John B. Sheahan, 93

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — John Bernard Sheahan, 93, of Williamstown, died Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017. 

 

Born in Toledo, Ohio, on Sept. 11, 1923, he was the first of three sons of Bernard W. and Florence Mary Sheahan Sheahan. His father, an engineer with Consolidated Aircraft, took the family to Buffalo, N.Y., and to San Diego in 1935, when the firm moved there. That move proved to be a blessing. It brought them to the same neighborhood as another new arrival in California, Denise Eugenie Morlino, whose parents had brought her there from her childhood home in Poitiers, France. 

 

Both went to San Diego High School; their walks together from school to home, through Balboa Park, always remained among the happiest memories of his life.

 

In 1942, he entered Stanford University, intending to study engineering. World War II and the Army decided otherwise. In the middle of his freshman year he was sent to Fort Knox for basic training and later into the infantry and to combat in Belgium, Alsace, and Germany. He received a Purple Heart.

 

Discharged in February 1946, he returned to Stanford and to Denise and they married that same year. He never changed his mind about Denise but did about engineering. Questions of how economies and societies function took on more importance. He switched to concentrating on economics, both as an undergraduate and for a Harvard doctorate. That led to his first professional work, as an economic analyst with the Marshall Plan in Paris, with strong approval from Denise. Both of their children, Yvette

and Bernard were born in Paris.

 

In 1954, an opening turned up to teach economics at Williams College. He remained on the faculty for the next 40 years. The usefulness of economics to help clarify real-world issues made it enjoyable to plunge into research and writing. That included a book on the efforts of the Kennedy administration to combine control of inflation with stimulus to economic recovery, and a larger study of how the postwar government of France managed to reawaken and reshape the French industrial sector.

 

In 1960, the Ford Foundation proposed and financed a Center for Development Economics (CDE) at Williams, dedicated to postgraduate teaching for public officials of developing countries. As one of the original faculty at CDE, Mr. Sheahan dedicated much of his focus to this area for the rest of his career. One of the complementary goals was to promote field research and applied advisory work by faculty. The Sheahan family went to Bogota, Colombia, for a two-year stay, during which he worked as an adviser in the planning department of the government, and later to Mexico for a year, teaching at El Colegio de Mexico. There was also shorter terms teaching or doing advisory work in Ethiopia, Peru, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, China, and Micronesia.

 

Much of this international work helped stimulate academic studies, including a comparative volume titled "Patterns of Development in Latin America," and a country-specific book on Peru, "Searching for a Better Society." Meantime, back at home, serious efforts to keep the yard from turning back to jungle were not highly successful.

 

Mr. Sheahan retired in 1994 as the William Brough Professor of Economics, Emeritus, and survived quite well until Denise died in 2012, after 66 years of marriage. He kept going with a quieter life: learning some things about cooking while enjoying friends, music, reading, cheese and wine, and the beauty of the countryside in the Berkshires and Vermont.

 

He is survived by his two children, Yvette Kirby and her husband, William, of Lexington and Bernard Sheahan and his wife, Alison Nevin Sheahan, of Arlington, Va.; his six grandchildren, Ted and Elizabeth Kirby, and Samantha, John Bernard, William and Amy Sheahan.

 

FUNERAL NOTICE — Burial is at the College Cemetery at Williams. Arrangements by Flynn & Dagnoli-Montagna Home for Funerals.