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Ture Fred Bergman

William Henry Cherry

Helen McDaniel Craven

Thomas H. Johnson

Louise Rosenblatt Ratner

Kate Payson Tredennick

Ture Fred Bergman

Ture Fred Bergman, 96, a former Princeton resident, died February 14.

Born in Overby, Sweden, he moved to Princeton for carpentry work after immigrating to the United States in 1937 and working on tugboats in New York harbor for a time.

Prior to that he lived at sea for 13 years as a sailor on Merchant Marine square-rigger ships. He married Hjordis Lindstrom in 1938.

Mr. Ture enjoyed telling his family and friends about his days at sea carrying cargo from countries in Africa to South America.

As a carpenter he worked on several Princeton University buildings, including the Firestone Library and the Woodrow Wilson Building.

He was a charter member of the Lutheran Church of the Messiah.

In 1995 he and his wife moved to Denver, CO to be closer to family.

Mr. Ture is predeceased by his wife, Hjordis. He is survived by a daughter, Evelyn of Denver; and two grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be sent to the Lutheran Church of the Messiah, 407 Nassau Street, Princeton, N.J. 08540.

William Henry Cherry

William Henry Cherry, 85, a longtime Princeton resident, died February 19.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Cherry lived in Princeton for 53 years before moving to Stonebridge in Montgomery Township last year.

He was a physicist, who graduated from Bayside High School in New York City, received his bachelor's of science degree from MIT in 1941, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958. His father, William Cherry, was a civil engineer for New York City's docks, and his mother, Theresa Baur Cherry was a stained-glass window artisan at the Louis C. Tiffany Studios prior to her marriage.

He began his career at RCA in Harrison, N.J. in 1941. He attended the groundbreaking for RCA Laboratories (later RCA's David Sarnoff Research Laboratories) in Princeton, and began working there at its opening in 1942. Using the auspices of RCA's employee education program, he was employed full time while working on his Ph.D.

At RCA he received eleven patents, contributed to RCA's development of color television, and was an early pioneer in the field of super-conductivity, using low temperatures to lower electronic resistance. During World War II, Dr. Cherry and another physicist, Dr. Jan A. Rajchman, spent two years trying to improve betatron electron tube to generate millimeter-wavelength radio frequencies. At the time, state of the art radar in World War II used three to ten-centimeter wavelengths to track planes, missiles, and ships.

During 1946 and 1947, he worked on the color television and his articles on "Colorimetry in Television" in the RCA Review and the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers established the mathematical basis of what could be called "video high fidelity." His work on quantifying the visible spectra in a color video signal also contributed to RCA Laboratories' compression of a color broadcast channel by two thirds so that it would fit in the government-allotted bandwidth for monochrome television.

Dr. Cherry was also involved in RCA's research, development, and manufacture of superconducting niobium tin solenoids, which make possible MRI technology. He made measurements and interpretations that were critical to the research and development behind high field superconductivity and contributed an article to the September 1964 RCA Review on superconductivity.

In the 1960s he helped pioneer gigahertz computing using electron-beam addressing, examined the relationship between the theoretical and experimental behavior of superconductive materials, and developed test equipment and observational techniques for superconductors under extremely high magnetic fields.

Late in that decade and early in the 1970s he developed and advocated within RCA an interactive cable-television educational system that provided coursework, live and recorded lectures, library access, coded or written exams, and individual and group discussion. He retired from RCA in 1975.

Dr. Cherry was elected to Princeton Township Committee in 1977, serving three terms until 1986. While on Committee he served as liaison to the Flood Control Committee, the Board of Health, the Welfare Board, the Recreation Board and the Sewer Operating Committee. Beginning in 1987 he served as Chair of the Floor Control Committee and continued as Chair until 1994. He was an avid distance swimmer and loved sailing and summer vacations on Nantucket and more recently Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y.

In 2004, he received the Good Guy Award from the Women's Political Caucus of New Jersey. His current pursuits included being chairman of the Princeton AARP's Legislative Committee. He was a life member of the American Physical Society and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Patricia; two married daughters, Kathleen of Princeton, and Diana of Springfield, IL; a son, Martin of St. Johnsbury, VT; and five grandchildren.

There will be a memorial service and brief reception on Sunday, March 6, at 1 p.m. at All Saints Church, located at 16 All Saints Road.

Funeral arrangements are under the direction of The Mather-Hodge Funeral Home.

Helen McDaniel Craven

Helen McDaniel Craven, 92, a former Princeton resident, died February 19.

Born in Suzhou, China on July 23, 1912, she was the youngest of six children of Baptist missionary parents.

She married Wesley Frank Craven on May 30, 1931. In 1953, she began teaching preschool children in Princeton. Two-year olds were her favorite age group and she loved teaching them music and movement. Her most rewarding experience in education was helping found and administrate the Princeton Junior School. After retiring, she moved to Carol Woods Retirement Community in 1993.

She loved music and played in recorder societies for many years. Her other love, besides family, was travel. She visited many places around the world including China.

Ms. Craven is predeceased by her husband Wesley. She is survived by two daughters, Nancy Beecher of Madison, WI, and Betty Barber of Portland, OR; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Memorial gifts may be made to the YMCA Children's Center, c/o Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA, 980 Airport Road, Chapel Hill, N.C., 27514.

Thomas H. Johnson

Thomas H. Johnson, 62, of Princeton, died February 26, at home.

Born in Princeton, he was a 1956 graduate of St. Paul's School and a 1961 graduate of The Hun School. Mr. Johnson was also a former altar server at the dedication mass of St. Paul's Church in 1956.

He was a self-employed electrical contractor. In addition, he was past president and former chief of Mercer Engine No. 3; past president of Princeton Lions Club; past president of the Nassau Social Club; president and founder of the Kenmore Social Club; a football coach for the Mercer County Football League, heavy weight division; former member of IBEW Local Union #269; and member of Princeton Boy Scout Troop 56.

Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife of 19 years, Josephine; two sons, Thomas R. Jr. and Michael J., ; and a daughter, Jessica; all of Princeton.

A funeral will be held Wednesday, at 10 a.m., at the Mather-Hodge Funeral Home, located at 40 Vandeventer Avenue. Following will be a Mass of Christian Burial at 11 a.m. at St. Paul's Church, located at 214 Nassau Street.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Johnson Family College Fund, c/o Commerce Bank, 883 State Road 206, Princeton, N.J., 08540.

Louise Rosenblatt Ratner

Louise Rosenblatt Ratner, 100, a former longtime resident of Princeton, died February 8, in Arlington, Va.

Born Aug. 23, 1904, in Atlantic City, N.J., she lived in Princeton beginning in 1950 before moving two years ago to Virginia.

A professor and writer, she received the "Certificat d'Etudes Francais" from France's University of Grenoble in 1926. She received a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne in 1931.

She developed a revolutionary approach to understanding the reading process and the teaching of literature with the 1938 publication of Literature as Exploration (Appleton-Century; Modern Language Association, 1995, 5th ed.)

The University of Chicago's Wayne Booth, writing the foreword to the 5th edition of Literature as Exploration, noted, "I doubt that any other literary critic of this century has enjoyed and suffered as sharp a contrast of powerful influence and absurd neglect as Louise Rosenblatt...She has probably influenced more teachers in their ways of dealing with literature than any other critic."

Dr. Rosenblatt was a professor of English education at NYU's School of Education (now Steinhardt School of Education). Prior to her arrival at NYU in 1948, she was an assistant professor at Brooklyn College (1938-1948) and an instructor at Barnard College (1927-1938). At NYU, where she earned the university's "Great Teacher Award" in 1972, she headed the doctoral program in English Education until her retirement from the university in 1972.

Her final book, Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays, was published by Heinemann on Feb. 1. She also authored The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Southern Illinois University, 1978, 1994) and wrote and co-authored numerous articles and publications.

After her retirement from NYU, Dr. Rosenblatt was a visiting professor at Rutgers University and the University of Miami. She was also a member of faculty institutes in English at Northwestern University, Michigan State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Alabama, the University of Alberta, Auburn University, and the University of Massachusetts.

Rosenblatt received numerous awards from organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), including its Distinguished Service Award (1972), the David Russell Award for Distinguished Research (1980), and the James R. Squire Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Teaching and Learning in the English Language Arts (2002). She was elected to the International Reading Association Hall of Fame in 1992 and received the John Dewey Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

During her years at Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1925, Dr. Rosenblatt developed friendships with anthropologist Margaret Mead and poet Léonie Adams, part of a group known informally as "The Ash Can Cats." Mead chronicles the friendship in her memoir, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (William Morrow & Co., 1972).

Dr. Rosenblatt was married to Sidney Ratner, an economic historian at Rutgers University. The two were married for 63 years at the time of Mr. Ratner's death in 1996.

During World War II, Mr. Ratner was an economist for the U.S. State Department's Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration, the New York Times reported in Mr. Ratner's obituary, and Dr. Rosenblatt worked for a U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of War Information, analyzing information from Nazi-occupied France.

Dr. Rosenblatt began as a literary historian and critic, publishing at age 27 a book in French on the "Art for Art's Sake" movement in England. While teaching literature to college students, she developed an approach that broke with the dominant academic model (the New Criticism), which elevated "the text," declaring it accessible only to those trained in unlocking its code. By contrast, Dr. Rosenblatt stressed that every act of reading involved a "transaction" of reader and text in which both were essential. In her view, any text was lifeless without a reader who is active: active readers create multiple readings of the same text; no reading is uniquely "correct."

At the same time, Dr. Rosenblatt argued against the purely personal and subjective approaches more popular in recent years. She noted that some readings were more defensible than others and worked for a community of readers who sought to refine their reading and test their responses against the text.

Dr. Rosenblatt is survived by a son, Jonathan, of Arlington, Va. and a granddaughter, Anna.

Kate Payson Tredennick

Kate Payson Tredennick, 91, died February 27 at The Elms of Cranbury.

Born in Portland, Maine, Mrs. Tredennick lived in Princeton for more than 25 years before moving to Rossmoor in Monroe Township 35 years ago.

She received a bachelor's degree from Smith College, and was a former chairman of the Red Cross Blood Donor Drive. She was a State of Maine Women's Singles Champion in tennis.

Daughter of the late Kate Wheeler Payson and Robert Payson, and wife of the late, Alan Tredennick, she is survived by two daughters, Joan Tredennick and Anne Chacchia, both of Rochester N.Y.; a son, Alan of Monroe Township; nine grandchildren; 18 great grandchildren; and three great-great grandchildren.

Funeral services and burial are private under the direction of Kimble Funeral Home. Memorial contributions may be made to The American Red Cross.