous tools of philosophy.

After a suitably lengthy engagement, Julia Sears and Reginald Phelps married in 1938, and she settled into life in Cambridge as a faculty wife (albeit the wife of a Harvard "Baby Dean," history tutor, and graduate student). She soon began serious graduate study in German art, study that led to an MA and later, after completing a highly regarded thesis, a PhD, both awarded by Radcliffe College.

During World War II, both Phelpses worked for the Office for Strategic Services (OSS). Based in London and Washington, DC, Julia translated German documents; Reginald followed US troops into Germany, investigating documents of the German intelligence forces.

After the war and a brief interlude living in New York City while Reginald taught at Columbia, the Phelpses returned to Cambridge, where Julia embarked on a career that combined effective teaching, museum administration, and scholarly writing (most notably a series of papers in the College Art Journal) while raising three children, William, Henry, and Susan.

Before feminism proclaimed that "women could do it all," Julia Phelps was doing it all and doing it well. In addition to being the wife of a senior Harvard University administrator, her teaching included appointments as Lecturer in Art for the Department of German in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a several-decade commitment to the Radcliffe Seminars Program, and a multi-year teaching career at the Harvard Extension School. On the museum administration side, she was Director of the Wellesley Art Museum for several years in the 1960s and served as acting curator several times for the Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum at Harvard, where she was assistant curator for an extended period. Incidentally, Extension School records reveal that from 1949-75, while her husband served as Director of University Extension at Harvard, Julia Phelps did not accept any salary for the courses she taught--there was not to be any hint of impropriety or favoritism in her participation at the School.

During the last two decades, after her children were grown, Mrs. Phelps devoted most of her energies to teaching and leading art study-tours to Europe. Until well into her late 70s, she offered study tours to Scandinavia, France, Italy, and Great Britain through the Radcliffe Seminars Program. "Most everywhere in Europe except the Baltic States," her husband noted. She taught in the Radcliffe Seminars Program until last year--retirement was not a word in Julia Phelps's lexicon.

For a number of years, Mrs. Phelps offered Harvard Extension alumni/ae interpretative lectures and guided tours for major exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts. One of her last public lectures--a talk on the dark vision of painter Emil Nolde leavened by the dry, Yankee sense of humor for which she was noted--was presented to a Harvard Extension School alumni audience at a standing-room-only meeting in the Grossman Common Room.

Honors also came to Julia Phelps. Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario awarded her an Ashley Fellowship and then an honorary degree for her work in introducing thousands of students to the humanities. And the Federal Republic of Germany, in recognition of her work in the teaching of German art, granted her the Order of Merit in 1989. The Harvard Extension Alumni Association dedicated the Alumni Bulletin to her in 1982.

Just prior to her death on October 4, 1995, Julia Phelps completed a study of the images of heaven in medieval art. Researching the topic returned her to Germanic medieval art, the focus of her initial graduate studies and of her dissertation six decades ago, and brought to full circle a life of teaching, scholarship, and dedication to the highest ideals of continuing education--the constant acquisition of knowledge and the willingness to share with others lessons derived from a lifetime of learning. She will live on in the fond memory of her many students in the Harvard Extension School.

- J.F.A.

Word was received by the Alumni Office of the death of Edward A. Glaum, ADA '34, who died at age 95 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he had resided for several decades and operated a ranch.

Alexander J. Chase, ADA '35, a retired Certified Public Accountant for Charles E. DiPisa Co. of Boston, died in Wellesley, MA on June 16.

Arthur Grenier, ABE '66, of Winthrop, MA, died on August 18, 1995. A long-time employee of New England Telephone Company and active in fraternal affairs, he was a past president of the New England Telephone Pioneers and a past Grand Knight of the North Cambridge Council of the Knights of Columbus.

Justin J. Francis, ALM '82, of Hagerstown, MD, died on April 10 after a long illness. He was retired from the Boston Naval Shipyard, where he was supervisor of the design department for marine engineering and naval architecture. He had earlier completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and initially attended Exten-sion School courses to accompany his wife, Bertha Francis, ABE '72, who survives him, before embarking on graduate work here.

Allie W. Scruggs, CAS '85, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, died suddenly on January 2.

David M. Thurston, ALB '88, a self-employed computer consultant and former president and owner of Thurston Electronics, died in Concord, NH on May 7, after a sudden illness.