Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:

Franklin M. Loew, 63, died on April 22 after a three-year
battle with a rare form of neuroendocrinal liver cancer. “I come to
work but go home early because I tire out,” Loew e-mailed to ANIMAL
PEOPLE on February 2. “I’m in a clinical trial of thalidomide, of
all things, which has been shown to have anti-cancer properties,”
Loew added, seeming to enjoy the idea that he was himself now a lab
animal, participating in one of the voluntary trials of drugs in
terminal human patients that he had often mentioned as an accessible
option for “reducing, refining, and replacing” the numbers of
animals used in biomedical research. “The tumor has never caused me
any discomfort, but the chemo certainly has,” he concluded. Loew
communicated only briefly thereafter, to celebrate victories by the
Boston Red Sox. President of Becker College in Massachusetts since
1998, Loew “was hugely popular on campus,” recalled Becker provost
Bruce Stronach. “He knew many of our 1,000 students and every
employee by name, and never failed to greet all with a warm smile
and a hearty welcome. Dr. Loew was formerly president of Medical
Foods Inc. He held doctorates in veterinary medicine and nutrition,
and was a member of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of
Medicine. He was dean of veterinary medicine at both Tufts and
Cornell universities, was a division director at the Johns Hopkins

School of Medicine, and was a professor at the University of
Saskatchewan in the 1970s, where he was also a Medical Research
Council Fellow. He was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He served as a consultant to Columbia and
Ohio State universities, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the
Pew Charitable Trusts, the Food and Drug Administration, the National
Institutes of Health, NASA, the Smithsonian Institution and the
USDA. He was a board member for the New England Aquarium and the
Tuskegee Advisory Committee for the Center of Bioethics and Health
Care Policy. He chaired a National Research Council committee to
review all USDA research programs. He previously served on the
boards of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, the Boston Zoological Society (where he was chair),
the Baltimore Zoological Society, the National Research Commission
on Life Sciences, and the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research,
which he chaired. His writings appeared in Science, Nature
Biotechnology, all the major veterinary journals, the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal.” As only the second dean of the
Tufts University veterinary program, Loew hired Andrew Rowan from
the Humane Society of the U.S. to found the Tufts Center for Animals
& Public Policy, the first major academic think-tank to focus on
improving animal welfare, now headed by Gary Patronak; Rowan
returned to HSUS after 10 years, where he is currently senior vice
president and chief of staff. Rowan introduced Loew to ANIMAL PEOPLE
editor Merritt Clifton and publisher Kim Bartlett at a conference on
feral cats hosted by the Center for Animals & Public Policy just
after ANIMAL PEOPLE incorporated. From that brief meeting on, Loew
helped ANIMAL PEOPLE with introductions, endorsements, personal
donations, and referrals of advertisers. Often he went out of his
way on short notice to help ANIMAL PEOPLE respond to emergency
information requests from animal welfare organizations abroad.
Married to the poet Deborah Digge, Loew was keenly interested in
just about everyone and everything. Tufts University named the
Franklin M. Loew Academic Building after him in 1993. Becker College
closed in his honor on April 25.

John F. Kullberg, 64, died on April 20 from liver cancer.
“He was born and died on Easter,” noted Farm Animal Reform Movement
founder Alex Hershaft. Kullberg had served on the FARM board of
directors since 1999, and was a keynote speaker at the Animal Rights
2002 conference that Hershaft organized. Born in Cranston, Rhode
Island, Kullberg joined a Catholic teaching order at age 16, but
“left eight years later just prior to permanently committing to the
monastic vow of obedience, which I believed undermined personal
responsibility,” he wrote. Kullberg taught English from 1962 to
1969, then from 1970 to 1977 was director of admissions and
assistant dean at the Columbia University School of Law. His sister
Marjorie Cooke, 12 years his senior, was a close associate of
Animal Welfare Institute founder Christine Stevens, and was lobbyist
for the affiliated Society for Animal Protective Legislation
1968-1976. In 1977 Cooke and Stevens asked Kullberg to represent
SAPL at a New York City hearing on the treatment of animals in air
transport, Cooke told ANIMAL PEOPLE. Afterward, Kullberg was named
consultant on animal welfare to the New York City airports, leading
to his later role in founding the Kennedy AnimalPort, a longtime
project of the American SPCA. A lawsuit brought by ASPCA member and
donor Gretchen Wyler (who later founded the Ark Trust) forced the
ouster of the then-ASPCA president in 1978. Cooke, Wyler, and
Stevens persuaded Kull-berg to step in as replacement. The next 14
years were perhaps the most dynamic at the 136-year-old ASPCA since
founder Henry Bergh died in 1888. Often at odds with board members
who hunted, wore fur, and even participated in canned hunts,
Kullberg introduced a code of ethics for the board in 1988 at cost of
becoming subject himself of a three-year investigation. Other points
of conflict were the 1990 publication of an animal rights handbook
that sold 400,000 copies, endorsement of vegetarianism, fractious
relations with the Teamsters Union (which represented the ASPCA
shelter workers), cost overruns in building a new shelter,
Kullberg’s frankness and accessibility to news media, his
endorsement of the high-volume adoption techniques introduced by the
North Shore Animal League (see page 14), and his recommendation
that the ASPCA should give up the animal control contract it had held
since 1895 to focus on animal advocacy. Under Kullberg the ASPCA
opened offices in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. Ousted in 1991,
Kullberg served as president of Guiding Eyes for the Blind 1992-1993,
then became founding executive director of the Wildlife Land Trust,
a subsidiary of the Humane Society of the U.S. which was the first
national land trust in the U.S. to forbid hunting and trapping.
Working until near death, Kullberg left his wife Karol and three
daughters. He was among the first subscribers and donors to ANIMAL
PEOPLE, and was a source who stood by his word, whose word stood up.

Allan J. Clark, 60, died of cancer on March 24 in
Framingham, Massachusetts. Clark founded his “Mega Clydesdale
Farm” in the early 1980s as a breeding and training facility for
Clydesdale draft horses, then expanded into rare livestock
conservation– but the farm was perhaps mostly a petting zoo. At
Clark’s death the residents also included “three bulldogs, a boar,
a Brahma cow, 15 breeds of rabbits, 50 chickens of varied types,
and a pair of giant pigeons named Bonnie and Clyde,” wrote Sudbury
Town Crier staff writer Carole LaMond.

Gerald R. Lehman, 44, of Akron, Ohio, escaped from a 2:30
a.m. housefire on April 21 with his wife Candy, his 26-year-old son
Casey, and the son’s 18-year-old friendDanielle N. Cramer, all of
whom suffered from burns and smoke inhalation, but returned inside
to attempt to rescue his two Siberian huskies, Hunter and Blue, and
died alongside them in a second-floor hallway. A cat and a pet
raccoon were also killed.

Susan K. Young, 35, of Tacoma, Washington, was killed at
about 3:00 a.m. on April 6, and her friend Allison Kaili, 27, was
critically injured, when they stopped their car to aid an injured
dog on State Route 7 near Stanaway and were hit by an 18-year-old man
who told police he did not see them until too late to stop in time.
Both women were wearing dark clothing, and the road was slick with
rain. The dog was taken to the Humane Society of Tacoma & Pierce
County.