Page 57 - Volume 9, Issue 3

mock-up of a possible magazine, and he bears major credit for the eventual Executive Council's decision to publish a magazine. After much discussion, a vote was taken that the magazine be titled “Acoustics Today.” After a fairly extensive well-advertised open search, Stern was selected as the Founding Editor of Acoustics Today.
The successive issues of Acoustics Today bore the unmis- takable creative stamp of Dick Stern, who planned every issue and sought to have a magazine that would be of wide interest of the membership as a whole. The covers were of his design and were stimulating and attractive. The Executive Council was pleasantly surprised to find that the quality of the maga- zine had attracted a substantial support from advertisers.
The activities mentioned above attest to the undisputed fact that Dick Stern was a visionary person. At the end of his term as President, he formed a committee, Vision 2010, which he chaired and which resulted in a report published in Acoustics Today. For the most part, the Society still continues (or perhaps strives) to move according to the vision of that committee. As for his extensive service to the Society, he was a person who got things done. One of his colleagues at Penn State, who knows him well, states “He is willing to accept any assignment asked of him. Simply put, Dick Stern will do any- thing for the ASA.”
The Acoustical Society of America and the readers of this magazine will greatly miss Dick Stern.
and his association with the current Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Martin, Stern came up with the idea of having all of JASA made available to the entire world on a collection of CDs. This required all the issues going back to 1929 to be scanned and then put on CDs so that people could view the individ- ual articles on their computers. Stern managed to get Penn State to donate a complete set of back issues for scanning and identified a company that would do the scanning. The proj- ect was carried through and the set of CDs were marketed by the ASA, starting in 1999.
The current ASA membership probably knew Dick Stern best because of his excellent service as the Founding Editor and Current Editor of Acoustics Today. When Stern was first on the Executive Council, from 1987 to 1990, he became a strong believer that the Society needed a magazine, some- thing analogous to Physics Today. The late Bob Apfel pushed vigorously for this during the early 90s, but there were con- cerns that the Society could not afford it. (The Society had actually had a succession of two popular magazines, Noise Control and Sound: its Uses and Control, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the magazine was discontinued because of a lack of funds.) Then, in the early years of the first decade of the 2000s, the topic became alive again, and there was a feeling that the Society could at that time, because of increased income and endowment funds, indeed afford a magazine, although only in a modest way. Stern made up a
ASA has learned of the passings of: Kim Benjamin
Stanley Ehrlich
Finn Jacobsen
56 Acoustics Today, July 2013