Remembrance for Harold R. Willson, India III, 1941-2001

Harold or Hal, as friends and associates called him, died January 23, 2001 at age 59. My name is Sally Willson; I worked in Washington as India Desk Officer under the name Sally Dana until we were married in 1966.

Peace Corps certainly influenced Hal's career and interests. In India from 1963-65, he helped establish a 4-H type training program for rural school teachers in Palampur, a town in the Himalayas now in Himachal Pradesh. I understand on this same site, a College of Agriculture was started in 1966 and has since become the Himachal Pradesh Agricultural University!

After returning from India, Hal worked on several PC-India training projects out of the University of California at Davis and Riverside while he pursued his MSc in International Agriculture at Davis, and PHD in Entomology at Riverside. He returned to India in 1969-70 with the Ford Foundation and researched indigenous grain storage methods in the Punjab. In the 1970-80s during his research extension appointment at Cornell University, he coordinated three state-side training programs for foreign agriculturalists from the Middle East including Pakistan, India and China. Next, at The Ohio State University where he was tenured and focused on corn, wheat and soy grain integrated pest management, he advised graduate students from Mali, Senegal, Uganda and China. His work also took him to South Africa, Swaziland, Columbia, Germany, Eritrea, Uganda and the Ukraine.

During the 1990s, he made many trips to Uganda where he took part in a Virginia Tech-Ohio State long range pest management project. A funny story about Hal told by a university colleague at his memorial service goes like this: "On one of his first field trips in Uganda, we were on our way to some rural areas to meet farmers and examine their crop pests. Heading out, Hal insisted on stopping at one of the first maize fields we saw. By God he was going to get out in that field. Pretty soon, Hal was pulling up stalks and slitting them to look for boring insects when the door of a hut opened. An old man came out. Then there was a woman, too. The kids kind of stayed back. Grabbing a stalk, Hal went running over to the farmer and asked, 'Did you know you have a stalk borer problem?' And before we knew it we're in the guy's hut drinking homemade beer. So, every time we were near there, we'd stop at this guy's place. Hal's total passion for the subject matter made people forget all their fears and suspicions".

At home, here in Columbus, Ohio, we hosted many foreign nationals for month-long stays in our home, all participants in the Columbus International Program, a year-long exchange program for foreign professionals. Hal's retirement goal was to return to some kind of overseas work but unfortunately, his life was cut short. His death was sudden and a shock, especially to his collaborators in Uganda. Instead of giving flowers to the family, his friends and associates contributed to a fund that paid for 32 boxes of his entomology journals to be sent to the University of Kampala in Uganda.

The accompanying photograph taken in 1964 shows the three Peace Corps Volunteers who set up the 4-H training programs in Palampur; some teachers who participated in one of the training sessions and a few Himachal District administrators. From left to right, third chair in: Robert Spencer; followed by Vineet Nayyar, IAS District Officer, Harold Willson and Harry Andrews. Posted 23 Aug 2010