[Ads-l] Allan Metcalf

[Bill Kretzschmar]

What a sad day to hear that Allan has died!  I first met him in 1977 at Raven McDavid's NEH Summer Seminar. I have a picture from then, which I can't attach on the listserv, where Allan is on one end of a row and I'm on the other--how young we both were! No other person was as important to the ADS as Allan during his tenure as Executive Secretary. After Raven died I worked closely with Allan about the Hans Kurath Fund for the Linguistic Atlas. We first arranged for an annual subsidy when I got to Georgia, and later moved the Fund away from its expensive financial advisors to an online brokerage, where it remains today. Apart from handling the money, Allan was a member of our Atlas Advisory Board and always kept up with our research activities. I enjoyed seeing him every year at the ADS meeting, and in some years at ACLS meetings. He knew everybody, in his humble, unassuming way. And without appearing to do so, he was a major force in supporting dialect research as well as participating in ADS innovations like WOTY.  We will miss him.

Bill Kretzschmar
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