Eliot Grinnell Mears, 1889-1946

30 Yearbook of the Association Vol. 9 Eliot Grinnell Mears, 1889-1946 Eliot Mears, who was elected president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in 1942, and who, with the other officers elected in that year, remained in office through the war, died of a heart attack on May 26, 1946, in Middlebury, Vermont. At the time of his death he wss spending a year's sabbatical leave from his duties at Stanford University. Professor Mears was born in Worcester , Massachusetts, February 1, 1889. His academic career began at Harvard, where he received the degrees of B. A. in 1910 and M. B. A. in 1912. From 1912 to 1916 he was secretary and instructor in the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. During the next four years he was in the Middle East, in the service of the United States Department of Commerce and of economic missions to countries in Asia Minor. He came to Stanford in 1S21, and became professor of geography and international trade in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford when that School was established in 1925. He remained in that position until his death, in addition serving the university as director of the Hoover Library and of the summer quarter. The list of institutions and organizations in which Professor Mears furthered the causes of scholarship and international cooperation is a long one; it includes the Institute of Pacific Relations , the Institute of World Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pan-American Institute of Geography and History. In 1929 and 1930 he lectured at a number of universities in Europe and the Near East. He received recognition in the form of membership in many learned societies, American and foreign, an honorary degree from Grinnell College, and the Order of the Redeemer from the government of Greece. His most important writings are Modern Turkey, 1924; Principles and Practices of Cooperative Marketing (with M. O. Tobriner), 1926; Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast, 1&27; Greece Today, 1929; and Maritime Trade of Western United States, 1935. His Pacific Ocean Handbook, 1944, became familiar to thousands of service men and civilians during and after the second world war. In the last year of his life he was working on the manuscript of a book to be called The Economics of Geography. Unfortunately this work was not sufficiently near completion at the time of his death to justify publication. With Eliot Mears' untimely death the Association has lost a helpful member and officer, and his academic colleagues a genial associate. Peace to his ashes! ...