Fr Mihalic dies in California (Post Courier)

[John Burton]

This is a sad piece of news which I have only just
seen. It seems that so often when a person retires
after a long and absorbing career, their time
thereafter is limited. 

Selfishly, for this project, I had hoped that we would
have been able to make substantial headway in
Mihalic's lifetime. I can only hope he did log in from
time to time and that he knew of the modest progress
we have made so far.

I am at least glad that we were at least able to make
a start for him. Let's continue.

(I'm am away in PNG until next week.)

John Burton

--- Robin Hide <rhide at postbox.anu.edu.au> wrote:
> Sad news,
> Robin
> 
> Post Courier
> News          Tuesday 11th December 2001
> 
> 
> Fr Mihalic dies in California
> 
> CATHOLIC priest, missionary, newspaper editor,
> linguist, compiler of the
> first Tok Pisin dictionary and educator Fr Frank
> Mihalic (in the
> Post-Courier file photo above) died at the weekend.
> Divine Word Missionaries in Mount Hagen said
> yesterday Fr Mihalic died in
> his Californian home of the United States on
> December 8, 2001 after
> suffering from pneumonia and its complications.
> Son of a Pennsylvanian farmer and railwayman, Fr
> Mihalic was born on
> November 24, 1916 to a family of 10 — four boys and
> six girls and raised
> among a “missionary magazine reading” family.
> Fr Mihalic first came to PNG as a missionary in 1948
> and was based in
> Alexishafen, Madang.
> A few months later he was posted to Marienberg, East
> Sepik Province as
> parish priest where one of his first parishioners
> was “young” Michael
> Somare who later became the country’s first Prime
> Minister. He worked
> mostly in the Mamose region until his return to the
> States due to “severe
> body complications” and after the Italy divine word
> missionaries recalled
> him.
> In 1969 Fr Mihalic returned to Wewak to set up the
> Wantok Newspaper and
> remained editor until 1979. During those years Fr
> Frank published the
> Jacaranda dictionary and grammar of Melanesian
> pidgin, widely used in PNG
> in the early days — he also found time to translate
> the PNG Constitution
> into Tok Pisin and in 1981 was awarded the OBE for
> services rendered to
> Pidgin in PNG and an honorary doctorate of
> linguistics from the University
> of PNG.
> In 1982 he was asked to head the Communication Arts
> department at the
> Divine Word University until 1997.
> Fr Mihalic spent 52 years teaching in PNG and in his
> term wrote more than
> 30 books, some of which are now used in many
> schools.
> 
> 
> 
>   
>
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> 
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> 


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