Leon Rappoport: Editorial Board Member and Psychologist Remembered

Clio’s Psyche Editorial Board member and psychologist Leon Harold Rappoport (1932-2009) died of colon cancer at his home in Manhattan, Kansas on September 10, 2009 at the age of 77. He was a professor of social psychology at Kansas State University (KSU) for 39 years prior to his retirement in 2003.

Leon Rappoport was born on March 11, 1932 to Minnie (née Himmel) and Jack Rappoport and educated in the public schools of Manhattan, New York prior to earning his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1953 from New York University. During his military service in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, he served as a radio operator and married his wife while stationed in Germany. Following his discharge, he worked in marketing for the Elmo Roper polling firm in New York City. As an avid skier, he applied only to universities in mountainous states, earning his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Colorado in 1962 and 1963. He did research and learned cross-county skiing in 1963 in Norway while on a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship at the Psychologisk Institutt of Oslo University. In 1964 the Rappoport family moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where he became an Assistant Professor in the KSU Department of Psychology.

Dr. Rappoport taught graduate and undergraduate courses including Psychohistory (with George Kren), Life Span-Personality Development, Social Psychology, Health Psychology, the History of Psychology, the Psychology of

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Ethnic Humor, and the Varieties of Consciousness. As an active professional he made many presentations and wrote numerous articles, chapters of books, and reviews. His books include: Personality Development: The Chronology of Experience (1972), Human Judgment and Social Interaction (co-edited, 1973), and Psychology and the Problems of Today (co-edited, 1978). His interests and research projects over the years were eclectic and wide-ranging, on such topics as conflict resolution; combat veterans’ opinions regarding the Vietnam war; decision-making in ambiguous situations; the Holocaust; ethnic, gender, and racial humor; nutrition and food preference; post-modernism; preventing nuclear theft; and problems of theoretical psychology. Dr. Rappoport also jogged, led Zen meditation sessions for two decades, played tennis, practiced yoga, read prodigiously, and with friends and family fished, hiked, ice-skated, skied, and swam.

Professor Rappoport was recruited for the Clio’s Psyche Editorial Board by his longtime KSU colleague and friend, the late George Kren (1926-2000). Together they edited Varieties of Psychohistory (1976), wrote The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (1980, 1994), talked extensively, rode motorcycles, and smoked endlessly. The professor enjoyed retirement, during which he published How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food (2003) and Punchlines: The Case for Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Humor (2005). For Clio’s Psyche, he sometimes refereed articles and occasionally wrote them, serving this publication through e-mail and occasional telephone conversations.

We mourn the passing of this genial colleague and regret that a memorial is so late in coming, because we only learned of his illness and death this summer. Leon Rappoport is survived by his wife, Karen; one of his two sons; two grandchildren; and one sister. A memorial service was

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held at the All Faiths Chapel on the KSU campus on October 11, 2009 and memorial memorabilia have been placed in the anteroom of the Kansas State Department of Psychology.

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