The work for this post was begun under a wrong assumption. I thought that the Chicago economics Ph.D. (1926) Shirley J. Coon was a woman and I quite honestly expected to add another PhD trained woman economist to the alumnae list of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. The portrait of Shirley J. Coon from the University of Washington yearbook from 1931 and the discovery that “J” stood for “Jay” forced me to update my Bayesian prior in the matter of Shirley’s identity.
The post turns out to be rather short as I have been unable to find many footprints left in the sands of time by Dean Shirley Jay Coon. A dissertation on the economic development of Missoula, Montana seems as inauspicious a topic as one could imagine, even for the German Historical School, so Coon’s academic obscurity comes as little surprise one century after his dissertation year at the University of Chicago.
_______________________
Shirley Jay Coon
Timeline
1887. Born 16 June in Walworth, Wisconsin.
1909. Beloit College undergraduate.
1915. M.A., Ohio State University
1915-19. Member of the department of economics and business administration at Ohio State.
Price expert for the Ohio food administrator during WWI
1919-1927. On the faculty of Montana State University.
1920-27. Dean of the Business School, Montana State University.
1925-26. Sabbatical to complete Ph.D. at Chicago.
1926. Ph.D. University of Chicago. “Economic Development of Missoula, Montana,” unpublished doctoral dissertation.
1927-1938. Professor of Economics at the University of Washington.
1931-38. Dean of the college of economics and business at University of Washington.
1938. Resigned due to ill health.
1938. Died 4 October in Seattle, Washington.
Sources: Obituary in The Daily Missoulian (Missoula, Montana) · Oct 5, 1938 and University of Washington yearbooks.
Image Source: University of Washington yearbook TYEE 1931, p. 38.