by Mikal J. Harris

DE Campus Life Editor

The office at 3424 Faner Hall once served a local Boy Scout leader, an avid and published international researcher, a flag football coach, and a scholar who received about 60 research grants during his SIUC career.

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But sociology department chairman Joel Best says Thomas Eynon also had a reputation as a grouch that seemed to directly contradict the high marks he received on teaching evaluations each year. Best, a longtime friend of the late sociology professor, says he became aware of that reputation shortly after his job interview at SIUC.

I was quite shocked when I got here because he seemed grumpy to me as well, he said. Part of his act was that he was a grumpy guy.

Best said Eynon, 70, who died early Monday morning at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, was really someone who loved to teach and who gave substantial efforts to the community. His last gift was his body to the School of Medicine.

The SIU Board of Trustees awarded Eynon the 1998 Lindell W. Sturgis Award for Public Service in February.

Eynon’s numerous other accomplishments fill his 22-page vita. Those notable achievements include serving SIU campuses in Nigata, Japan, and Edwardsville, editing The Sociological Quarterly, and his 1983 appointment to the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission by then Gov. Jim Thompson.

Eynon received his undergraduate, graduate and doctorate degrees at The Ohio State University, and came to SIUC in 1968 as a professor of sociology and criminology. He also began work at SIUC’s Corrections Center for the Study of Crime at that time.

Two years later, he laid the basic foundation for SIUC’s Administration of Justice program as the department’s first chairman. He built the program to include 480 undergraduate and 63 graduate students.

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Eynon also directed undergraduate and graduate studies in sociology during his SIUC career, and he was teaching two classes at the time of his death. In recent years, he also spent consecutive summers teaching at the Nigata campus.

Rhonda Vinson, executive assistant to the chancellor for international and economic development, said that zest for educating never slowed as Eynon grew older.

He kept teaching because he still loved teaching, she said. It doesn’t appear that he even rested in the summer.

FACTOID:For information regarding a memorial service for Thomas Eynon call the Sociology Department at 453-2494.