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 Cecil Robinson Cecil Robinson was born on July 19, 1921, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to Dorita Frances MacElhinny and Watson Bryant Robinson. He had three brothers Thomas, James and Murray and one sister, Dorita. In Rye his family lived at 12 Park Drive North. Cecil received a bachelor of arts degree in English from Harvard University in 1942.
He enlisted January 29, 1943 and served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. He received his honorable discharged a sergeant on February 20, 1946.
Promoted to Sergeant Sgt. Cecil Robinson, 12 Park Drive North, Rye, was recently promoted from the grade of Cpl. at Westover Field, Mass. , where he is presently on duty.
Friday, March 30, 1945 THE RYE CHRONICLE PAGE FIFTEEN
Mrs. Robinson Welcomes Home Four Sons in Military Service
Mrs. Watson B. Robinson, of Park Drive North, welcomed home her four sous in the last few weeks from military service. The eldest, James W. Robinson, was a lieutenant-commander in the U. S. N. R. , and was given a citation for meritorious service at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His ship had been converted into a hospital ship. He has now resumed his law practice. Murray Robinson, who was in the Air Corps, has taken up the study of engineering at the Harvard Post Graduate School. Thomas Arnold Robinson, the third son, who was also in the Air Corps in the European Theater of War, is studying Greek and Latin at Fordham University. Cecil Robinson, the youngest of the brothers, plans this summer to attend the University of Mexico to study Spanish.
May 17, 1946 THE RYE CHRONICLE PAGE FIFTEEN
After his discharge, Cecil received a master's degree in Latin American history from Columbia University in 1949 and a doctorate in English from Columbia in 1960. He married Madeleine Hale on June 19, 1954, in Washington, District of Columbia. They had two children during their marriage.
Cecil joined the University of Arizona in 1953. "He was very much interested in Latin American culture," his wife said yesterday. She said her husband started the English as a Second Langauge program at the UA and had an award winning radio program here in the 1950s called "Hablamos Inglés," which taught English to Spanish speaking people.
He served as a foreign-student adviser at the UA from 1954 to 1958, spent a year in Brazil in 1963 to lay the foundation for a library of American literature at Rio de Janeiro's University of Guanabara, and worked in Tuba City in 1967 with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In Rio, he bought 300 books for the library and taught some courses in American literature and the modern novel.
His publications included: "With The Ears of Strangers, The Mexican in American Literature," "'The View from Chapultepec," and a large number of other articles. Cecil also taught at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Oliver Sigworth, a close friend and fellow retired UA English professor. In 1977, he was acting head of the UA English department, Sigworth recalled. . "By temperament he was a peacemaker," Sigworth said. He also served as acting head there in 1982. He retired in 1983.
Cecil Robinson, a former professor of American and Latin American literature who started the UA's English as a Second Language Program, died October 2, 1990, in Tucson, Arizona after a year's battle with abdominal cancer. He was 69. There will be no funeral, but there will be : a memorial service at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 4831 E. 22nd St., at 2:30 p.m next Tuesday, according to Madeleine Robinson, his wife.
Besides his wife, Robinson was survived by his daughter, Cecilia Robinson Liss, of Baltimore; and a son, Daniel Hale Robinson, of Tucson. The family suggests donations be made to the Sally Perper Memorial Fund, in care of the English department at the UA, for graduate students..
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