George Day

George Frederick Day died on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022, in his apartment at Jones-Harrison Senior Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his daughter, Georgianna Day Ludcke, and son, John Day, sitting beside him.  George Day, the grandson of one of Superior’s earliest families, was born in Superior on July 1, 1926, the child of Kathryn Hole Day and Frederick Ira Day of Superior. His father was the owner and proprietor of the Day & Frees Lumber Company, the Superior branch of which was opened for business by George’s grandfather, his namesake, George L. Day, in 1879.  

George was the youngest child in the family. He had two sisters: Elizabeth, nine years older, and Isabelle, seven years older. One of the greatest tragedies to befall the family was the untimely death of Isabelle at age 11.  His extended family included two aunts – Joesphine Day Mendell, an accomplished pianist who gave private piano lessons in Superior and who married Superior resident Bert Mendell, and Marian Day, an accomplished painter who had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and trained with Birger Sandzén, a Swedish painter who taught at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.  

The family life in which George grew up included a love and appreciation of music, literature and the arts, and these interests shaped and animated his life. The Days were well known members of the Nuckolls County community, and from his earliest days through to his last, George Day loved the town of his birth and relished its history and the people who lived there. George Day had an encyclopedic memory, much of it devoted to the characters and events of Superior.  

George attended Superior public schools and graduated from Superior High School in 1944. He was actively involved in school and town life in these years, singing in choir, playing cornet in band, acting in theater productions and competing in track and field events. He spent a great deal of time with a group of friends who referred to themselves as the “Gas House Gang,” and was made up of George, Denny Meyers, Bill Hill, Melvin Kugler, Bill Niehaus, Larry Whitney, Bill McBroom and Don Boyd. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, George and his friends were anxious to join the military. In 1944, at their first opportunity, George and one of his friends drove to Hastings to enlist in the United States Navy. He completed boot camp at Farragut Naval Training camp in Northern Idaho and was eventually assigned to the U.S.S. Kidd destroyer, on which he served as a sonar operator. The ship was on duty in the Pacific theater, and was stationed at various ports including San Diego, San Francisco and Honolulu, Hawaii.  

At the conclusion of World War II, George returned to Superior, and like many other returning GIs, he went back to school. At the urging of a Naval officer under whom George served, George applied to, and was accepted at, Dartmouth College, where his great, great uncle Aaron Day had attended many years before. George cherished his time at Dartmouth College, where he met life-long friends, and where his love of literature deepened, leading him to major in English. On a blind date, he met and fell in love with a young woman from Mt. Holyoke College, Ann Harvey, who, like himself, combined intellectual curiosity with a sense of fun and an openness to adventure.  

In his third year of college, George’s father experienced a heart attack that greatly curtailed his ability to run the family business. George returned to Superior, where he took up the reins of Day & Frees Lumber Company.  Not willing to abandon his new love, and after Ann Harvey graduated from Mt. Holyoke in 1948, she and George were married in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where Ann and her mother, sister, and two brothers had come to live to escape German bombardment of England.  Ann joined George in Superior, where they soon built a small, mid-century-styled house located at the corner of Ninth Street and Commercial Avenue in Superior.  In due course, they welcomed into their family daughter, Georgianna (1949) and sons, John (1951) and David (1953).  

While George loved his life in Superior – raising a young family, running the lumber yard, living alongside his extended family and many friends, he also yearned to pursue a professional life that would build on his love of literature. In 1957, George and Ann decided to leave Superior and return to Dartmouth, so George could finish his bachelor’s degree. They moved their young family to Hanover, New Hampshire, for a year, where George graduated in spring, 1958. The following year the family moved to Marshfield, Massachusetts, while George pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, earning his master’s of education degree in 1959. While there he accepted an offer to teach at a private school in Hawaii. The family moved to live on the campus of Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, which at that point was still a “territory” of the U.S., not yet a state of the union. George taught high school English for three years at the K-12 school.  In 1962, he was accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado, so the family moved to Boulder. While George pursued his graduate studies, his wife, Ann, became an administrative assistant at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to support the family.  

Upon completing his studies, George was offered an assistant professorship at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) in Cedar Falls, Iowa, so in the summer of 1967 the family moved to a home in the neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa. George rose from assistant professor to full professor in the English Department of UNI, retiring in 1994, whereupon he was named Professor Emeritus.

Besides teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, George engaged in research centered on Western American literature. Over the years of his academic career, George published articles and gave numerous presentations on various American writers. His Ph.D. research on the writer Vardis Fisher culminated in the 1976 publication of his book The Uses of History in the Novels of Vardis Fisher. George was an enthusiastic supporter of the author Willa Cather, who grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and he frequently attended the annual conference held there. He sat on the Board of Governors of the Cather Association for a number of years. He was an energetic, longtime member of the Western American Literature Association, becoming its president in 1983.  

George and Ann liked to travel. While in Hawaii, Colorado and Iowa, they often spent their vacations taking camping trips. Thanks partly to Ann’s work, they were able to take trips to Europe to visit Ann’s childhood homes and travel throughout Europe, which involved much camping. George and Ann divorced in 1979. During an academic trip to Spain in 1993. George met Clara Arrascue Coronado, and in 1995, they married in Waterloo, Iowa.  After retirement, George and Clara moved to a home in Cedar Falls. In 2019, as his health deteriorated, he moved to the Jones-Harrison Senior Living Residence in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just a few blocks from his daughter’s home. George’s marriage to Clara ended in 2022. 

George is remembered by his family and friends for his robust sense of humor and creative imagination, an example of which was his creation of the Superior Music and Concert Association to bring musical events to his hometown, which succeeded in doing so for several years. George was widely known for his passionate love of music, especially classical music of the romantic era, and especially opera. He served on the board of directors and as president of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony. For many years George wrote music reviews for the Waterloo Courier newspaper, covering performances of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony and other musical events.  He is remembered also for his unstinting love and suppport of his family and his friends, as well as for his respect to all people no matter their station in life. 

George Day is survived by his children Georgianna Day Ludcke of Minneapolis, John Day and his wife, Janice Eisma Day, of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and David Day and his wife, Alisa Jonas, of Brookline, Massachusetts; seven grandchildren, a great-granddaughter; three stepchildren; three stepgrandchildren; four nephews and nieces and their spouses and children.