Without fail for over 30 years, Joe Whitney published a Valentine’s Day poem for his wife in the Toronto Star. Each year’s poem was different and never identified his wife.

Every Feb. 14, Diana Baxter read through all the Valentine’s Day greetings in the Star to find the one meant for her. It was like a game for the couple who had been together since 1981, and in later years Baxter’s friends joined in on the fun, also trying to find that one special poem.

“He was romantic,” said Baxter, “a real scholar and a gentleman.”

An environmental geographer who specialized in soil erosion, waste management and rural energy use, Whitney’s primary research interest was China. He also conducted research in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Sudan, taught in Hong Kong, Japan and Canada, and worked in Thailand.

“He had a broad and eccentric interest in the world,” said Baxter. “He was always up for something new and different.”

Given his travels and adventurous nature, Whitney was an amazing storyteller, making him a great favourite at dinner parties and in the classroom.

Whitney died of melanoma at age 87 on Sept. 2.

“He was a man of many interests,” said Roger Clarke, an undergraduate student of Whitney’s at the University of Toronto in 1969. “He helped a lot of us grow up.”

Whitney didn’t just teach Clarke and his classmates about Chinese geography, a new course Whitney added to the U of T’s curriculum; he vividly described the country’s people and politics because he wanted students to “live it as well as learn it,” said Clarke.

Whitney’s interest in Asia was sown several generations before his birth.

According to an account of Whitney’s life written in 1996 by Robert Fuller, a University of Georgia PhD student at the time, one of Whitney’s forefathers went to Japan from Philadelphia in the 1800s to teach accounting. He then created a business school which still exists today as a university. Whitney’s grandfather went to Tokyo to work as the U.S. embassy’s doctor. While in Japan, he established an eye hospital.

Whitney’s father was born in Japan but finished his education in the U.K., where he married and started a family, bringing Joseph Bevan Robertson Whitney into the world in London in 1928.

Conversations about Japan were common in the Whitney household, and that gave Whitney an interest in the country. But with strong negative sentiment toward Japan during the Second World War, Whitney’s passion shifted to China, according to Fuller’s account.

Whitney married his first wife in 1950, the year he graduated with a degree in geography from the University of Cambridge. Instead of travelling to China, which had just undergone its communist revolution, the couple went to Hong Kong, where Whitney taught geography for the next 12 years. He also became fluent in Cantonese.

Whitney moved his family to the U.S. in the 1960s and received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1969 before moving to Toronto.

“He was a kind and generous man,” said Virginia Maclaren, chair of the U of T’s geography department, which Whitney joined in 1969 and led from 1988 to 1993. “It was easy for him to establish relationships.” Whitney was Maclaren’s mentor at the U of T in the early 1980s. A quarter of a century later, they shared an award for science and technology given to them by the government of Vietnam.

As Professor Emeritus at the U of T since retiring in 1993, Whitney continued travelling, conducting research and publishing his findings. He co-wrote “Goats and garbage in Khartoum, Sudan,” Maclaren’s favourite article of his that explained animals’ role in consuming waste and keeping cities clean in many impoverished countries.

Whitney’s life adventures started quite early. At age 18, just after the end of the Second World War, he used a £25 travel scholarship to pay for a 5,600-km trek through Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden, making it as far as 300 km inside the Arctic Circle. “I hitchhiked practically all the way, hardly ever knowing where I would find food and a roof for the night,” he wrote in a 1946 newspaper story about his odyssey.

One segment leading from Norway to Finland involved a long ride in a truck full of fish. “For 28 hours, that lorry bumped over the worst road in the world, with me on top of the fish cases in a raging snowstorm,” he wrote.

His sense of exploration continued into his 80s. Last year, Whitney travelled to Japan for three weeks. Shortly after he returned home, he went to B.C.’s Haida Gwaii where, according to Baxter, he was “climbing hills and jumping on zodiacs.”

“Everyone wanted to age like Joe,” said his wife. Whitney was fit and youthful, and a model on how to grow old, she said.

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Given his good health, the family was shocked by Whitney’s melanoma diagnosis in May.

Whitney made sure over the last several months to delegate some projects he would not be able to complete. Baxter was tasked with co-ordinating a very extended family reunion next year in British Columbia, while one of Whitney’s daughters will have to organize all his papers and find a permanent home for them.

Whitney leaves behind his wife, five children and six grandchildren.

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