Jean Rogers Hall died on Tuesday, Oct. 31, after a long period of declining health. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating Jean’s memory. She was the most attentive listener, the best reader, a constant friend, a dedicated professor and a loving wife to her husband, James Hall, for, according to Jim’s calculations, 59.184 years (!).
Jean was born June 4, 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, in Wilmington, Calif., at the Port of Los Angeles, where her father, Ray Rogers, worked as a chemist for Union Oil. Ray, Jean, and her mother, Dorothy Katherine Conroe Rogers, moved to Fullerton, Calif. in 1951, and it is there that Jean attended high school, finding her niche in the speech squad. As Jean was always modest about her academic and professional achievements, even close friends might not know that Jean won the California state competition in oratory and impromptu speaking. Jean once grudgingly admitted to a cousin, “In those remote days, I was a star.”
While attending Pomona College from 1959 to 1963 as an English major, Jean met her future husband, James Hall, a fellow student who worked in the dining hall. When they took a philosophy course together, Jim was flabbergasted by Jean’s intellect. Romance ensued. After graduating from Pomona, Jean worked briefly as a legal secretary in Los Angeles. On the day President Kennedy was assassinated, Jean ran down the hall to watch Walter Cronkite on the only television in the building. That TV was in an office belonging to the famously flamboyant Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. It is hard to imagine a more unlikely duo than Jean Rogers Hall and Hedda Hopper watching that broadcast together.
After marrying in 1964, both Jean and Jim went to graduate school at UC Riverside, where Jean received her doctorate in English Literature. In 1968, Jim, who had been in ROTC at Pomona, was called up to active duty as a captain in the US Army and stationed at Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey. Every weekend, he and Jean would go to New York City to enjoy the museums, the symphony and the theatre. Soon, however, Jim was sent to Vietnam. Jean found a wrinkle in the regulations that could spring Jimmy from the war early if he had a job as a farmer or teacher. Clever Jean secured him a job teaching chemistry at a parochial school and, thus, got her husband the hell out of Vietnam and the army in record time!
Jean moved to Laguna Beach, joined the California State University, Fullerton faculty in 1970 and taught there until 2002. Tom Klammer, her friend and former chair of the Fullerton English department, remembers that Jean “represented the best qualities of an entire generation of university faculty, enthusiastically guiding her students to love and appreciate great literature and pursuing a life devoted to scholarship and teaching. Her colleagues remember her warmth, sense of humor, and caring friendship, qualities that helped make her department into a supportive professional community.
Professor Hall taught undergraduate courses in Romantic Poetry, Modern Poetry and Victorian Literature, along with graduate seminars in Victorian Poetry and Women’s Writing. She was an early advocate of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Study Away programs, having three times taught a semester-long program of study in London.”
As a scholar of the English Romantic period, Jean published peer-reviewed articles, as well as two scholarly monographs: The Transforming Image: A Study of Shelley’s Major Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1980) and A Mind that Feeds Upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991).
Jean retired in 2002, primarily to care for her father, Ray. Over the next 21 years, Jim and Jean managed to travel the world with friends and colleagues, often visiting London for months at a time and traveling to New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Alaska, Costa Rica, Antarctica, India, Africa, Egypt, Vienna, The Czech Republic, Berlin, Italy, Norway, France… well, you get the idea: every continent on the globe.
Jean eagerly devoured art, music, movies, theatre, and books, books, books! Her devotion to the written word was unparalleled. Moreover, she brought her intellect, warmth and emotional intelligence to all her many important friendships. Though she was herself an only child, she married into a loud and large family – Jim has five siblings. Her deep understanding of the dynamics of that family and her sympathetic observances of it were uncanny and illustrative of a lifetime of sensitivity, generosity and kindness.
A celebration of Jean’s life will be held in the new year. Until that time, in lieu of flowers, we ask that donations be made to Human Rights Watch.
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