David Hepburn Milton

David Hepburn Milton, longtime resident of San Francisco, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon, died on March 15, 2017. Born on December 21, 1923 in Winnetka, Illinois to Taliaferro and Lucille Forbes Milton, he grew up in Winnetka and attended New Trier High School. After his family moved to Chicago, he graduated from Francis Parker High School.

Near the end of his first semester at Wooster College, Ohio, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at the age of barely 18. As an active member of the National Maritime Union, he sailed on North Atlantic convoys throughout World War II. On a convoy to northern Russia in 1944, his ship ran aground off Scotland and was taken over by the U.S. Navy to be sunk on the Normandy beachhead to make an artificial harbor for the invasion of France. He, with most of the merchant crew, volunteered for the operation. The ship was sunk on June 6, 1944 off the Omaha Beach landing site.

After the war, he was an active trade unionist and officer in the CIO steel, packing, and electrical industries. In 1948, he married Eva Zhitlovsky with whom he had two sons, Christopher and Taliaferro. They later divorced.

He moved to San Francisco in 1958, and after the interval of many active years, completed his B.A. at San Francisco State University. He married Nancy Dall, and in 1964 they went to the People’s Republic of China where they both taught at the First Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. After their return home in 1969, they co-authored The Wind Will Not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China, 1964 1969. They were also co-editors with Franz Schurmann of the Random House China Reader: People’s China.

He earned a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1978 taught at the University of Oregon, Eugene for more than 20 years. He was the author of The Politics of U.S. Labor, From the Great Depression to the New Deal and Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network.

He was predeceased by his parents and his three older siblings: John Milton, Isobel Cerney and Meredith Sheehan. He leaves Nancy, his beloved wife of 54 years, his sons Christopher and Taliaferro Milton, his stepson Grant Lupher, grandchildren and great-children. At his own request there will be no public memorial. His ashes will be scattered at sea. “Fair winds and following seas.”

Donations in his memory may be made to Doctors Without Borders or the ACLU.