December 16, 1940 March 19, 2023

Dale Christophersen died peacefully on March 19, at the Austin home of his daughter Kirsten, ending his battle with lung cancer and chronic pulmonary disease. He leaves memories of affection and respect in the friends, colleagues, and students he gathered in five decades of teaching and civic engagement in Alpine.

Dale grew up in Aberdeen, S.D. where, as he said with Scandinavian understatement, “winters are real.” He worked his way through college and graduate school pulling ties and pounding spikes for the MStP&SSM Railroad, earning a B.A. in Political Science from Augustana College (Sioux Falls, S.D.) and an M.A. from the University of Missouri. He received a teaching appointment at Sul Ross State University in 1965 and moved to Alpine. In his early summers at Sul Ross, he worked as a seasonal ranger at the Fort Davis National Historic Site, where he met Ann Welles, a University of Arizona student also doing summer work there. In 1968, Dale took a leave of absence from Sul Ross to start law school at the University of Texas, but left law school after a semester to marry Ann. The couple moved to Missouri for Dale to pursue doctoral studies, and he ultimately earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri. Dale and Ann returned to Alpine in 1971, their daughter Kirsten was born the following year, and Dale settled into a career as a professor of political science at Sul Ross that would last until his retirement in 2012.

Colleagues and friends saw

in Dale three traits seldom combined in one person: the rigorous intellect of a scholar, an attraction and commitment to the practical sides of community life, and a love of camaraderie with friends of diverse pursuits and interests. Sul Ross gave Dale a stimulating but congenial setting to engage his mind. He appreciated the variety of work possible at a small university, which enabled him to teach political science, criminal justice, federal government, sociology, and philosophy courses at various times in his career, at levels ranging from graduate seminars to introductory freshman courses. He excelled at making accessible to students their intellectual heritage – the great thinkers and structures of government that have shaped the modern world – and he aspired that, whatever field his students chose, they would be empowered to be thoughtful and engaged citizens. In his early years at Sul Ross, Dale was instrumental in developing a Master of Public Administration program for students who wish to pursue public service as a career.

In his own life in Alpine, Dale modeled the practical engagement for which he equipped students. He was an active participant in Kiwanis and served on numerous local boards, including those for hospice care and the public library. In 1989 he was elected the Brewster County Democratic Chair, and he served in that role for about 25 years. The position, he said, taught him “a lot of things that are useful to know as a political scientist which one doesn’t learn from books.” Even aside from any formal role, Dale was a dedicated observer and participant in local government, regularly attending city council, county commissioners court, and other meetings. Few people are inspired to attend those public meetings except when a certain issue affects them immediately, but Dale did so routinely, from a deep appreciation of the importance of the work and a desire to assist people trying to do it conscientiously and well. He was an invaluable source of advice and community history for those in office, and his letters to the editor elucidating a current local issue were a staple of the Alpine Avalanche.

In his university work as well as his community life, Dale was attracted to practical questions and committed to outcomes, not just study. He created and directed Sul Ross’s unit on Institutional Research and Effectiveness, helping keep the university focused on fulfilling its mission and using productively the resources it was entrusted with.

Finally, in all his endeavors, Dale’s love of camaraderie and the value he placed on friendships were palpable and enduring. Dale’s close relationship with his brother Jerry was a great source of joy, and their nightly online poker games sustained Dale for years, until just a few nights before he died. While at Sul Ross, Dale served as the pre-law advisor, a role through which scores of future attorneys came to regard him as a mentor and friend. Many graduates stayed in touch with him, and through these friendships with dozens of attorneys across the Southwest, Dale welcomed a “vicarious connection to the other career I wasn’t destined to experience.” From 1971 forward, he was a mainstay in what he considered the longest running, though constantly evolving, local poker group in Alpine. In his last several decades in Alpine, the “FOOF” group came into being for weekly drinks and conversation about local issues, first at Railroad Blues and then on the back porch of Dale and Ann’s home. This group was also constantly evolving, seamlessly adding new arrivals to Alpine and saying goodbye as people moved away, though seldom losing touch with them altogether. Dale, and through him the FOOF group, craved not agreement but people serious enough to care about issues and discuss them reasonably. The FOOF group assembled for a farewell just five days before Dale’s death. Some, having been in FOOF in different eras, met then in person for the first time after knowing each other only through online conversation. Many spoke at that gathering of Dale’s central role in helping them feel at home in Alpine when they first moved there, and of the valuable friendships they formed through him.

Questions of philosophy were never purely abstract for Dale. The side of life he saw in summers of hard manual labor on the railroads was never far from his thinking and work, and he was acutely attuned to the inequities in our society. If anything could inspire his ire, it was pursuit of self-interest at the expense of the common good, toward which all of Dale’s study and civic work pointed. But in an era where Tweet-sized bursts of acrimony take up much of public discourse, Dale was consistently the opposite: thoughtful, substantive, gentle, and constructive.

Dale is survived by his wife Ann Welles Christophersen, his daughter Kirsten Moody, his brother Jerry Christophersen of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, his sister-in-law Sally Christophersen of Denver, Colorado, his granddaughter Ann Louisa Moody, and his son-in-law Charles Moody. He was predeceased by his parents Ingolf and Mary Christophersen and his brother Paul Christophersen.