Clarence Henley ‘Red’ Cramer (1902-1983) was a university professor, historian and author.
Born in Eureka, Kansas, in 1902, the son of a minister, young ‘Red’ spent his childhood moving from one s...mehr sehenClarence Henley ‘Red’ Cramer (1902-1983) was a university professor, historian and author.
Born in Eureka, Kansas, in 1902, the son of a minister, young ‘Red’ spent his childhood moving from one small-town parish to another—in Kansas, Iowa and Illinois—before settling in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, some 35 miles north of Columbus. Attending Ohio State University as a ‘street-car student,’ he earned his B.A. (1927), M.A. (1928) and Ph.D. (1931), specializing in economic and diplomatic history. He subsequently taught at Southern Illinois University.
The war years found Cramer in Washington, D.C., where he would serve as director in charge of recruitment, first for the Board of Economic Warfare and then for the National War Labor Board. After the war, he worked as personnel director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s displaced persons operation in war-torn Germany, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Garman, a UN social worker born in Tokyo of missionary parents. He later served as a consultant to the International Refugee Organization’s Washington office, while he researched the life of Robert Ingersoll at the Library of Congress.
In 1949, Cramer joined the history department of Western Reserve University, eventually becoming the department chair (1963-1967), and published biographies on Ingersoll and Baker, which earned him the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1973. He became WRU’s emeritus professor of history in 1974 and turned to writing full-time, publishing a history of the university for its centennial in 1976, as well as histories of its law school (1977), its school of library science (1979) and its dental school (1982).
Dr. Cramer passed away in 1983.weniger sehen