In memory of Torrence Parsons, 1941–1987

The Journal of Graph Theory (JGT) lost one of its most helpful and enthusiastic editors in the untimely passing of Tory Parsons on 2 .4pril 1987. Amongst his other attributes, he was totally unsurpassed in his reliability as a referee for JGT. He always analyzed each paper sent to him in detail; he simplified proofs, clarified concepts, suggested new lines of research to authors, and with his remarkable breadth of knowledge was often able to provide exact references to the literature where either some theorems of the authors of some similar results had already been published. Tory was tapped for administrative duties even while still a graduate student at Princeton when he served as an assistant dean in the graduate school during the middle one of the three years which elapsed between his B.A. and his doctorate. In addition, he served on many departmental and university committees at both Pennsylvania State University and California State University, Chico. It was this time consuming selfless behavior which held down his list of publications to forty papers. Our paths crossed many times. We first met at Bowdoin College in the summer of 1971 at a national conference on combinatorics. We both attended the leap-year meetings in Kalamazoo, “International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Graphs,” in 1976, 1980 and 1984. the Graph Theory Seminar in Oberwolfach in 1973, and the Seventh British Combinatorial Conference at Cambridge University in 1979. During these events, I found him to be a gifted lecturer. My most memorable meeting with him, however, was not at a conference or a university, but in his home. As it happened one Saturday afternoon in the Spring of 1987, I was driving through State College on the way back to Ann Arbor (from New Jersey) and was invited by Tory and his wife Noelle to spend the night. This event made possible a six-hour nonstop (well. almost) spirited conversation on graph and combinatorics. The astounding depth and breadth of Tory’s knowledge of graph theory which was so evident in that marathon session made an indelible impression on me that 1 have never forgotten. All of us at JGT will miss Tory Parsons.