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Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, CT) April 25, 1951

ANSONIA MAN JAILED FOR 2 AUTO FATALITIES

NEW HAVE, April, 25- (AP) Superior Court Judge Samuel Mellitz yesterday warned that drinking and driving don't mix and sentenced an Ansonia motorist to a year in the county jail for running down and killing a Yale professor and his daughter. Judge Mellitz found Raymond Burr, 30 guilty on a charge of misconduct of a motor vehicle.

John Fee Embree, 42, and his daughter Claire, 16, of Hamden, were killed last Dec. 22. Burr had pleaded no contest last week.

Society for Applied Anthropology Publication; Human Organization, Volume 10, number 1/Spring 1951; pages 33-34

John Fee Embree: 1908-1950: by Alexander Spehr

In the tragic death of John Fee Embree, reported in the last issue of this journal, anthropology lost one of its most sensitive field observers, a sound scholar, and a proponent and critic of the extension of anthropology into the applied field.

Embree was born on August 26, 1908 in New Have, Connecticut, the son of Kate Clark and the late Edwin R. Embree. As director of the Rosenwald Fund, the elder Embree was well known for his interest in race relations, whose investigation and improvement formed one of the Fund's principal objectives. John Embree's parental background was conducive to his developing a condern with peoples of differing racial and cultural backgrounds.

From her papers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library

On Feb. 20, 1909 Ella Meierovna Lury was born in the Tsarist Russian Far Eastern town of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. Her father, Meier Moiseevich Lury was a merchant of the First Guild and owner of an extensive fishery business not only in Russia, but also China and Japan. The primary fish he dealt in was salmon and its red caviar, both of which Ella adored. She was educated at home by a series of governesses and tutors from England and Germany. By 1920 Ella's father fortuitously had moved the family to Yokohama, Japan. In March of that year a renegade band of Blosheviks held the residents of Nikolaevsk hostage and proceeded to kill a large percentage of the population, including many of Ella's relatives.

In Japan Ella graduated from the Canadian Academy in 1926 and left to attend the University of California at Berkeley (1927-1929) where she studied French. From 1929 to 1931 she attended the Sorbonne University in Paris, majoring in French. Having met John Embree on various ships when she returned each year to see her family in Japan; she married him in 1932. While living in Canada John obtained an MA in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and their daughter Clare was born (Dec. 29, 1933). From 1934-35 they were at the University of Chicago, where John began to work on his PhD; he received a scholarship to live from 1934-36 in the village of Suye Mura (Kyushu, Japan), where John was doing fieldwork with Ella's assistance. Ella's field notes on her interactions with and observations of the women in the village were later published. Back in Chicago (1935-38) John received his doctorate, and the family next moved to Kona, Hawaii (1938-1939), where a study of the acculturation of Japanese farmers growing coffee was undertaken. John taught in the Anthropology Dept. at UH (1939-1941) and Ella taught Russian in night school A teaching invitation in August of 1941 took them back to the University of Toronto, but after Pearl Harbor, John was called to Washington DC as a Japan specialist. From 1944-45 they returned to Chicago where John and Ella were both teaching. From 1945-57 they lived in Honolulu and worked for the US Office of War Information. John headed the US Information Service in Bangkok and later Saigon (1947-49). In the fall of 1949 John accepted a position at Yale University as Chairman of the Southeast Asia Studies Program. On the 22nd of December 1950 tragedy struck. Ella had been preparing dinner and did not know why John and Clare had not returned home...until a knock on her door...and a police officer informed her that both were killed as they crossed the street.

Ella was forever grateful that in February of 1951 UH President Gregg Sinclair, whom John and Ella knew quite well, sent her a cable asking her to come at once to begin teaching French and to start a Russian program. That summer when the village held a memorial service for John and Clare, Ella returned to Suye Mura for the first time since 1935. By 1954 the Russian program was set up. In April of 1955 she married Fred J. Wisewell. Ella went to the soviet Union three time (1957, 1964 and 1979), but she always regretted never being able to return to Nikolaevsk.

During her retirement years Ella kept busy publishing many articles and books. She was an active member of the Bishop Museum's Pacific Translators' Committee and did many translations from French and Russian concerning visits to Hawaii. As a result of this work she also published a translation from Russian of V.M. Golovnin's Around the world on the Kamchatka, 1817-1819 (Hawaiian Historical Society and UH Press, 1979). The women of Suye Mura (co-authored with Robert J. Smith; Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982) was a pioneering text of Women's Studies. He other publications concern the town in which she was born: The destruction of Nikolaevsk-onAmur, 1920 by A.Ya. Gutman (translated from Russian by E. Wisewell; Limestone Press, 1993), and Liudi v adu [People in hell] by Konstantin Emelianov (translated by E. Wiswell; Vladivostok State Univ. of Economics and Services, 2004).

On the 16th of August 2005 Ella Lury Wiswell died. She is survived by her cousin and adopted sister Sophy Kraslavsky (Tokyo, Japan); her niece Carolyn Karcher, well-known Professor of American Literature at Temple University (Washington DC); her nephew Richard R. Lury, a lawyer (NYC/NJ)' and sister-in-law Catherine Harris (Honolulu) and Edwina Devereux (Ithaca, NY).

The point of my earlier comment is that the fact that Ella was credentialed teaching a Russian language class in 1955 does not mean that she was in fact teaching Russian in 1960 anywhere at the University, much less at the East West Center.

In fact, as Fred also points out, the purported story here has not been anywhere on the record until some recent date. A couple of years ago, Fred identified a news article dating from the late 50’s or early 60’s which has since been scrubbed about two retired ladies in Honolulu, one of whom to the best of my memory was Ella, who were retired Russian language instructors, who were living in Hawaii. No evidence that either one of them was teaching Russian in the fall of 1960.

Given the extent to which we are looking at a record, much of which emanates from Photo Shop, it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that we ought to see some certified record that dates back in the 60’s or 70’s before we believe that the University of Hawaii was teaching a Russian language class anywhere in a closet in 1960—certainly didn’t have anything to do with the East West Center which didn’t even exist.

And of course it is some leap from the point at which you could prove a Russian language course was possible to supporting a fairy tale about Stanley, an entering Freshman, being in the class in the fall of 60—as of this date, there is no real evidence Stanley was ever in Hawaii prior to March of 1963.