William “Bill” Berg

Gearhart

Aug. 13, 1938 — May 16, 2021

William “Bill” Berg was born on Aug. 13, 1938, in Berkeley, California, to William Berg Jr., administrative assistant to Oregon’s U.S. Sen. 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 University for a master’s degree in 1962, and Princeton University 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 Graeco-Roman civilization at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, 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, City Council and 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 Department.

His frequent sojourns abroad began with a year in Greece as a Fulbright scholar in 1960 to 1961, where he pursued field archaeology at ancient Corinth, followed by a summer of excavation on Samothrace in 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 doctoral dissertation at the University of Tübingen, Germany, during 1964 to 1965 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, in 1987 to 1988, 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 bit.ly/WilliamBerg

He is survived by his wife, Mami; his stepson, Shota, of Tokyo, Japan; his brother, retired Ohio state geologist Thomas Berg, of Columbus, Ohio; his sister-in-law, Betty; numerous nephews, a niece and their descendants; and a large number of fellow friends of dear old Gearhart.