The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

96 NOVEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL (nowMumbai), Kathmandu, Rabat, Strasbourg, Bridgetown and Vienna. He received the State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award for his handling of political affairs at the U.S. consulate in Bombay during the 1971- 1972 Bangladesh War, and the Superior Honor Award for his actions on Grenada to assess the political situation there and to ensure the safety of Americans on the eve of the 1983 U.S. invasion. Highlights of his years abroad include shaking hands with Indira Gandhi and Helmut Schmidt, and hosting visiting American dignitaries such as musical ambassador Lionel Hampton and civil rights icon Coretta Scott King. In 1978 Mr. Kurze demonstrated diplomatic tact and restraint by allow- ing distraught French fans to hold an impromptu memorial on the first anni- versary of Elvis’ death in the U.S. consul- ate in Strasbourg, as this simply had to occur on American “soil.” At each posting, Mr. Kurze promoted U.S. interests and shared his American values, both as a diplomat and as a friend, and developed many lifelong friendships. Mr. Kurze met Ingrid Sonja Fischer in 1957 on the Zugspitze, the highest peak in Germany, during his 1956-1957 Wayne State University Junior Year Abroad program in Munich, Germany. They married in Cranston on March 26, 1960, and would have four children whom they raised on four continents. Traveling to and from assignments involved 29-hour flights, the penultimate Atlantic crossing of the USS United States , cruises through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope, and navigating the lagoons of Venice in a gondola laden with 29 pieces of luggage. In 1989 Mr. and Mrs. Kurze retired to Middletown, R.I., which became their permanent home base. Mr. Kurze enjoyed time at Sachuest Beach and many family and friend reunions. Mr. and Mrs. Kurze continued to travel abroad extensively, visited missed continents and crossed the international date line. From 1992 to 1993, he and Mrs. Kurze spent a semester abroad in Sweden where he taught at Johnson &Wales Uni- versity/IHM Business School. They maintained their old friendships and gained many new ones, at bridge and poker tables, through the Edward King House Senior Center, the Newport Council for International Visitors (CIV), the Naval War College, the Rhode Island Philatelic Society and North Kingstown Stamp Club. Mr. Kurze served on the board of the Japan-America Society and Black Ships Festival, Newport CIV, and assisted the Middletown Personnel Board and Board of Elections. He was an accomplished pianist, an occasional painter and an avid philatelist. Mr. Kurze was married for 59 years to the late Ingrid S. Kurze and is survived by his four children and three grandchildren: daughter Barbara Kurze of Dorchester, Mass.; sonThomas of Cranston and granddaughter Gemmia Lompa Kurze of Boca Raton, Fla.; son Peter Kurze of Cran- ston; and son Derek Kurze with wife Kellie Walton and granddaughters Natalie and Eliza Walton Kurze of Mendon, Mass. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Norman Bird Sanctuary, 583Third Beach Rd, Middletown RI 02842, or the Edward King House Senior Center, 35 King St., Newport RI 02840. n Robert “Bob” Edward Mitchell , 91, a retired Foreign Service officer, passed away peacefully on July 27 at his home in Brookline, Mass. He had been under hospice care for congestive heart failure. Born in Detroit in 1930, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1952, a master’s in Harvard’s China Area Program in 1955, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia in 1962. In 1962 he was named to head the Sur- vey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965 he accepted a position in Her Majesty’s Colonial Service to establish a survey research center in Hong Kong, where his major project was the Southeast Asian Family Life Study. Breaking with sociological tradition at the time, he studied individu- als not as solo actors, but in the context of families. His team of field researchers pro- vided a year’s warning of the mainland’s plans for major disruptions in Hong Kong at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a warning that colonial authorities ignored. In the early 1970s, Mr. Mitchell taught and headed a survey research center at Florida State University and contributed to the Florida Task Force on Marriage and the Family. Midcareer, he joined the Foreign Service and was posted in Egypt, Yemen and Guinea-Bissau. In Egypt, he played a leading role in the Neighborhood Urban Services Project. In Yemen, his Arabic skills allowed him access to broad sectors of society and earned him the nickname “The Sheik of Taiz.” In retirement, he con- tinued to be a prolific scholar and writer, with 10 books to his name. He was preceded in death by his wife, Sylvia Ann Mitchell (née Sheppard, mar- ried in 1950, died in 1998). He is survived by his three children, Anthony, Maude and Adam; daughter-in-law Gwen Ossen- fort; and grandchildren Tucker and Tate. He is to be interred in his mother’s family cemetery in Midland County, Mich. n Richard “Keith” Rutherford , 80, of Corrales, N.M., husband of retired For- eign Service Officer Sharon Rutherford, passed away peacefully on July 23.