In Memoriam: Theodore J. Tracy
The Rev. Theodore (Ted) Tracy, S.J., died on Monday 2 October 2006 at the age of 90, in Clarkston,
Michigan, where he had been a resident of the Colombière Center after his retirement from active service
in the Jesuit order in August 2005. A funeral mass was celebrated at St. Ignatius Church in Chicago,
on 5 October, and the eulogy was delivered by Fr. Raymond C. Baumhart, S.J., former President of Loyola
University of Chicago.
Born on the West Side of Chicago on 2 January 1916, Ted was the eldest of three children of Theodore
J. Tracy Sr. (a wholesale jewelry salesman by occupation) and Honor (née Higgins) Tracy. In 1926, he
moved with his family to the East Rogers Park neighborhood, on the North Side of Chicago, where he
remained a resident throughout most of the years of his life. During the Great Depression, Ted worked to
help support his family and to pay for his education at Loyola Academy and at Loyola University of
Chicago. He earned an honors A.B. in Classics, philosophy, and history from Loyola University in 1938,
and after a year of post-graduate studies, he joined the Society of Jesus at Milford, Ohio, on 1 September 1939.
While studying for the priesthood, Ted earned an M.A. in Classics and philosophy from Loyola in 1942 and
taught Latin, Greek, and English at Loyola Academy in Chicago from 1943 to 1947. After ordination (13
June 1950), Ted pursued graduate studies, earning an S.T.L. (Licentiate in Theology) from the Bellarmine
School of Theology in 1951 and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics and ancient philosophy from Princeton
University in 1954 and 1962 respectively. In 1955-56, he served as an instructor of Classics at Xavier
University, Cincinnati, and then returned to his alma mater, Loyola of Chicago, where he rose through the
ranks from instructor to associate professor (1956-1970). He served as Chairman of the Classical Studies
Department for seven years (1960-67), and it was during his administration that the doctoral program in
Classics was established at Loyola. In June of 1970, he was named “Distinguished Professor of the Year”,
an honor conferred by vote of the Faculty Council at Loyola, a body composed of representatives from all
schools and colleges in the university. That same year Ted resigned his faculty position at Loyola to accept
an appointment as associate professor of Classics at the new Chicago campus of the University of Illinois,
where he spent the next 11 years of his teaching career. It is impossible to overstate Ted’s contribution
to the formation and growth of the Classics faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).
Ted was truly the senior founding member of the department and guided it through its formative years.
When he arrived in 1970, the campus was a mere five years old. As Ted told his colleagues at Loyola, he
felt drawn to this new public university in Chicago, where the majority of students were the first in their
families to attend college. Those undergraduates would never gain an appreciation for Classical literature
and culture unless the university was properly encouraged and aided in building a strong program. Under
Ted’s wise and gentle leadership, this is precisely what occurred. The department at present comprises 10
full-time faculty and includes among its offerings, in addition to degrees in Ancient Greek, Latin, and
Classical Civilization, courses in Arabic, Modern Greek, and Catholic Studies. (The latter field was
serendipitously added to the department twenty years after Ted’s departure when the Schmitt Chair of
Catholic Studies was endowed at UIC, and its first occupant happened to be a scholar of Augustine and so
welcomed a cross appointment in Classics.) After Ted’s retirement from UIC in 1981, where he had served
briefly as Acting Head of the department in 1974-75, Ted embarked upon a whole new career. He began by
enrolling in a one-year course of study at Paul Robb’s Institute for Spiritual Leadership on Chicago's South
Side. This training convinced Ted, as he put it, that “I’ve been living my life from the head up, but now I also
want to be living from my head down.” Always a great believer in fostering a healthy mind-body connection,
Ted was a self-taught practitioner of yoga. For many years, until late in life, he pursued a daily stretching and
relaxation routine. After serving for one year as superior of Ignatius House, a satellite community of Jesuit
priests which he helped found near the Loyola campus, he joined for a time the staff of the Institute for
Spiritual Leadership. Later, in 1990, he took a position at Loyola, where for the next 15 years he served as a
retreat leader and spiritual director. Those who knew him invariably use the words “kind”, “gentle”,
“sympathetic”, and “pastoral” to describe his approach to life and his relations with others. He was beloved by
students and colleagues alike. One priest recalls that when he informed Ted that Ted had been appointed his
Spiritual Director, Ted replied “it will be my privilege to be your spiritual companion.”
Ted’s scholarly publications were primarily in the field of ancient philosophy, appearing in articles in
Classical Philology and Illinois Classical Studies. He wrote his Princeton dissertation, entitled
“Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean in Plato and Aristotle”, under the direction of Whitney
J. Oates, and he took one or two classes from Harold Cherniss at the Institute for Advanced Study. His
investigation sought to elucidate the notion of the term mesotes (“the mean”) in Aristotle in the light of Greek
medical theory, a connection that had been posited by Werner Jaeger. Ted credited Tony Raubitschek with
setting him off along this path of research. When his dissertation was published in 1969, reviewers praised
it especially “in [its] discussion of Aristotle, where the De Anima and the biological writings are brought
into relation with the Eudemean Ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Politics.” (Phillips, CR 22 [1972],
420); and it was described as offering “a splendid exposition of sensation in the De anima and a convincing
interpretation of the living organism as ‘an embodied mesotes’.” (Sprague, CP 66 [1971], 292). In a recent
canvass that I did of ancient philosophers known to me, among other responses I received from Richard Kraut,
my former colleague in the UIC Philosophy Department (now at Northwestern) the statement (with permission
to be quoted) that “to my mind, it (Ted’s book) remains the best treatment of the medical background to
Aristotle’s discussion.”
Although, as I have indicated, Ted devoted himself primarily to pastoral care after his retirement from UIC in
1981, he returned briefly to Classics to publish in 1989 a scholarly paper entitled “Who Stands behind
Aeneas on the Ara Pacis?” (pp. 375-96 in Daidalikon, ed. R. Sutton). In it, he made a very persuasive case
for identifying the broken figure, of which we have only a draped arm, not with Achates, or Iulus-Ascanius,
or a hypothetical figure of Pax Romana, but rather with the goddess Venus.
Ted served as President of the Chicago Classical Club from 1963 to 1965 and as First Vice President and
member of the Executive Committee of CAMWS in 1977-78. He was a member of the examining board in
Latin for the Education Testing Service (College Entrance Board) from 1969 to 1971 and a member of the
Editorial Board of Illinois Classical Studies from 1974 to 1976. In addition, he served for 15 years as a
member of Loyola’s governing body, the Board of Trustees.
Among his honors, in addition to those already mentioned, were the John Harding Page fellowship at
Princeton and a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Italy (1960-61). The highest tribute of all, however,
was paid to him by his colleagues at UIC, who established in 1984 an annual lecture named in his honor.
Over the past 22 years, some of the most distinguished Classicists in America and Europe have come to
Chicago to give this lecture (listed at www.uic.edu/las/clas/lectures.html), and the tradition will be
continued this coming spring. On Thursday 5 April 2007, Professor Hunter Rawlings III, President-emeritus
of Cornell, will deliver the 24th lecture in this series, speaking on the subject of “Thucydides and Truth in
History.”
As a teenager growing up in Chicago, Ted had the unique experience of holding a summer job as office
boy to Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the founder of the Chicago Tribune, and as a student at Loyola
Academy, he played football as a guard, an amazing feat for a man of his size. In fact, Ted frequently
reminisced about what a thrill it was to play in the Prep Bowl, a game that has taken place annually since
1929 between the champions of the Catholic and Public Leagues of Chicago. This game is still played in
Soldier Field, the home of the Chicago Bears, on the lakefront, and in Ted’s day this annual match used to
attract close to 100,000 spectators.
Ted’s brief association with the Tribune as a summer employee is to be explained in part by a family
connection and invites the telling of a marvelous anecdote that was part of family tradition. In the 1930’s,
Ted’s Aunt Kitty happened to be the personal assistant of Colonel McCormick’s former editor-in-chief,
Joseph Patterson, who left Chicago to found the New York Daily News. The story goes that one day in
1931, when the cartoonist Chester “Chet” Gould was showing Patterson some early, rough sketches of his
soon to be famous cartoon detective, who as yet had only the first name “Dick”, Aunt Kitty remarked,
“goodness me, that character in your drawing has a nose exactly like my brother-in-law’s.” Hence the sleuth
acquired the last name “Tracy”, being named after Ted’s father, and by an odd twist of fate, Ted died just two
days shy of the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first Dick Tracy installment, which appeared on
4 October 1931.
The world is a sadder and less kind place now that Ted has departed. For many years, our family regarded
him as an adopted member. He baptized our son in 1978 and was rarely absent from our table at Thanksgiving
and at our son’s birthday on the day before Christmas. In the summer, Ted and our family always made one
or two pilgrimages to the Indiana Dunes State Park, where he loved to swim, walk the seashore, and paint in
oils, a hobby at which he excelled. His stamina at climbing the steep, sandy dunes was phenomenal even after
he passed the age of eighty. If he had any weakness, it was his extreme fondness for any
confection made of chocolate. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him. To know him was to honor and
respect him as a dear dear friend. Among his immediate family, he is survived by two sisters, Mary Elizabeth
Diffendal and Sr. Katherine Tracy, S.H.C.J.
Those who wish to honor the memory of Theodore Tracy may do so by making a contribution to a memorial
fund that has been established to insure the perpetuation of the annual Tracy Lecture. Checks should be made
payable to the "The University of Illinois," with a notation "Tracy Fund 335486" on the memo line, and sent to
the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Office of Development, 601 South Morgan Street, Room 809,
Chicago, IL 60607-7104, USA.
John T. Ramsey
University of Illinois at Chicago
