Paul DEMPSEY

DEMPSEY, Paul

Paul Dempsey, a Professor at UC Davis and Sacramento State University, died in his sleep on the morning of December 17, 2009. He was 92. He died in his own bed, in the house he designed, a few hours after being tucked in by his wife.

Paul was born in New Trier Township, Ill., on August 16, 1917, the fifth and youngest child of James E. Dempsey and Mary J. Dempsey (nee Driscoll). His father was an inventor and entrepreneur who created a telegraph cipher code used by railroads to reduce signaling costs and later ran an electroplating business. Paul grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, with three brothers and one sister and loved games and language. His sister, Rosemary, and he challenged each other to give dictionary definitions for obscure words, a skill that distinguished Paul for his entire life.

In 1935, Paul graduated from New Trier High School, where he was student body president, and set off for the Naval Academy, where he had received an appointment. Paul's contrary nature made him ill-suited for Navy life, however, and he transferred before his sophomore year to Amherst College, where he majored in English Literature, met the poet Robert Frost, and graduated in 1939.

In the years between college graduation and World War II, Paul held a variety of jobs, from graduate student in English Literature at the University of Chicago, to copywriter at WGN radio, to English teacher at New Trier. When WWII threatened, Paul was drafted early, but insisted that he was a conscientious objector. After a few months among the ''oddballs'' at a Conscientious Objector camp in upstate New York, however, and the U.S. entry into the war, Paul joined the Navy and spent the war years teaching officers to target and fire the big naval guns.

As the war neared its end, Paul was transferred to Naval Intelligence and sent to the University of Colorado in Boulder to study Chinese. In September 1945, just weeks after the war ended, he met his wife, Irene (nee Olson), who was about to start her junior year. Three weeks after they met, Paul and Irene were married on a lark that lasted more than 64 years.

After spending 1946 in Sweden studying architecture, Paul returned to Boulder in 1947 and completed a Masters Degree in Psychology in 1949. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley and completed his Ph.D. in 1951. After his Ph.D., he spent time at Cornell University before joining the UC Davis faculty in 1956, where he served as chairman of the nascent psychology department. In 1963, he won tenure at Sacramento State University, where he taught and did research until his retirement in 1993.

Paul's intellectual interests were very broad, even within his chosen field of psychology. At Sac State he spent time studying hypnosis, but his primary area of research, starting in graduate school, was psychological testing. One particular contribution was his invention of what he called ''contextual analysis'' as an alternative to the conventional ''factor analysis'', which is used to analyze testing data.

Paul was an avid tennis player, playing daily into his eighties and then several times a week until first one shoulder and then the other finally gave out at age 87. He enjoyed all sorts of games, especially card games. His monthly poker evenings continued until weeks before his death. Even at age 92, he won much more often than not against much younger competitors.

Paul is survived by his wife, Irene, his sons Ajax and Jed, and his daughter-in-law Diana. A memorial service is planned for Saturday, April 3, 2010, in Davis. Please call his son Jed at (310) 300-4030 for details. In lieu of flowers, we ask for donations ''in memory of Paul Dempsey'' to Amherst College (he was class of '39) or to the Food Bank of Yolo County. Donations can be sent to Amherst College, c/o Diana Scriver, P.O. Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002, or to The Food Bank of Yolo County, 1244 Fortna Avenue, Woodland, CA 95776.