John Cross Webster

1920 - 2021

John Cross Webster February 23, 1920 - December 29, 2021 Glens Falls, New York John Cross Webster died December 29, 2021, in Glens Falls, New York, at the age of 101. He is survived by his wife Barbara, sons John (Nalani), Tom, Bill (Mary), Charlie and Dan (Maria), grandchildren Bryant (Audra), Ellis, Kimmianne and Sean, and great-grandchildren Isaac and Mirah.
John was born February 23, 1920, on his grandfather's farm near Runnels, Iowa, to Harry Newton and Merle Ann (Winegar) Webster. He and his mother left the farm after his father died of tuberculosis in 1923, moving first to Des Moines and then Iowa City, where at City High School and later the University of Iowa he studied music and developed into an accomplished clarinet player. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in music in 1941 and a master's in 1943.
With World War II underway, John served as a civilian instructor at an army air corps training facility at Yale University in 1943 and 1944, teaching radio operators deploying to Europe the fundamentals of their bombers' radio sets. After the two years at the radio school, he took a job as an acoustic research engineer with C.G. Conn, the band instrument maker, in Elkhart, Indiana. While in Elkhart in 1945, he was married to Mary Bryant, whom he had met while both served as radio instructors at Yale. They later moved to Iowa City, where John began work on a PhD program in psychoacoustics, the scientific study of sound perception.
In 1947 John accepted a position in a psychoacoustic research unit at the Navy Electronics Laboratory (NEL) in San Diego. He and Mary moved to San Diego, living in the community of Pacific Beach, where five sons and a daughter were born between 1948 and 1958 (the daughter, Mary Ann, died in infancy), returning briefly to Iowa City in 1951 while John completed his PhD.
Dr. Webster had a long and distinguished career at NEL, where he published numerous professional papers and was active in the Acoustical Society of America. Outside of the lab he played clarinet in the La Jolla Civic Orchestra, sang in the Pacific Beach Methodist Church choir, and coached little league baseball. In 1959 and again in 1966, he arranged exchanges in which he spent the year working at a research laboratory in Cambridge, England, while living with his family of five boys in a nearby village and taking extended trips in Europe in a VW camper.
In the later 1960s and early 1970s his work at the navy lab increasingly involved observation and testing aboard naval ships at sea, often in distant oceans. These travels took him to many foreign lands, providing opportunities for his hobby of photography but also requiring extended absences from home and family. In 1975 he and Mary were divorced, and John retired to upstate New York where in 1977 he was married to Barbara Jancar. The remainder of his life was spent at their home in the Adirondack Mountains near Chestertown and on frequent trips together to far-away places around the world.
It was John's wish that a portion of his ashes be buried next to his daughter's grave at El Camino Memorial Park in his family's hometown of San Diego. A celebration of his life will be held at El Camino and online on February 10 at 1:30.