Bud was one of the 13 participants at the infamous Cosmos Club meeting hosted by Preston E. James in 1968, to discuss the possibility of forming a Latin American regional organization. As a follow-up, Bud hosted the September 1969 meeting at Michigan State University where 27 future members laid the groundwork for the initial meeting of CLAG in 1970 at Ball State University.
Following the Muncie meetings, Bud was elected the first Chair of the CLAG Executive Committee. During his tenure in office, he spent considerable hours of his professional and personal life, as well as personal funds, to ensure that the fledgling organization would develop a strong foundation. He has remained an active (lifetime) member of the organization since its founding.
One of Bud's major contributions to the discipline relates to his work with Latin Americans in organizing professional geography groups within their respective countries. For example, he received several Fulbright awards under whose aegis he utilized his administrative skills to assist Colombians in organizing the Colombian Association of Geographers (ACOGE).
Perhaps Bud will be best known for the numerous teaching/research institutes he organized in Latin America in such countries as Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Brazil. These four to six week seminars brought together in-country and foreign geographers to share their teaching/research experiences in attacking local geographic problems. In many instances these gatherings served as the basis from which local geography organizations were launched.
Bud's work with the Pan American Center for Geographic Teaching and Research (CEPEIGE) in Quito, Ecuador, demands our attention. He has served on the advisory board since its beginning in the early 1970s. This position relates to his work with the Pan Amerrican Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) in which he has held numerous positions, including President on the Commission on Geography. At the March 1990 PAIGH General Assembly in Costa Rica, he was elected President of the entire organization. At that same meeting, he was awarded the prestigious Pan American Gold Medal, given to "that geographer who has made the greatest contribution to Latin American geography during the past four years."
Recently, Bud, along with Preston E. James, co-authored the 5th edition of Latin America, published by John Wiley and Sons, and quite possibly the most noteworthy text on Latin America.
Bud has served as major advisor to numerous Ph.D. candidates while serving as a faculty member and administrator. Also, he is known by many of the younger members of our association as one of the sponsors of the infamous informal gatherings of Latin Americanists hosted with Dr. Arthur L. Burt at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers. He and Arthur would reserve adjoining hotel rooms which were open to all individuals with a Latin American interest. The food, drinks, and hospitality helped to attract young geographers, who were thus able to mingle with the more experienced and noted members of our profession, such as Preston E. James.
Just as important, while Bud has served in a variety of high administrative positions at Michigan State University and the University of Tennessee, first and foremost he considers himself to be a Latin Americanist geographer, a geographer who, in this observers eyes, may be more widely traveled in Latin America than any other geographer since the days of Humboldt. These travels not only broadened his own personal and professional perspectives, but generated a long list of contacts which he freely shares with his fellow Latin Americanists.
Dr. C. W. (Bud) Minkel is presently Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
--Robert N. Thomas
Few Latin Americanist geographers have kept their eyes so closely focused throughout their scholarly career on a single area and theme as Campbell Penninggton. He has put on record, with four major books and a fifth in the final stages, the details of how surviving aboriginal groups of northwest Mexico utilize and have utilized what they have defined as resources. His intimacy with this hard and rugged land and its people is probably without parallel amongst us. The Tarahumar, the Tepehuan, the Pima Bajo, the long-forgotten Eudeva, and the Opata are all there and Campbell is the authority on each of them, witness his contributions to volume 10 of the Smithsonian Institution's Handbook of North American Indians.
His attention has been principally on material culture, how each group has used the land, their agriculture, the wild things they have gathered and used, their homes, the games they have played, the trails they have trod, the clothes they have worn. He has found a critical entry point into such matters through their little-known languages. Word lists have been a special concern. In at least two instances he has found and edited and critiqued forgotten grammars and vocabularies, with Spanish-language equivalents. A 1,400-page manuscript, Opata-to-Spanish/Spanish to Opata, with acccompanying grammatical observations, is about ready for publication.
His best times have surely been in his beloved Chihuahua and Sonora, either in the pine-oak highlands where travel is still largely by foot or on rough logging roads, or in the seclusion of his working quarters at the Posada Tierra Blanca, a congenial establishment in the heart of the city of Chihuahua. There he could be found most summers, when not in the mountains, with his maps, field notes, and boxes of 5 x 8 cards, the staccato of his trusty portable interrupting the quiet of the warm Mexican air like the chirping notes of a company of excited crickets. His studies have led him, too, to the great collections at Austin and Berkeley, the Newberry, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Historical Society, and many archives in Mexico.
No one has ever enjoyed his work more than Campbell, the field researcher. In Mexico he found the equanimity he needed after a busy year of teaching and administration. When he trilled off the names of those remote mountain villages -Maicoba, Yepachic, Yécora, Onavas, Tecorip--you knew where his heart was. And it still is there. The interdisciplinary character of his kind of geography has been abundantly justified. Historians, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, and linguists have all taken heed and expressed admiration for his careful reporting and collecting. One hundred years from now scholars, and quite possibly the Indians themselves, will still be going to Pennington's books for information on this mystical land and its people, so close to us and yet so far.
Campbell is as Texas as the Alamo. Born in Campbell Station, Tennessee some 73 years ago, he moved to the Lone Star State in his early youth. He studied at Austin under Walter Prescott Webb, Charles Hackett, and Donald Brand, who together steered him to geography, Berkeley, and Carl Sauer. His dissertation on the Tarahumar, completed in 1959 and published four years later, was to set the tone for his later work. From Berkeley it was Georgia State, Utah, Southern Illinois, and finally to Texas A&M where he was brought in as chairman. His energy and enthusiasm for his work has remained undiminished in his semi-retirement at San Marcos, Pennington family territory, where he is surrounded by not only relatives and friends but a fine private library and an impressive collection of choice paintings, antiques, and Chinese snuff-boxes. Recently he has been filling in as a lecturer at nearby Southwest Texas State University. His affable and open manner and his big heart have greatly facilitated his contacts not only with his Indian friends but with others who count--judges, priests, bankers, editors, university deans, elderly Texas matrons, yes and students. Their collective encouragement and support has been his sustenance.
It is appropriate that this award for distinguished research is labeled as it is. One suspects he must have felt that Carl Sauer was somehow always looking over his shoulder. They shared many values, not the least of which was a profound appreciation and respect for the native peoples of northwest Mexico. Campbell has never ceased to proclaim that whatever he has done traces back to his Berkeley days with Mr. Sauer, along with John Leighly and John Kesseli and such student friends as Ward Barrett, Yi-Fu Tuan, and the late John Street.
He has been modest almost to a fault. Professional meetings he has largely avoided, a paradox considering his open disposition and his love of good talk. A colorful and unrepentant historical-cultural geographer of Latin American in the best tradition, he has served with honor in bringing added scholarly recognition and respectability to our field.
--James J. Parsons.
The 1990 CLAG Ph.D. dissertation award is given to Karl Zimmerer for his study "Seeds of Peasant Subbsistence: Agrarian Structure, Crop Ecology, and Quechua Agricultural Knowledge with Special Referrence to the Loss of Biological Diversity in the Southern Peruvian Andes," Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 1988, Professor James J. Parsons, supervisor. Material related to the dissertation has subsequently been published or is in press in the Annals of the Association of American Geograaphers, The Geographical Review, Economic Botany, Mountain Research and Development, Biological Conservation, Journal of Ethnobiology, and Journal of Biogeography. Dr. Zimmerer was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, during 1988-1990, and he is currently Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madision. His research has shifted to rural society and soil resources in Cochabamba, Bolivia, funded by the National Sciience Foundation.
-- William M. Denevan