The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 93 and earned a bachelor’s degree in educa- tion from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943. He later returned to Penn for master’s degrees in education (1950) and in political science (1951). A Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet at Penn as an undergraduate, Mr. Hitchcock entered the U.S. Army as a lieutenant in 1943 and was assigned to the Army Air Corps Administration. He served in Korea as a military govern- ment officer and, later, as captain. He remained in the Army Air Corps Reserve, later the Air Force Reserve, resigning in 1957 as major. Mr. Hitchcock worked for the Department of State and the U.S. Infor- mation Agency in Washington from 1952 to 1954. In 1954 he was commissioned as a Foreign Service officer, diplomatic offi- cer and consular officer, and his career extended until 1982. He served overseas in Canada, Argentina, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Laos, Thailand and South Korea. His first wife, Margaret L. Schug, died in 2002. They had no children. In 2003, Mr. Hitchcock married Margaret M. “Mary” Hamel of Calgary, Canada, who survives him. n Jay Kenneth Katzen , 83, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on April 9 at his home, Beaver Cabin, in Talkeetna, Alaska. The son of Perry and Minnie Katzen of Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Katzen was born on Aug. 23, 1936. He attended Princ- eton University, graduating magna cum laude in politics. After earning a master’s degree at Yale University, Mr. Katzen entered the U.S. Foreign Service and during a diplomatic career of more than 25 years served in Australia, Burundi, both Con- gos, Romania, Mali, the United Nations and at the White House. He spoke five languages. After retiring from the Foreign Ser- vice, Mr. Katzen served as consultant to the CEOs of five Fortune 50 compa- nies for a decade, as vice chairman of the African Development Foundation and as acting chief of staff of the Peace Corps. A lifelong Republican, he was the first of his party to represent his rural constituency in Virginia’s House of Del- egates, where he served for four terms before narrowly losing as the candidate for lieutenant governor. He was a visiting professor at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and a member of several university boards. Mr. Katzen and his wife of 56 years, Paddy, were driving forces behind con- struction of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was chairman of the Board of the Combat Wounded Veteran Challenge. The couple moved to Alaska in 2009, where he served as a national park ranger. Mr. Katzen leaves his wife, Paddy; sons Timothy, David and James; and seven grandchildren. n Theodore Cooke Nelson , 89, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on May 9 at the Oaknoll Retirement Resi- dence in Iowa City, Iowa. Mr. Nelson was born on Jan. 6, 1931, in Hartford, Conn., to Mr. and Mrs. R. Winthrop Nelson. He attended local schools and then followed his older brother to the Loomis School (now Loomis Chaffee) in Windsor, Conn., and then to Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1952. Having enlisted in the U.S. Army, Mr. Nelson graduated from the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., and then served with the U.S. Army in Germany until 1955. He spent a summer at Middlebury, Vt., in the Intensive Russian Language Program, and then earned a master’s degree in Russian studies from the Uni- versity of Minnesota in 1956. His mar- riage to Elizabeth Erickson, in summer 1956, ended in divorce in 1957. Mr. Nelson joined the Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State in the summer of 1956 and moved to Washington, D.C., where he served until 1959. He married Margaret Moeller that year, and the couple moved to their first overseas posting, at the consulate in Sarajevo, where their first son was born. Mr. Nelson’s next posting, in 1961, was to U.S. Embassy Pretoria, where his second and third sons were born. After studying Hungarian at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, he was posted to the U.S. Legation in Budapest in 1965. After returning to Washington, D.C., for a three-year assignment, Mr. Nelson earned a master’s degree in popula- tion affairs at the University of North Carolina in 1971. He then served as coordinator of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities in Tehran from 1972 to 1974, when he was posted to Kabul until 1976. He returned to the State Department from 1976 to 1983. Retiring from the State Department in 1983, Mr. Nelson became an active volunteer at Youth for Understanding, an international exchange program for high school students. Moving to Iowa City, in 1988, he became involved with the Teaching Assistant/Simulated Patient program at the University of Iowa College of Medi- cine, retiring in 2000. In his later working years and in