Retired Berkeley professor, 70, dies

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jan 10, 2007 | by Kristin Bender

BERKELEY -- Allan Richard Pred, a retired UC Berkeley professor of cultural geography who is touted as one of the world's leading geographers and social scientists, died Friday at Alta Bates Medical Center after a short battle with acute lung cancer, university officials said.

He was 70.

Pred -- who rode his bicycle to UC Berkeley nearly every day of the 45 years he taught there -- retired in May. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months later, his daughter Michele Pred of Berkeley said.

A colleague of Pred's said he left an "indelible stamp" on the geography department because of his devotion to critical thought and his passion for truth and human freedom.

"Allan Pred was a formidable intellectual, a brilliant thinker, a great humanist, a loyal and trusted friend, and a generous and engaged mentor," said colleague Michael Watts, professor of geography and director of UC Berkeley's

Institute of International Studies.

During his career, Pred wrote 22 books and monographs -- including three on 19th century U.S. urbanism -- which were translated into seven languages, and more than 70 articles and book chapters.

"He was cultural geographer and that embodies a lot of different schools, including economics, linguists, cultural anthropology and sociology. But he was just as much a social scientist," Michele Pred said. Those who knew Pred said he chose cultural geography as his life's work because it incorporates so many different fields. "His work was really about how the urban environment effects people," said Michele Pred, an artist whose work focuses on political and social ideas and who is dedicating her new exhibit called "Predilections" to her father.

"He was very much for people and always thought there was so much unfairness in the world and that's what he wrote a lot about. In his writing he was fighting for those people," his daughter said.

At the time of his death, he was completing a book manuscript about the life of American-French dancer Josephine Baker as a way to show how racism took form during the early 20th century.

Born in the Bronx, New York City in 1936, Pred was the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Poland. In 1953, when he was just 16, Pred enrolled at the Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

In 1957, he graduated first in his class and enrolled in Pennsylvania State University to study geography. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1962.

Pred then joined the faculty at UC Berkeley at the age of 25. Within five years, he had obtained tenure. By 1971, at 34, he had been appointed full professor.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, Pred's graduate seminars -- always large, unruly and overpopulated -- drew historians, planners, and students of rhetoric and literature, university officials said.

In addition to his work in geography, Pred had a lifelong love affair with Sweden, drawn, in part, from the theoretical and scientific innovations of Swedish geographers such as Torsten Hagerstrand, university officials said.

He met his wife of 44 years, Hjordis, who is Swedish, in San Francisco in 1962. The couple married three months later and lived in Berkeley and spent summers at their country home in Sormland, Sweden -- a place they called their creative and romantic retreat, his daughter said.

"They often referred to it as their own personal paradise," Michele Pred said.

He worked the land, learned to speak Swedish, took up skiing and even made up elaborate yet personal stories he told his children, nieces and nephews during their nights at the Swedish countryside, his wife Hjordid Pred said.

"He had a quality of life," his wife said. "Many people at the university go back at night, work on Saturdays and Sundays. Allan said we have to have a life outside the university. Academics wasn't the most important thing in life for him it was that you could do anything you like."

Although Pred started his career as a theorist of the American city, he later focused on the Swedish city, digging up neglected church and state papers on 19th and 20th century life. Between 2000 and 2004, Pred published two controversial books on cultural racism.

Pred was awarded the Anders Retzius Medal -- sometimes called geography's Nobel Prize -- by the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology in 1991. The king of Sweden presented the award to him.

Pred is survived by his wife, Hjordis Pred of Berkeley; daughter, Michele Pred of Berkeley; and son, Joseph Pred of San Francisco; a brother, Ralph Pred of British Columbia; a sister, Suzanne Pred Bass of New York City; two nieces, Emily and Rebecca Bass; and a nephew, Noah Pred.

A memorial service will be held on Sunday, Jan. 28, at 2 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Men's Faculty Club on the UC Berkeley campus. Donations in Pred's name can be sent to the American Lung Association, 61 Broadway NY, NY 1006.