A celebration of life for longtime English professor Leon Satterfield have been scheduled for Saturday, June 18 at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Satterfield died Tuesday, April 12 of complications of Alzheimer's Disease.
A celebration of life will be held from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. on the east side of Old Main at Nebraska Wesleyan University, followed by a party from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Lux Center for the Arts at 2601 N. 48th Street in Lincoln.
Professor Emeritus of English Leon Satterfield had an exemplary career teaching English, composition and journalism at Nebraska Wesleyan University from 1960 until his 2000 retirement.
Besides teaching, Satterfield wrote a biweekly column for the Lincoln Star and then the Lincoln Journal Star titled “The Truth Mainly,” taken from the opening lines of Huckleberry Finn. Many of his columns were compiled in his 1999 book, Satterfield on the Loose.
Satterfield published scholarship on American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson and writer James Thurber, and about teaching composition and the rhetorical use of irony. The three-time National Endowment for the Humanities fellow was a strong proponent of writing across Nebraska Wesleyan’s curriculum.
He was a founding member of the University Place Community Organization and was active in Nebraskans for Peace, Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty and the ACLU.
His favorite writers included Twain, Thurber, Kent Haruf and Professor Emeritus of English William Kloefkorn. Satterfield and Kloefkorn were founding members of the Loup River Expeditionary Force, which goes on springtime river runs and has continued and grown into a second generation.
He is survived by his wife Mary Ann, two sons, a daughter, their spouses, five grandchildren, his mother-in-law, a sister, two brothers-in-law and several nieces and nephews.
Memorials may be made to Nebraska Wesleyan University, the Alzheimer’s Association of the Great Plains, Nebraska Public Radio or any of his favorite causes.