Richard M. Hazelton, Ph.D., professor emeritus of English in Arts & Sciences, died Nov. 13, 2009, of pneumonia at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis. He was 91.
A commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps and U.S. Air Force from 1943-49, he served in World War II as a bombardier and was a prisoner of war in Germany.
After returning home, Hazelton, a native of Camden, N.J., went to college under the G.I. Bill. He earned a bachelor of arts in English at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1951 and a master of arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952. He earned a doctorate in English from Rutgers University in 1956.
He joined the WUSTL Department of English in 1958 as an assistant professor after teaching at Ohio State University. He was promoted to associate professor in 1961 and to professor in 1964 and was named emeritus in 1984.
A medievalist and Chaucerian scholar, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 to conduct research in Oxford, England, and in Florence, Italy. Hazelton also taught for a year at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he developed a passion for Asian art and culture.
Hazelton was beloved by his students for his commitment to learning and for his continued intellectual growth. He frequently offered new courses, developing an interest in, among other things, Native American oratory and writing and Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Hazelton also was active in civil rights, antiwar and other political movements in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1974, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jake McCarthy wrote about Hazelton helping set up the Metro Bail Fund to raise bond for the indigent.
McCarthy described Hazelton as a “lover of music and poetry and a mild man, inconspicuous in a crowd. But he hurts inside over injustice, and he works unobtrusively in the community — also endlessly — to secure his belief that men existing together ought to be humane to one another.”
Hazelton, treasurer of the Metro Bail Fund, explained the need for such a fund: “Here are people being held in jail before they’ve been found guilty of something, just because they are poor. The rich can get bailed out the same day, but who’s going to do something to get the poor out of jail on bond? Why doesn’t society do something about this problem?”
After retiring from WUSTL, Hazelton traveled extensively in Mexico and Spain. He is survived by three daughters, Nina Hazelton of Jefferson City, Mo., Jill Hazelton of Waltham, Mass., and Suzy Gorman of St. Louis; a son, John Gorman of Falls Church, Va.; and four grandchildren. A son, Rick Hazelton, and a daughter, Meiling Hazelton, preceded him in death.
Memorial contributions may be made to the North Shore Animal League, 25 Davis Ave., Fort Washington, NY 11050, or NSALAmerica.org.