A good friend of mine, Maria Padro Torry, texted me yesterday to ask a favor. She reminded me that when she lost her father, the opportunity to speak about him at a memorial brought her as close to feeling his presence as she had felt since he passed. Now she wanted to recreate that experience for a friend of hers who had lost his father, a man named Walter Corson. Maria asked if her friends could commit an act of kinds or remembrance that she could then collate and forward to Walter’s son as a way of reminding him about his father.

I didn’t know Walter, but any friend of Maria must be a good soul—she is an extremely generous one—and so I am happy to post at her request a few remembrances of Walter Harris Corson. He lived quite a life! Born in 1932, he graduated from Princeton and earned a sociology degree from Harvard. He served in the Army. He researched and taught at institutions including Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan. He edited The Global Ecology Handbook, which would really come in handy these days.

This is the biography that gets transcribed in obituaries. The part that doesn’t get written down anywhere official is that he had a family who carry on his memory and who continue to touch the lives of people around them in ways that make those people want to give back.

It’s hard to find that kind of thing on Google. But it’s not such a bad legacy to leave behind. Not bad at all, in fact.