William Berg [Γουίλιαμ Μπεργκ] (1938-2021)
Translatum has lost its resident classicist. His contribution in Ancient Greek boards was precious and his death left a huge and unfillable gap. He was a kind and gentle man. He will be sorely missed.William "Bill" Berg was born on August 13, 1938 in Berkeley, California to William Berg, Jr., administrative assistant to Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, and to Dorothy Helen Shaw, descendant of pioneers who migrated from Indiana to Oregon in 1852. He attended primary and secondary schools in Washington, D.C. and Boulder, Colorado, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University in 1960. Bill attended Cornell for a Master's degree in 1962, and Princeton for a doctorate in 1966. He married Beverly Brown, a fellow Classicist, in 1970; they separated after seven years and were divorced in 1980.
After teaching Classical languages and Greco-Roman civilization at UCLA and Stanford, Bill left the academic world in 1974 to settle in Gearhart where he had celebrated his first birthday, and many summer holidays, in his great-great grandmother's cottage on the Ridge Path. He took a number of odd jobs over the years in Clatsop County, including teaching languages, literature, and ancient civilization at Clatsop Community College through the 1990s.
In 1976, Bill was elected president of the Gearhart Homeowners Association, and subsequently served on the Gearhart Planning Commission, on the City Council, and on the Historic Landmarks Commission. He organized and directed resource inventories, surveys, and data analysis for the original Gearhart Comprehensive Plan, and drafted the final 1978 text approved by the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission. Also in 1978, Bill successfully applied for grants to complete an award-winning solar retrofit to the Gearhart Fire House.
His frequent sojourns abroad began with a year in Greece as a Fulbright scholar in 1960-61, where he pursued field archaeology at ancient Corinth, followed by a summer of excavation on Samothrace (1964). Over the following decades, he returned to Greece nine times for research in Classics and in the musical modes and singers of rebetiko, the "blues" of modern Greece. He studied and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Tübingen, Germany during 1964-65 through an award from the German Academic Exchange Service.
After teaching a variety of courses at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1987-88), Bill accepted a Fulbright lectureship at 'Atenisi University in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga, where he lectured during 1989 on Classical civilization and American literature, and where he met his future wife Mami Kanzaki, a teacher in the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers program. They were finally married in Japan in 2004. In the meantime, Bill had again done extensive travel and research in Greece, Mexico, Thailand, and India. He and Mami enjoyed further world travel both together and with their son Shota during the years following their marriage.
His publications included books and articles on ancient and modern Greek and Roman (and early Christian) literature, history, religion, and philosophy. Bill's scholarly output continued until shortly before his death. A major historical work, Gearhart Remembered, was published in 2001, with a second edition in 2013. Further information can be found at his
Wikipedia page. He died in Portland, Oregon, May 16, 2021.