Necrology

Frank Edwin Price '68

Apr. 6, 1946-May. 25, 2022

Frank Edwin Price ’68 died on May 25, 2022, in Clinton. Born in Annapolis, Md., on April 6, 1946, he came to Hamilton from the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. He majored in biology, earning departmental honors upon graduation. He ran cross country as a freshman and was a devoted member of the Outing Club. Among his achievements were snowshoeing and winter camping in the course of reaching the summit of many of the “46 Peaks,” a reference to the highest group of Adirondack mountains.

In the fall of his senior year, at a time when the Outing Club was not active, Frank decided to climb the north wall of Kirkland Hall. Thirty feet up, his climbing harness broke. He crunched two lumbar vertebrae, broke his right wrist, and spent much of the rest of the year in a body cast. He was forced to take notes for a genetics course with his left hand and drop physics. He would subsequently learn that Selective Service classified him 4-F for his injuries.

Following graduation, Frank pursued graduate work at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he conducted research on the ecology of American dippers, a songbird species that lives along mountain streams; taught biology to college students; and met his future life partner, Sue Ann Miller, a fellow graduate student. After completing a one-year appointment as a visiting assistant professor in biology at Oberlin College, Frank finished his doctoral program in 1975. When Sue Ann left her position at Harvard Medical School, she and Frank got married in Denver. They had two children.

Not all of Frank’s time in Boulder was devoted to biological research. By the time he finished his graduate studies, and harkening back to his Outing Club days, he had reached the summit of most of Colorado’s mountains with elevations greater than 14,000’.

Beginning in the fall semester of 1975, Frank and Sue Ann held appointments on the Hill to teach in the Hamilton-Kirkland Joint Program in the Life Sciences, positions they continued to hold after the merger of the two colleges. They remained close to the College for 47 years, deeply touching the lives of countless students, faculty members, and staff during their long tenure. 

In 1983, Frank accepted the position of administrator of academic computing. His attention later turned to off-campus affiliations that involved curricular development. He was a co-founder of BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium and participated in several National Science Foundation-funded computer and curriculum development projects, including developing software for teaching ecology and evolution in collaboration with colleagues at Beloit College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2001, he returned to teaching as an adjunct professor of biology at Utica College, from where he ultimately retired in 2016. 

Always drawn to the outdoors — and after his wife taught him the skill — Frank skied with his family in New York, New England, and several Rocky Mountain states. He enjoyed camping and hiking to numerous summits with his children and enjoyed activity in the wilderness for decades.

The family traveled all over North America and to many other parts of the world. Frank had lived in Spain as a youth during the Francisco Franco regime, and returned with family when Sue Ann presented her research at the International Meeting of Cell Biology in Madrid. He accompanied the family to Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands before their children left for college. Frank continued to travel as an ecologist, often with Sue Ann, to Lake Baikal in Russia, Madagascar, China, Japan, Peru, Iceland, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico’s Yucatán, arctic Canada, and Alaska. He floated down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon with a group of evolutionary biologists and geologists. During trips to Great Britain, he enjoyed science history, hiking, and a Jane Austen tour with Professor of English Emeritus John O’Neill. In later years, he visited the highest natural ground of most of the states and hundreds of U.S. counties, as well as the sites of several hundred fire lookout towers. When the pandemic limited travel, the couple turned to waterfalls to nurture their love of hiking and birding.

Frank was a reader and avid learner who enjoyed reading science fiction from an early age. In his later years, he took to Jane Austen novels, learning “Birding-by-Ear” birdsong identification, attending political discussions at the Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, and writing occasional letters to a newspaper editor. He was passionate about the need to be informed about and act on climate change.

Frank E. Price is survived by his wife, Professor of Biology Emerita Sue Ann Miller, son, daughter, and sister. 

— Obituary prepared in collaboration with Frank E. Price, who drafted his own memorial biography.

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