John M. Dealy - 1992 Distinguished Service Awardee

The Society’s Distinguished Service Award was presented to Dr. John M. Dealy at the 64th Annual Meeting held in Santa Barbara. This is the third time the Award has been made since its establishment in 1984.

The criterion for the Award is "...members whose service in responsible positions has extended over long periods and has been of great value to the Society”. A glance at the history of John’s service shows that it meets this criterion fully and admirably. He has served on many Society Committees, including the Executive Committee, on which his attention to issues of Society governance has been of inestimable value. He served as Chairman and principal mover of the Nomenclature Committee, whose report he wrote; it has been reprinted most recently in Volume 37(1) of the Journal of Rheology.

The most noteworthy accomplishment of his service occurred during his Presidency of the Society in 1988-1989. He assumed the office just as the Society was forced to double its dues to the present $40, because of the financial situation of the Journal, as described by Dr. Collins, Treasurer, in the January 1987 issue of the Rheology Bulletin. Our favorable arrangement to have the Journal published by John Wiley had deteriorated. As a result, the Society had no control over steadily escalating costs of the Journal to libraries. Further, the page size of the Journal was severely limited, requiring either rejection or untimely publication of worthy manuscripts, or large financial penalties, which were the immediate cause of the 1987 dues increase.

John Dealy undertook the task of halting and indeed reversing the precarious path of the publishing and financial situation by having the Society take responsibility for the publication of the Journal through the American Institute of Physics, the umbrella organization of which the Society is a founding member. This required not only courage and confidence, but also diplomacy, perseverance and persuasiveness, in dealing with Wiley, with A.I.P., and with his colleagues on the Executive Committee. The negotiations required innumerable meetings and telephone calls, but were concluded successfully. A measure of the success is that in 1988 the Journal published 822 pages, at a cost to the library subscribers of $0.29 per page; in 1992 it published 1848 pages at a library cost of $0.17 per page. And there is no indication that it will be necessary to raise dues in the near future. Indeed the Journal has been able to generate a surplus towards the necessary creation of a reserve fund to guard against contingencies, and in the future may be able to support, if the inclined walls. Joseph has also recently been working on a membership wishes, an expansion of Society activities.

Clearly the turn-around of the Society’s publishing and financial situation created by John’s service during his Presidency "...has been of great value to the Society”, and fully justifies the rare distinction of the Award.