1963

OBITUARY

John Irwin, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University (SFSU), passed away January 3, 2010. After a conviction for armed robbery and serving a five year sentence in California's prison system, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.

My thesis researched Chinese family formation, supervised by Kingsley Davis. From my perch in Hong Kong, I tried to do a minisurvey people using topical questions, on people that no longer lived in China. I discovered that asking people their views of what would have happened if they had remained in China [what would have happened in their lives if they had not done what they did do] was troubling to me and them. I really had to do participant observation. So I retooled myself in interpretive sociology with a structural bais.

I have been Professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1969. It was my first job.Berkeley offered poor training in quantitative methods in those days, and the graduate student culture was hostile to them to boot. Unfortunately, those proved subsequently to be the dominant methods in professional sociology so, in this respect, I was poorly prepared at Berkeley.

I left Berkeley in 1968 for the University of Hawaii. I stayed 12 years, became a father, grew concerned about overpopulation, the environment, and hunger, crafted my ability to teach, and began writing textbooks.

In 1979, my wife, Sheila, whom I had first met at the Survey Research Center at UCB, got a job offer in the Bay Area. Taking a deep breath, I resigned as a tenured professor and department chair, and we moved. For the next seven years, I was a writer only. As the years went by, however, I found I missed the classroom, partly because the ham in me missed performing.