Farewells
Drug Combatant
Michael Weston, who studied computer science and economics at Stanford and then earned a law degree at Harvard, could have thrived on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill or in Silicon Valley. But Weston turned away from the money and prestige of those fields for a career in public service, first in the military and then the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Weston, '94, a DEA special agent and Marine Corps major, died on October 26, when the U.S. military helicopter he was in crashed while returning from a counter-narcotics mission in western Afghanistan. Two other DEA agents and seven soldiers also were killed. Weston was 37.
"Mike could have been anything he wanted," wrote Josh Rushing, who attended officer candidate school with Weston, in a blog entry. "[At Harvard], he was offended by his classmates' sense of entitlement to the six-figure careers and power that would come with their high-profile postings in the nation's elite law firms after graduation. Instead, Mike craved the feeling of making a difference."
Weston, who grew up in California and Pennsylvania, entered Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1999 and was commissioned a second lieutenant. He worked several years in military law at Camp Pendleton in Southern California and was deployed in January 2003 to Kuwait and Iraq. That August, he left active duty but continued his military service in the Marine Corps Reserves.
In 2005, on a second combat tour in Iraq, Weston served as part of a team assigned to protect the critical October elections. In 2006, after only nine months back in the States, Weston volunteered for his third combat tour to Iraq.
Weston joined the DEA in September 2003. Assigned to an office in Richmond, Va., he worked on a number of significant cases. Last July, Weston volunteered for a two-year deployment to Afghanistan as a member of the DEA's Kabul Country Office.
Weston is survived by his wife of five months, Cynthia Tidler; his mother, Judy, and her husband, Steven Zarit; his father, Steven, and his wife, Jude Weston; three brothers, Thomas Weston, Benjamin Zarit and Matthew Zarit; a sister, Megan Manly; and grandparents, Avis and Laurence Maes.
Supremely Supportive
In 1954, recent Law School graduate John Jay O'Connor III was drafted by the Army and posted to Frankfurt, Germany, with the Judge Advocate General's Corps. Rather than wait until the Army could ship her overseas, his wife bought her own ticket to Europe. He showed equal devotion to their marriage and her work; when Sandra Day O'Connor was uncertain about accepting President Ronald Reagan's offer to make her the first female Supreme Court justice, her husband said, "You have to do it. It'll be fine."
John O'Connor, '51, JD '53, died in Phoenix on November 11. He was 79. Alzheimer's disease had forced him to retire in 2003, and Justice O'Connor in 2005 cited his illness in stepping down from the court.
Charming, friendly and a well-regarded specialist in property law, O'Connor was best known in his later years as the husband of the first woman to sit on the high court. Sandra Day O'Connor, '50, JD '52, says he took it all in stride: "He served as the president of the male auxiliary of the U.S. Supreme Court for several years and he did a very fine job at it."
Their relationship blossomed from a late-night edit of a submission to the Stanford Law Review in 1951. After finishing the revisions, John suggested they go out for a drink. "We had a beer, got acquainted and that was that," O'Connor says. They were married December 20 the next year.
O'Connor is survived by his wife; three sons, Scott, '79, Brian, and Jay, '84; and six grandchildren.
Songbirds' Diplomat
His professional career made William Belton a keen observer of the human world, but his amateur career made him an expert on the natural one. A foreign service officer and ornithologist, Belton, '35, died on October 25 from congestive heart failure. He was 95.
Belton studied political science at Stanford and then made his way to Ecuador, where he became a clerk in the American legation. In 1938, he was appointed vice consul at the American Consulate in Havana, Cuba. The consulate was overwhelmed with refugees from Nazi Germany—cases Belton described as "heart-wrenching."
His last post, in Brazil, saw him help to negotiate the release of Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, who was kidnapped by guerillas in 1969. (The incident became the basis for the 1997 film Four Days in September.) His daughter, Barbara Yngvesson says, "For the last year he was there he was being followed by people with machine guns in jeeps."
Belton retired not long after. He began to spend more time birding, an interest piqued many years before in Ottawa, Canada, where his neighbor was Hoyes Lloyd, president of the American Ornithologists' Union. "It was like being interested in political science and finding out that you live next to the secretary of state," says his granddaughter, Lorien Belton, '00.
Although he had no formal ornithological education, Belton became a pioneer in the study of South American birdsong, focusing his efforts on the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. His exceptional eye for detail and a decade in the field culminated in 1984 and 1985 in a two-volume series, The Birds of Rio Grande do Sul, and a subsequent field guide. Greg Budney, a curator at Cornell University, where more than 1,000 of Belton's recordings reside, says, "Bill was a consummate citizen-scientist. He created a body of work that was well documented, well recorded, and made a huge contribution to our understanding of birds of South America. The value of those recordings is really eternal." Brazilian ornithologists he mentored and bird-watchers and conservationists inspired by his work call themselves the Beltinho generation.
His efforts on behalf of the natural world survive him in multiple conservation projects, including the American Bird Conservancy's William Belton Grants Program.
Belton was predeceased by his first wife, Julia Hyslop Belton, and a grandson. He is survived by his wife, Cornelia Brouwer Lett Belton; his children, Barbara Yngvesson, Hugh Belton and Timothy Belton, '72; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
ONLINE ONLY
Hear some of the bird calls recorded by William Belton.Collecting well over a thousand Brazilian bird calls was no easy task. William Belton's recordings—made with a directional microphone and a heavy reel-to-reel recorder—often began before dawn. "That's pretty straightforward until you start to consider insects, mud, and the occasional reptile," says Greg Budney, who curates Cornell's Belton collection. "It takes a lot of patience. It's not a simple matter of going out, going up to a bird, recording it, and walking away." Here are five of Belton's clips:
Ramphastos toco, Toco Toucan, 24 Oct 1975
Gnorimopsar chopi, Chopi Blackbird, 19 Sep 1972
Attila phoenicurus, Rufous-tailed Attila, 29 Jan 1978
