The Foreign Service Journal, February 2011

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 77 I N M EMORY Jane Cooke Brynn , 69, a retired Foreign Service specialist and the wife of retired FSO Edward Brynn, died of brain cancer on Dec. 5, 2010, at her home in Charlotte, N.C. Born Jane Cooke in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1942, Mrs. Brynn was raised in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn and in Garden City, N.Y. She received her B.A. degree fromRosemont College in Philadelphia in 1964 and later earned advanced degrees from Stanford Uni- versity and the University of Denver. After marrying Edward Brynn in 1967, she worked in banking in Dublin while he pursued his doctoral studies there. Starting in 1972, when her husband joined the Foreign Service, Mrs. Brynn accompanied him to posts in Colombo, Bamako, Nouakchott, Moroni (where they opened a new embassy) and Yaounde. The Brynns were twice posted to the United States Air Force Academy, where three of their five children were born. Mrs. Brynn entered the Foreign Service as a financial and budget spe- cialist in 1989, after 17 years of em- ployment on contract or on a Part- Time Intermittent basis. She served in Conakry, Banjul, Bonn, Accra and Paris, where she was the chief of fi- nancial and budget operations. She re- tired on Jan. 1, 2000, and thereafter assisted several embassies (Kinshasa, Asmara, Abidjan, Ouagadougou and Dar es Salaam among them) in up- grading their financial services opera- tions. She received numerous awards during her Foreign Service career. An avid bridge player, Mrs. Brynn was also a devotee of Italian and French opera. In retirement, she served on the board of Davidson Col- lege’s classical music station, WDAV, for seven years. In her honor, WDAV has established a fund to promote wider appreciation of classical music in area schools. She was also a docent at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte for several years. Mrs. Brynn is survived by her hus- band, now serving as acting historian for the Department of State; five chil- dren and their spouses, Sarah Reichert of Louisville, Colo., Edward Cooke Brynn of Okemos, Mich., Kiernan Flynn of Burlington, Vt., Anne Brynn of Chicago, Ill., and Justin Oliver Brynn of Charlotte, N.C.; and eight grandchildren. There will be commemorations of Jane Brynn’s life and work inWashing- ton, D.C., and Charlotte, N.C., in the early spring. Elisha Greifer , 85, a retired FSO and professor emeritus of Northern Michigan University, died at his home in Marquette, Mich., on Sept. 29, 2010, in the loving care of his longtime companion, Beverly Evans. Dr. Greifer was born in New York City on Dec. 27, 1924, and moved to Ishpeming, Mich., in third grade. After graduating as valedictorian of the Ishpeming High School class of 1942, he attended Harvard University, where he was awarded a full scholarship. He suspended his studies at the age of 19 to serve on the USS Winged Arrow during World War II. After the war, he returned to Harvard to com- plete his undergraduate degree in 1946, with a major in philosophy and a minor in mathematics. With a love of foreign languages and having had a taste of travel in the Pacific during the war, Dr. Greifer ac- cepted a job in the Foreign Service with the State Department in Berlin. After a five-year stint there, he re- turned to Harvard to complete a Ph.D. in political science in 1958. This was followed by faculty positions at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1961 Dr. Greifer re-entered the Foreign Service, serving in Argentina and Ecuador. In 1967, he returned to his roots in Upper Michigan, where he taught political science at NMU until his retirement in 1997. Former stu- dents and colleagues, and friends on the tennis courts and ski slopes and