This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Clymer, Newton, Barrett, Pearson, Miles, Iverson, Brandt Classification: Obituary Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/3FC.2ACI/3673 Message Board Post: Dr. Theodore W. Clymer, 77 Wednesday, July 28, 2004 Dr. Theodore W. Clymer, 77, a former Hudson resident, and a reading authority and a prolific author-editor of textbooks and children’s books, died Sunday, July 25 at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 77. For a decade he suffered from a rare degenerative, neurological disease. He was born in St. Paul, April 2, 1927, the son of Theodore F. and Annette (Newton) Clymer, and grew up in Hudson, graduating from Hudson High School in 1945 as the Representative Senior. He was the grandson of Otis E. Clymer, a professional big league baseball player and a descendant of George Clymer (1739-1813), the Patriot from Pennsylvania, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. During World War II, he served as a yeoman in the U.S. Navy from June 1945 to Aug. 1946. After earning a B.S. degree in 1948 from River Falls State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin-River Falls), he received his M.A. and a Ph. D in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1952. After completing his doctorate he worked as a 5th grade “demonstration teacher” at the River Falls College. In 1966 was the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UW- River Falls. As a professor of elementary education and educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, he was a leader in reading research and research training. Many of the nation’s leading reading researchers from 1950s to the 1970s entered the field under his tutelage. He was the founder and first editor of Reading Research Quarterly, one of the most widely accepted research journals in field of education. Also in the 1960s, with Thomas C. Barrett, he developed a reading readiness assessment test used for decades by kindergarten and first grade teachers to assess students’ skills. For 40 years, Dr. Clymer was an author-editor of reading textbooks for grades K-12, first for Houghton Mifflin. In the late 1960s, Dr. Clymer designed a textbook series for Ginn & Co., Reading 360, according to the principles he and others had devised. He worked with children’s book authors and illustrators to create literature for particular levels of reading instruction. In 1976, he left his university position to concentrate entirely on publishing, both textbooks and children’s books. “We in the field will honor him for his lasting contributions to classroom practice and scholarship,” said P. David Pearson, Dean of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education. He wrote several children’s books. His interests in world folklore, especially of Native Americans, were reflected in two of his books: The Travels of Atunga (1973), and Four Corners of the Sky: Poems, Chants, and Oratory (1975). He also published Horse and the Bad Morning (1982), co-authored with Miska Miles. Hired as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in 1953, he eventually served as chairman of the Department of Elementary Education and Educational Psychology. He was a visiting professor at the University of Utah in 1953 and 1958, and the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. He served as a consultant to the U.S. Office of Education, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. His Ph.D. students have held major positions in a number of colleges, universities, and professional organizations. In 1964, he was president both of the International Reading Association and of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. In 1985, he was elected to the International Reading Association Hall of Fame. For four decades, he directed the Institute for Reading Research, an organization he founded to explore the development of reading readiness and literacy. He moved to California in 1967 to take a two-year sabbatical from the University of Minnesota, and resumed his academic duties in Minnesota for one year 1969-1970. Returning to California in the summer of 1970, he made his home in both Santa Barbara and Carmel. Surviving are his wife of 24 years, the former Genie Iverson, and two daughters by his first marriage: Brook, of Lake Arrowhead, Calif., and Lorna, of Los Angeles, Calif. His first marriage in 1948 to Lois Beverly Brandt (HHS ’45) ended in divorce in 1977. Private cremation services are planned. In lieu of flowers, friends may make a donation to a library in his memory. Preceding him in death were his parents and two brothers, Otis Theodore Clymer in 1950 and Fred Bernau Clymer in 1955. © 2004 Hudson Star-Observer - Reposted by permission http://www.hudsonstarobserver.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=11289&SectionID=3&SubSectionID=54&S=1