Harrington Cooper Brearley, Jr. (1926-2011)

BREARLEY, MARION, GRIMES, HAGEN, SANGER, MEYER

Posted By: Mark Christian
Date: 8/4/2012 at 13:36:47

From Adams & Soderstrum Funeral Home obituary, Story County, Iowa:

Harrington Brearley

BORN: January 17, 1926

DIED: August 26, 2011

LOCATION: Ames, Iowa

Harrington Cooper Brearley, Jr., died August 26, 2011 at age 85 in Ames, Iowa. A memorial service will be held on Friday, September 2, 2011, at 10:00 a.m., at Collegiate Presbyterian Church in Ames, Iowa.

He was born January 17, 1926, in Greenville, South Carolina, to Harrington Cooper Brearley, a sociology professor, and Margaret Douglas Marion Brearley, an English teacher. He spent his early years in Clemson, SC, where his father was on the Clemson College faculty. In 1937 his father won a fellowship at the London School of Economics and the young family spent an academic year in London. On their return to the United States they settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was on the faculty at Peabody College.

Harrington graduated from the Peabody Demonstration School and briefly studied engineering at Vanderbilt University before enrolling in the J-9 program, a forerunner of ROTC, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. There he earned a B.E.E. in electrical engineering in three years with a perfect 4.0 GPA. From 1946-47 he served as a communications officer in the U.S. Navy on board the U.S.S. Taconic.

After leaving the Navy, Harry spent two years in Burlington, NC, as an engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories. He returned to school supported by a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission fellowship, earning M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1950 and 1954. He then moved to General Electric in Syracuse, NY, where he worked on the guidance system for Polaris submarine missiles. He met Mary Jo Bradford at a YWCA gathering there and they were married in December 1957.

In 1959 he joined the University of Illinois electrical engineering faculty where he worked on the Illiac II, an early computer. In 1965 he moved to the electrical engineering faculty at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He was one of the founding faculty members of the ISU Computer Science Department. He taught courses in switching theory, logic design, computer organization, programming, and data structures, wrote one of the early textbooks on assembler language, and supervised many master's degree students. He was promoted to full professor in 1977 and retired in 1995. In addition to university committee service, he was an active member of many professional societies. He served as chair of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Central Iowa Section (1976-77) and he initiated and edited the newsletter of the IEEE Computation Society's Educational Activities Board from 1980 to 1988. He taught short courses for several organizations and frequently served as a reader for Advanced Placement exams for the College Board.

Harry was also very active in civic life. In Syracuse, he was a charter member of the New York State Canal Society. In Ames, he was an elder at Collegiate Presbyterian Church and served as vice-chair of the church's Sanctuary Remodeling Committee. He served on the boards of the Octagon Center for the Arts, the Ames Visiting Nurses (now Homeward) and the Friends of the Ames Public Library. He was an active member of the Story County Democratic Central Committee, serving as treasurer (1973-79) and vice-chairman (1980-92), and as delegate to county and state conventions. He served as the treasurer for the successful legislative campaigns of Cecile Burnett and Jane Greimann.

Harry is survived by his wife, Mary Jo, his sister, Margaret Grimes, of Lexington, KY, three children: Ann (Chris Hagen), William (Katie Sanger) and Caroline (Steven Meyer), and five grandchildren: Rachel and Hannah Hagen, Russell Brearley, and Anastasia and Katarina Meyer.

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