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 Fr.
Theodore J. Tracy, SJ
October 2, 2006
Clarkston, MI
The
Rev. Theodore (Ted) Tracy, S.J., died on Monday 2 October 2006 at
the age of 90, in Clarkston Michigan, where he had been a resident
of the Colombiere Center after his retirement from active service
in the Jesuit order in August 2005. A funeral mass was celebrated
at St Ignatius Church in Chicago, on 5 October, and the eulogy was
delivered by Fr. Raymond C. Baumhart, S.J., former President of
Loyola University of Chicago.
Born on the West Side of Chicago on 2 January 1916, Ted was the
eldest of three children of Theodore J. Tracy Sr. (a wholesale jewelry
salesman by occupation) and Honor (nee Higgins) Tracy. In 1926,
he moved with his family to the east Rogers Park neighborhood, on
the North Side of Chicago, where he remained a resident throughout
most of the years of his life. During the Great Depression, Ted
worked to help support his family and to pay for his education at
Loyola Academy and at Loyola University of Chicago. He earned an
honors A.B. in Classics, philosophy, and history from Loyola University
in 1938, and after a year of post-graduate studies, he joined the
Society of Jesus at Milford, Ohio, on 1 September 1939. While studying
for the priesthood, Ted earned an M.A. in Classics and philosophy
from Loyola in 1942 and taught Latin, Greek, and English at Loyola
Academy in Chicago from 1943 to 1947. After ordination (13 June
1950), Ted pursued graduate studies, earning an S.T.L. (Licentiate
in Theology) from the Bellarmine School of Theology in 1951 and
an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics and ancient philosophy from Princeton
University in 1954 and 1962 respectively.
In
1955-56, he served as an instructor of Classics at Xavier University,
Cincinnati, and then returned to his alma mater, Loyola of Chicago,
where he rose through the ranks from instructor to associate professor
(1956-1970). He served as Chairman of the Classical Studies Department
for seven years (1960-67), and it was during his administration
that the doctoral program in Classics was established at Loyola.
In June of 1970, he was named “Distinguished Professor of
the Year”, an honor conferred by vote of the Faculty Council
at Loyola, a body composed of representatives from all schools and
colleges in the university.
That same year Ted resigned his faculty position at Loyola to accept
an appointment as associate professor of Classics at the new Chicago
campus of the University of Illinois, where he spent the next 11
years of his teaching career. It is impossible to overstate Ted’s
contribution to the formation and growth of the Classics faculty
at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Ted was truly the
senior founding member of the department and guided it through its
formative years. When he arrived in 1970, the campus was a mere
five years old. As Ted told his colleagues at Loyola, he felt drawn
to this new public university in Chicago, where the majority of
students were the first in their families to attend college. Those
undergraduates would never gain an appreciation for Classical literature
and culture unless the university was properly encouraged and aided
in building a strong program. Under Ted’s wise and gentle
leadership, this is precisely what occurred. The department at present
comprises 10 full-time faculty and includes among its offerings,
in addition to degrees in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Civilization,
courses in Arabic, Modern Greek, and Catholic Studies. (The latter
field was serendipitously added to the department twenty years after
Ted’s departure when the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies
was endowed at UIC, and its first occupant happened to be a scholar
of Augustine and so welcomed a cross appointment in Classics.)
After Ted’s retirement from UIC in 1981, where he had served
briefly as Acting Head of the department in 1974-75, Ted embarked
upon a whole new career. He began by enrolling in a one-year course
of study at Paul Robb’s Institute for Spiritual Leadership
on Chicago’s South Side. This training convinced Ted, as he
put it, that “I’ve been living my life from the head
up, but now I also want to be living from my head down.” Always
a great believer in fostering a healthy mind-body connection, Ted
was a self-taught practitioner of yoga. For many years, until late
in life, he pursued a daily stretching and relaxation routine. After
serving for one year as superior of Ignatius House, a satellite
community of Jesuit priests which he helped found near the Loyola
campus, he joined for a time the staff of the Institute for Spiritual
Leadership. Later, in 1990, he took a position at Loyola, where
for the next 15 years he served as a retreat leader and spiritual
director. Those who knew him invariably use the words “kind”,
“gentle”, “sympathetic”, and “pastoral”
to describe his approach to life and his relations with others.
He was beloved by students and colleagues alike. One priest recalls
that when he informed Ted that Ted had been appointed his Spiritual
Director, Ted replied “it will be my privilege to be your
spiritual companion.”
Ted’s scholarly publications were primarily in the field of
ancient philosophy, appearing in articles in Classical Philology
and Illinois Classical Studies. He wrote his Princeton dissertation,
entitled “Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean
in Plato and Aristotle”, under the direction of Whitney J.
Oates, and he took one or two classes from Harold Cherniss at the
Institute for Advanced Study. His investigation sought to elucidate
the notion of the term mesotes (“the mean”) in Aristotle
in the light of Greek medical theory, a connection that had been
posited by Werner Jaeger. Ted credited Tony Raubitschek with setting
him off along this path of research. When his dissertation was published
in 1969, reviewers praised it especially “in [its] discussion
of Aristotle, where the De Anima and the biological writings are
brought into relation with the Eudaemean Ethics, the Nicomachaean
Ethics, and the Politics.” (Phillips, CR 22 [1972], 420);
and it was described as offering “a splendid exposition of
sensation in the De anima and a convincing interpretation of the
living organism as ‘an embodied mesotes’.” (Sprague,
CP 66 [1971], 292). In a recent canvass that I did of ancient philosophers
known to me, among other responses I received from Richard Kraut,
my former colleague in the UIC Philosophy Department (now at Northwestern)
the statement (with permission to be quoted) that “to my mind,
it (Ted’s book) remains the best treatment of the medical
background to Aristotle’s discussion.”
Although, as I have indicated, Ted devoted himself primarily to
pastoral care after his retirement from UIC in 1981, he returned
briefly to Classics to publish in 1989 a scholarly paper entitled
“Who Stands behind Aeneas on the Ara Pacis?” (pp. 375-96
in Daidalikon, ed. R. Sutton). In it, he made a very persuasive
case for identifying the broken figure, of which we have only a
draped arm, not with Achates, or Iulus-Ascanius, or a hypothetical
figure of Pax Romana, but rather with the goddess Venus.
Ted served as President of the Chicago Classical Club from 1963
to 1965 and as First Vice President and member of the Executive
Committee of CAMWS in 1977-78. He was a member of the examining
board in Latin for the Education Testing Service (College Entrance
Board) from 1969 to 1971 and a member of the Editorial Board of
Illinois Classical Studies from 1974 to 1976. In addition, he served
for 15 years as a member of Loyola’s governing body, the Board
of Trustees.
Among his honors, in addition to those already mentioned, were the
John Harding Page fellowship at Princeton and a Fulbright Fellowship
for study in Italy (1960-61). The highest tribute of all, however,
was paid to him by his colleagues at UIC, who established in 1984
an annual lecture named in his honor. Over the past 22 years, some
of the most distinguished Classicists in America and Europe have
come to Chicago to give this lecture (listed at www.uic.edu/las/clas/lectures.html),
and the tradition will be continued this spring. On Thursday 5 April
2007, Professor Hunter Rawlings III, President-emeritus of Cornell,
will deliver the 24th lecture in this series, speaking on the subject
of “Thucydides and Truth in History.”
As a teenager growing up in Chicago, Ted had the unique experience
of holding a summer job as office boy to Colonel Robert R. McCormick,
the founder of the Chicago Tribune, and as a student at Loyola Academy,
he played football as a guard, an amazing feat for a man of his
size. In fact, Ted frequently reminisced about what a thrill is
was to play in the Prep Bowl, a game that has taken place annually
since 1929 between the champions of the Catholic and Public Leagues
of Chicago. This game is still played in Soldier Field, the home
of the Chicago Bears, on the lakefront, and in Ted’s day this
annual match used to attract close to 100,000 spectators.
Ted’s brief association with the Tribune as a summer employee
is to be explained in part by a family connection and invites the
telling of a marvelous anecdote that was part of family tradition.
In the 1930’s, Ted’s Aunt Kitty happened to be the personal
assistant of Colonel McCormick’s former editor-in-chief, Joseph
Patterson, who left Chicago to found the New York Daily News. The
story goes that one day in 1931, when the cartoonist Chester “Chet”
Gould was showing Patterson some early, rough sketches of his soon
to be famous cartoon detective, who as yet had only the first name
“Dick”, Aunt Kitty remarked, “goodness me, that
character in your drawing has a nose exactly like my brother-in-law’s.”
Hence the sleuth acquired the last name “Tracy”, being
named after Ted’s father, and by an odd twist of fate, Ted
died just two days shy of the 75th anniversary of the publication
of the first Dick Tracy installment, which appeared on 4 October
1931.
The world is a sadder and less kind place now that Ted has departed.
For many years, our family regarded him as an adopted member. He
baptized our son in 1978 and was rarely absent from our table at
Thanksgiving and at our son’s birthday on the day before Christmas.
In the summer, Ted and our family always made one or two pilgrimages
to the Indiana Dunes State Park, where he loved to swim, walk the
seashore, and paint in oils, a hobby at which he excelled. His stamina
at climbing the steep, sandy dunes was phenomenal even after he
passed the age of eighty. He will be greatly missed by all who knew
him. To know him was to honor and respect him as a dear dear friend.
Among his immediate family, he is survived by two sisters, Mary
Elizabeth Diffendal and Sr. Katherine Tracy, S.H.C.J.
Those who wish to honor the memory of Theodore Tracy may do so by
making a contribution to a memorial fund that has been established
to insure the perpetuation of the annual Tracy Lecture. Checks should
be made payable to the "The University of Illinois," with
a notation "Tracy Fund 335486" on the memo line, and sent
to the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Office of Development,
601 South Morgan Street, Room 809, Chicago, IL 60607-7104, USA.
John T. Ramsey January 2007
University of Illinois at Chicago
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