Necrology

Earl Eugene Huyck '44

Oct. 30, 1922-Mar. 4, 2007

Earl Eugene Huyck ’44, a sociologist and former federal government demographer who became an art gallery proprietor, was born on October 30, 1922, in Ilion, NY. His parents were Oscar H., a truck owner and operator, and Esther Shorey Huyck. He grew up in Ilion, was graduated from Ilion High School, and came to College Hill in 1940. With the help of a small scholarship and earnings derived from waiting tables and working in the library, he paid his own way on the Hill. A member of Psi Upsilon, he also went out for football and served on the staff of Hamiltonews as well as the campus radio station, WHC. In early 1943, however, he withdrew from the College to enlist in the U.S. Army.

Assigned to a premeteorology program at Brown University, Earl Huyck was subsequently trained as a cryptographer and served with the Signal Corps attached to the Army Air Forces in the South Pacific. In early 1946, after service in the Philippines and occupied Japan following World War II, he returned to civilian life and his studies on the Hill. Awarded his diploma in 1947, he embarked on a graduate program at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. There on September 13, 1947, the year before he received his M.A. degree, he and Dorothy J. Boyle, a fellow student at the School, were married.

While pursuing doctoral studies at the American University, Earl Huyck also did work on population dynamics for the Office on Intelligence Research in the Department of State (1949-54) and served as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (1955-58). He acquired his Ph.D. in international relations in 1956 with a dissertation on “Population Growth in Ceylon.” In 1959, after a year on leave from the CIA to teach sociology and population courses at the University of Colorado, he returned to Washington to become a program analysis officer and publications editor in the Office of the Secretary, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

In 1970, after two years with the Agency for International Development in Costa Rica, working to provide better family planning, Dr. Huyck returned to the Washington area to become a social demographer with the Center for Population Research at the National Institutes of Health. A fellow of the American Sociological Association and a widely recognized authority on population and demographics, he retired in 1985, after 36 years of federal government service.

Long a resident of Bethesda, MD, and a past president of the Maplewood Civic Association and vestryman of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Earl Huyck traveled extensively, often with his wife, a freelance journalist whose travel articles he edited and accompanied with his own photographs. In 1990, a decade after his wife’s death, he was married to Dorothy Zagaris, an interior decorator and widow, from Redding, CA. The couple later settled in Redding, where, drawing upon his expertise derived from many years of art collecting worldwide, he established the Earl Huyck Gallery. His second wife died in 1999, and five years later he was married for the third time, to Evelyn Weeks Chambers, a sculptor.

Earl E. Huyck, a gregarious man whose interests were many and activities multifold, was also a devoted alumnus and former president of the Washington and Vicinity Alumni Association. He was still residing in Redding when he died on March 4, 2007. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Heather A. and Holly O. Huyck, and a grandson.

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