James N. Wallace, ‘50

Jim Wallace, seventy-six, retired senior editor of U.S. News & World Report and recent president of the Cosmos Club, died April 5 in Fairfax, Virginia after a heart attack.

After graduating from UO in 1950, Wallace began work on a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, but left early when The Wall Street Journal offered him a job in 1953. In 1957, he was sent to the Middle East to set up the paper’s Beirut bureau and then to Cuba in 1960, where he was arrested and jailed several times and eventually expelled from the country, as were many other foreign journalists at that time.

Wallace covered the Pentagon until U.S. News & World Report sent him to cover the Vietnam War and Indochina in 1967, an assignment that would last more than six years. He has also been stationed in Tokyo, Moscow, and Beijing. In 1974, he received an Overseas Press Club of America citation for his foreign affairs coverage. In 1983, Wallace returned to the United States and worked as senior editor of international news for U.S. News and World Report until his retirement in 1992.

The Cosmos Club, founded in 1878 in Washington, D.C., elects members based on scholarship, creative genius or intellectual distinction. Wallace served the club as journal editor and later president. An early supporter of Flux magazine and frequent visitor to Allen Hall, he was a member of the school's Journalism Advancement Council as well as the UO Law School's Board of Visitors. In 1999, he was inducted into the school’s Hall of Achievement.

"Jim Wallace was a foreign correspondent when that title really meant something—it meant strenuous, dangerous work that called upon a reporter to be daring, enterprising, and complete,” Professor and former Dean Duncan McDonald said. “Jim was more than a dashing storyteller, though ...He wanted to explain complex information to people because he believed they deserved to know it. And through all of his adventures, his great experiences, he never lost sight of his roots. Jim was ever so proud of the University of Oregon and our school. I'll miss his great smile, his unending stories, his affection for journalism."

Wallace enjoyed gardening and collecting art. He is survived by his wife of forty-five years, Haya. His complete biography can be found at jcomm.uoregon.edu/alum/hoa/index.html.

Steve Neal, ‘71

Steve Neal, author and longtime political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, died February 16 at his home in Hinsdale, Illinois. He was fifty-four.

A three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary known for his integrity and his pull-no-punches style of writing, Neal wrote columns that influenced change in the Chicago area and earned him the title “Renaissance man of political columnists” from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Neal was born in Coos Bay and attended high school in Salem. As a child, he collected campaign buttons. His interest in politics continued at the UO. He was active in student government and the Interfraternity Council, earning the Theta Chi fraternity equivalent of “undergraduate of the year.”

“I never had a student I admired more. He was the perfect journalist and a great friend. A man of the highest ideals. And so young,” Emeritus Professor Roy Paul Nelson said upon learning of his death.

After graduating from the SOJC in 1971, Neal completed his master’s at Columbia University in 1972. He began his career as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune before moving to the Sun-Times. He is one of the few journalists to have interviewed Ronald Reagan in four different decades. His coverage of the Reagan shooting earned him a nomination from the Tribune for the Merriman Smith Award and recognition as a top White House Correspondent by the Washington Journalism Review in 1982. His columns in the Sun-Times appeared three times a week for the past eighteen years.

Editor of six books and author of seven, Neal had recently mailed the publisher’s proofs for his most recent title, Happy Days are Here Again/The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR and How America Was Changed Forever. A collection of his columns, Rolling on the River: The Very Best of Steve Neal, was published in 1999.

Neal had the respect of politicians at all levels, whether they agreed with him or not. Early in his career, Richard Nixon wrote a letter of commendation. Former President George Bush once asked Neal to be his press secretary. “Steve Neal was a man of incredible talent, generosity and wit,'' former President Bill Clinton told the Sun-Times. "He was a gifted writer and a sharp political analyst, always drawing from his deep reservoir of historical knowledge to frame current events in a way that helped people really understand what was happening in an increasingly complicated political universe.''

At his funeral, Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank asked the hundreds in attendance to pray that journalists “remember Steve’s wisdom, kindness and fairness as they carry out their awesome responsibility in our democratic society.”

SOJC Dean Tim Gleason noted Neal’s passion for history and politics and his commitment to serving the public interest. “There are fewer and fewer columnists like Steve Neal,” Gleason said. “He’ll be missed.”

Neal is survived by his wife, Susan; two daughters, Erin and Shannon; his parents, Ernest and Ellen Neal of Salem; and two brothers, Dan and Gary Neal.

Neal was inducted into the school’s Hall of Achievement
in October 2003. His biography can be found at
jcomm.uoregon.edu/alum/hoa/index.html.

Phyllis Van Kimmel Bell

Phyllis Van Kimmell Bell, who attended the UO from 1926-1929, died March 2 at her home in Tucson, Arizona. She was ninety-three.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, she attended high school in Houston and entered the UO at sixteen. She was involved in university life as a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, in student government, and as president of the Mortar Board. She also wrote for the Oregon Daily Emerald. At the Emerald’s 100th anniversary in 1999, Bell remembered “interviewing the famous (and later, notorious) California woman evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson when she came to preach in Eugene.”

She starred in Ed’s Coed, a 1929 feature film written, cast, produced, and directed by UO students, playing a comic ingénue named Midge. It was the first-ever feature film about college life.

Forced to leave college during her junior year because of the Depression, she moved to San Francisco, where she met her husband, Raymond Bell (UO, business, ’31), an ROTC colonel at the university. The military couple ran a CCC camp in the Cascades. After Pearl Harbor, Bell lived with sorority sister Bernice (Hamilton) Greene (UO, Liberal Arts, ‘30) while their husbands were overseas. When Raymond returned, the couple continued their military life until retiring to Tucson in 1960. In Tucson, Bell played golf and bridge and was active in women’s and civil rights issues. She also enjoyed travel.

Her involvement with the school continued and in 1998, in honor of her eighty-eighth birthday, her family established the Phyllis Van Kimmell Bell Leadership Award. The award acknowledges undergraduate students for outstanding student achievement and leadership in the school, willingness to take on challenges, and an ability to work with students, faculty, and the university community. Bell was present to make the first award at commencement 1999.

Bell is survived by her daughter, Judith Wales; son-in-law, George H. Wales Jr; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

No formal ceremonies were held. The family requests contributions to the School of Journalism and Communication toward her leadership award.

Raymond “Max” Wales

Beloved advertising Professor Raymond "Max" Wales, who taught at the SOJC for twenty years, died December 11 of cancer at his home in Eugene. He was ninety-one.

Wales was born January 21, 1912, in Topeka, Kansas. He graduated from Topeka High School and Washburn College and received a master's degree from the University of Iowa. He was a member of Phi Beta Phi.

An Army captain during World War II, Wales worked as a sales promotion manager at department stores in New York and St. Paul, Minnesota, before starting Wales Advertising Agency in Topeka. He began his teaching career at the University of Iowa and Michigan State before coming to Eugene to lead the advertising program in 1957 as an assistant professor. He co-authored an advertising textbook in 1958 and was a Fulbright lecturer in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1963. With more than twenty years’ experience in the field, Wales was able to teach every advertising course the school offered.

Retiring in 1977, he formed Wales, Williamson and Warr Ad Agency in Eugene with his former J-School student Bob Warr.

An avid photographer and fisherman, he was a member of the Eugene Rotary club and St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene.

Survivors include his wife, Jeanne; a daughter, Sandra Cameron of Eugene; a son, Bruce of Brookings; and six grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene.