Kelsie B. Harder (1922–2007)

On April 9, 2007, Kelsie B. Harder passed away of congestive heart failure at his home in Potsdam, New York. Born on August 23, 1922, on a farm in Pope, Tennessee, he graduated from Perry County (Tennessee) High School in 1939 and took a civilian job with the U.S. War Department in 1942. After training in Rock Island, Illinois, Kelsie was transferred to the Sierra Ordinance Depot in Herlong, California, where he directed the message center and operated a teletypewriter.

From 1944 to 1946, Kelsie served in the U.S. Army as a personnel specialist in Oregon and Washington, earning the rank of sergeant before returning to the Sierra Ordinance Depot as a cost accountant. In 1947 he resigned from the War Department to attend Vanderbilt University on the G.I. Bill. After receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at Vanderbilt, he relocated to the University of Florida, where he received the Ph.D. degree, also in English, in 1954.

The same year, Kelsie joined the English Department at Youngtown State University as an assistant professor and was promoted to professor in 1960. At Youngstown, he taught a variety of courses in English and the humanities and remained there until 1964, when he was appointed chairperson of the Department of English and Drama and professor of English at SUNY Potsdam.

At Potsdam, Kelsie was a popular teacher of literature, language, and writing courses—influencing a number of students, especially in writing—as well as an effective chairperson, active scholar, and campus leader. In 1989 he was promoted to SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, and in 1994 he received the President’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Endeavor. Very active in faculty government, he served as chair of the faculty assembly of Potsdam College, chaired the Conference of SUNY Campus Governance Leaders, and also became the first chair of the governance committee of the SUNY senate.

Kelsie kept busy in the profession, too, especially in the American Name Society, where he served as editor of its journal, Names, as executive secretary-treasurer, and then as president. Among his many other professional offices, he served terms on the advisory board of American Speech, the executive committee of the International Linguistics Society, the board of directors of the American Society of Geolinguistics, and the usage committee of the American Dialect Society, which he chaired. While at Youngstown State, he served as president of the Ohio Folklore Society from 1959 to 1961.

Kelsie began publishing articles while a graduate student at the University of Florida, and he continued to publish widely throughout his career in the fields of literature, folklore, American speech, and, especially, onomastics. Among his books are Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976); Names and Their Varieties: A Collection of Essays in Onomastics (University Press of America, 1988); Claims to Names: Toponyms of St. Lawrence County, by Harder and Mary H. Smallman (North Country Books, 1993); and A Dictionary of American Proverbs, edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Stewart A. Kingsbury and Harder (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Kelsie cast a wide net in creative and academic writing, but the majority of his articles deal with names, especially as found and used in literature. Early in his career, though, he published several folklore-related studies, mainly dealing with the speech of his native state, including the book The Vocabulary of Marble Playing (American Dialect Society, 1955) and articles “Weather Expressions and Beliefs in Perry County, Tennessee” (Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 23:83–6, 1957), “Pert Nigh Almost: Folk Measurement” (Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 23:6–12, 1957), “The Vocabulary of Hog-Killing” (Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 25:111–15, 1959), and “Hay-Making Terms in Perry County” (Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 33:31–48, 1967).

Indefatigable in all of his professional pursuits and active in his community and church as well, Kelsie will be sorely missed by his wife Louise, four sons, two daughters, eleven grandchildren, friends, and innumerable colleagues in English literature and language, onomastics, and cultural studies.