Necrology

Edmund Granville Hamann '55

Apr. 25, 1933-Nov. 13, 2007

Edmund Granville Hamann ’55, for 23 years the director of Suffolk University’s library, was born on April 25, 1933, in New York City. A son of Edmund H., a chemist recognized in his day as one of the country’s leading authorities on essence oils, and Mary Foss Hamann, he grew up in Riverside, CT, prepared for college at Vermont Academy, and came to Hamilton in 1951. Ted Hamann joined the Emerson Literary Society and lettered in soccer in his senior year. Amidst “a pall of blue pipe smoke and wails of Louis Armstrong,” according to The Hamiltonian, he “serenely applied himself to studies” and was graduated as a history and biology major in 1955.

Having chosen librarianship as his future career, Ted Hamann obtained an M.A. degree in library science from the University of Michigan in 1956. He stayed on at Michigan as a catalog librarian until 1959, the year in which he acquired a second M.A., in history, from the University. Thereafter, he spent two years as a librarian at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where he met Barbara J. Scudder. They were married in Auckland on February 13, 1961.

In 1966, after five years as a serials librarian at the University of New Hampshire, Ted Hamann became an order librarian at Cornell University. He remained in Ithaca until 1973, when he settled in the Boston area. He was at Harvard University for a year before his appointment as college librarian of Suffolk University on Beacon Hill in Boston. In charge of the University’s Mildred F. Sawyer Library until his retirement in 1998, he early embraced computerization and led his staff in computerizing the Library’s catalog. In addition, he worked diligently to organize the Fenway Library Consortium, which included such area colleges as Simmons and Emerson.

In addition to finding great satisfaction in his work at Suffolk, Ted Hamann was devoted to reading, especially about World War II. Above all, he was passionate about bicycling and twice bicycled 3,500 miles across the country from the West Coast back to Massachusetts. He became New England regional director of the League of American Wheelmen (later Bicyclists) and, while serving on the Cambridge Bicycle Committee, was also an ardent advocate for safer and better bicycling. A champion of transportation reform to address the needs of bicyclists as well as pedestrians in the Boston area, he customarily commuted by bicycle from his suburban home to Beacon Hill.

Ted Hamann, who resided in West Newton and later Cambridge before moving to Falmouth on Cape Cod in 2004, also organized a Cape Cod chapter of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition and served on the Falmouth Bikeways Committee. Despite having suffered a major stroke in 2006, leaving him severely disabled, he continued to enjoy riding around the neighborhood on his recumbent tricycle.

Edmund G. Hamann, a faithful Hamiltonian, died in Falmouth on November 13, 2007. He is survived by his wife, Christine Weisiger, whom he had wed in 1994; a daughter, Philippa H. Comfort, and a son, Jeremy F. Hamann, from his first 30-year marriage to Barbara Scudder, who also survives him; and three grandchildren, a brother, three sisters, and nieces and nephews, including Charles F. Hamann.’88.

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