{"id":4085,"date":"2007-06-21T11:09:32","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T15:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/batesviews.net\/?p=4085"},"modified":"2015-06-26T11:39:03","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T15:39:03","slug":"dick-williamson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2007\/06\/21\/dick-williamson\/","title":{"rendered":"Dick Williamson, Dana Professor Emeritus of French, dies at 62"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dick<\/a><\/p>\n

Richard C. Williamson, Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of French and a charismatic catalyst of Bates community, died on the night of June 19 while en route to Louisville, Ky., with his wife, Deborah, to compete in bicycling events at the National Senior Games.<\/p>\n

The apparent cause of death was\u00a0a heart attack, according to the Sun Journal. He was 62.<\/p>\n

A man of zeal and a master teacher at all levels of French language, literature, and culture for 30 years, Williamson was, for his colleagues, “always…consistent and masterful at pulling us…into the larger good,” said colleague Kirk Read in 2005, at the time of Williamson’s retirement.A decade-long chairman of the Department of Classical and Romance Languages and Literatures, he created and directed the Fall Semester Abroad Program in Nantes, France, and has often visited Avignon with students during Bates’ Short Term. He had become increasingly interested in “la francophonie” and visited Martinique and Senegal frequently. His final official\u00a0teaching moments, in 2005,\u00a0were spent\u00a0in Morocco\u00a0leading 15 Short Term students with\u00a0a colleague, Paqui Lopez.<\/p>\n

As coach of the men’s hockey club early in his Bates career, Williamson provided for his players “the entree into adulthood” said Wilson Ring \u201979 in 2005.\u00a0Inside and outside the classroom, he offered students “a window to a much larger world, the example of flexibility and resilience, and so many other fundamental but intangible gifts,” said Patrick Murphy ’80.\u00a0He was inducted into the Bates Scholar-Athlete Society<\/a> in 2006.<\/p>\n

Williamson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University, where he played hockey\u00a0as an undergraduate and captained the team his senior year. He earned\u00a0a doctoral degree from Indiana University where\u00a0he played for and coached the\u00a0club hockey team, which won the Big Ten Club Championship twice during his tenure. He was named all Big-Ten Club three times.<\/p>\n

He edited Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes<\/em> (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), and co-edited Toward a New Integration of Language and Culture<\/em> (Middlebury, Vt.: Northeast Conference, 1988).<\/p>\n

The French government, in gratitude for his teaching French language and literature in the United States, named him Chevalier in the Order of the Palmes Acad\u00e9miques in 1997. In\u00a02005 he received the\u00a0Sister Solange Bernier Lifetime Achievement Award, given by the Foreign Language Association of Maine<\/a> (FLAME), a nonprofit organization that promotes and improves the teaching and study of foreign languages and cultures.<\/p>\n

An avid cyclist who competed annually in Senior Games and trained year-round, he was\u00a0highly admired by\u00a0his fellow cyclists in the Lewiston-Auburn area. “I don’t feel like he missed out on anything,” his friend and fellow cyclist John Grenier told the Sun Journal.\u00a0 “He was doing what he loved, always.”\u00a0In 2006,\u00a0Williamson completed a 600-mile trek with two Bates seniors, John Bauer and Kate Gatti, who had cycled from Fort Myers, Fla., to meet him in Pennsylvania and ride together to Maine.<\/p>\n

Survivors of Dick Williamson’s immediate\u00a0family include\u00a0his wife, Debbie,\u00a0and four grown\u00a0children, including Vanessa ’05. He was\u00a0predeceased by a daughter.<\/p>\n

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