Professor John Van Buren Perry passed away on October 27, 2026, at the age of 98 after a short illness. John was born to Circuit Judge and Mrs. Van Buren Perry at their family home in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was educated in the Aberdeen public schools. He was a descendant of a family with a President, Martin Van Buren, and a family with two famous naval officers, Oliver Hazard Perry and Mathew Perry.
He lived through the Great Depression and saw the rise of fascism and the early stages of the Second World War. John’s father and three uncles had served in World War I during the “War to end all wars,” so their children could live in peace; thirteen of their children eventually served in World War II, including John.
John served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, the early Cold War, and at the beginning of the Korean Conflict. For several years, he served in the Atlantic Fleet at Primary Flight Control on the bridge of one of the largest aircraft carriers, U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVB-42), as it became the flagship for various task forces and fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, above the Arctic Circle, and both the Atlantic and Caribbean. During these travels, he visited nearly thirty foreign countries.
On returning to Aberdeen, he studied at Northern State University under the World War II GI Bill, earning a bachelor’s degree with teaching fields in history, political science, sociology, English, Classical Attic Greek, and mathematics. Next, he attended Black Hills State University to qualify for teaching credentials and taught for a year in public schools. A scholarship drew him back to graduate study at New York University, but his special interests led him to do most of his graduate study and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Still later, he spent a year at the University of Southern California.
After a year of teaching public school in Britton, South Dakota, he spent almost all of the next sixty years teaching in public colleges and universities. The most enjoyable stints were at the California State Universities at Fresno and Sonoma, helping to start Central Wyoming College, and some three-dozen years at Lake Tahoe Community College. He was one of the original full-time faculty creating LTCC and helping it to earn its early accreditation. He taught its first class in the fall of 1975 and hosted many public cultural events there about artifacts, art, travel, museums, and classical music. In support of these activities, he wrote many “Cultural Reflections” articles for the Tahoe Daily Tribune.
His major interests included reading, researching, and incorporating materials from museums and travel into his classroom teaching. Ultimately, he visited and studied cultural sites and institutions in more than eighty countries, which included almost all the major museums of the world. To share as many artifacts and artworks as possible, he built collections that showed the development of ancient human skills in making basketry and stone tools, making and decorating ceramics, creating metal weapons and equipment, glassmaking, the Renaissance printing of texts, pictures, and maps, and finally, the European manufacture of porcelains. His interest in the history of glassmaking led to his election as a fellow of the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass in New York.
Early in his career, he saw the great need for aid to handicapped students and students with deficient basic skills, so he designed and championed programs for them in all of the colleges he served. Locally, he was a member of the American Legion and served as a trustee for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. His parents, siblings, many friends, and much-beloved pets predeceased him. Interment will be in his family’s plot in South Dakota.
In lieu of flowers, please donate to the John Van Buren Perry Foundation, the holder of his artifact collection.