Alpha May Bond, Jr.

“The name is Bond, Al Bond,” an icebreaker that he might use as his greeting, was delivered without a smile, but with a slight twinkle in his eyes. To Al everything could be fun. He spent his life pursuing answers with a delightful exuberance, letting each experience take him to a next step in his quest for solutions. Alpha May Bond, Jr., born July 12, 1930, was the son of Alpha May Bond, Sr. and Helen Gudrun Olsen Bond and was the first child born at the new Dumont Hospital in Dumont, New Jersey. Growing up with one younger brother, Irving, Al could recall momentous occasions such as the year he learned to tie his shoes or how he could walk home from school with his eyes closed after days of carefully groping and stepping his way from one point to the other. He recalled sledding on numerous snowy days and playing cowboys and Indians, but still wondered why the boys always preferred the role of Indians.

He was encouraged to play a musical instrument by his mother, a pianist, and chose the violin which led to a position with the New Jersey All State Orchestra; he especially enjoyed singing in the church choir. His childhood was filled with opportunities that nourished Al’s quest to further exploration. Prior to his junior year in high school, his parents applied to a competition sponsored by Pan American Airways and the New York Tribune for a student to spend a year abroad. Al won the trip and spent his junior year as an exchange student in Ecuador, riding horses and camping in the Andes. After graduating Tenafly High School in 1948, he attended Dartmouth College, not far from his father’s family in Vermont.

Al thought engineering would be his field of interest since he excelled in math and sciences but, his first year of required courses included an introduction to Philosophy and he was hooked. Philosophy encompassed ancillary topics that would lead to a broader horizon of possibilities for teaching. Al once told an interviewer that philosophy rules out any career except teaching, so he knew the path forward would lead to just that. Although he spent happy days on the slopes skiing while a student at Dartmouth, he had time to participate in founding the Jefferson Club on campus. The reputation was that the club attracted “progressives,” or “radical liberals,” which in no way deterred Al’s mission; he had honed in on social philosophy.

After graduating cum laude with a Philosophy degree from Dartmouth in 1952, Al attended Columbia University in New York City, earning a master’s degree in Philosophy in 1953. While living and working on his master’s degree in New York, Al was involved with the Thomas Jefferson School and with the Progressive party, but still had discretionary time to do some modeling for the New York Times Magazine.

Al’s trajectory to professor was interrupted by the Korean War and the prospects of Al being drafted. Instead, he applied and was accepted into the US Navy’s OCS School in Newport, Rhode Island from which he graduated in the top 10% of his class in November, 1953. Because of the intense emotions generated by the war and by the McCarthy hearings, the US Navy was hesitant to send the new naval officer, with what the Navy thought were “leftist leanings,” overseas. Al was honorably discharged in 1954, but served the balance of his obligatory time in the armed forces in the US Army Personnel Office of the Signal Corps which, he commented, had no qualms about sending him overseas. This change in plans took Al to Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia where he was honorably discharged once again in November, 1955. After his stint in the armed forces, he spent four years in Thetford, Vermont teaching in a private academy for high school students. Since his wife, whom he had met and married while in Georgia, decided the months of snow had lost their luster, the couple headed back to Georgia where Al was accepted at Emory University as a doctoral student in Sociology.

In 1961, after completing his classes in Sociology, Al was hired as an instructor in his chosen subject at Mercer University in Macon. He completed his thesis and received his doctorate from Emory in 1963. His tenure at Mercer included innovations in the Sociology and Anthropology curriculum, introducing off campus field trips to surrounding areas to observe other forms of social interaction and specific communities of people brought together by common interests, history and life styles. His impact on the Ogburn Department of Sociology at Mercer has left indelible and significant initiatives that are part of the curriculum today, almost 30 years after his retirement.

Al and his colleagues began a museum featuring artifacts found and donated by scientists and other people interested in anthropology. During retirement he relentlessly sought appropriate places for all the objects in the museum because it was being dismantled. Some went to The Harriet Tubman Museum, others to the Ocmulgee Mounds and some were regifted to interested parties. A shrunken head from Ecuador was eventually returned to that country, following museum protocol that human remains not be taken from their native countries.

Al taught in the state prison system in the middle Georgia area, eventually resulting in a few of his students earning their degrees. He served as chair of the curriculum and of the welfare committee at Mercer University. After serving as the president of the Mercer chapter of the American Association of University Professors, he was elected to that same office on the state level. For several decades while at Mercer and during retirement he volunteered with Macon-Bibb Citizen Advocacy, advocating for disabled citizens including for his protégé, Cecil Rawlins.

His first marriage to Adrienne Moore Bond, mother of his three oldest children, ended in divorce. Al later married Susan Maxwell from Decatur, Georgia, with whom he had three children born between 1977 and 1984. Bond is preceded in death by a son, Ernest Leighton Bond, Ph.D, his parents and his brother Irving Gustav Bond. He is survived by his wife Susan Maxwell Bond and his children, Alpha Wallace Bond of Tallapoosa, GA, Thomas Kimball Bond of Decatur, GA, Lawrence Maxwell Bond of Carbondale, CO, Alice Bond Miller of Piedmont, CA and Julia Bond Guercio of Bozeman, MT. He was blessed with sixteen grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

The memorial service for Al will be held at 11:00 on Wednesday, January 15, 2025, at Snow’s Memorial Chapel on Cherry Street, with visitation one hour prior to the service. Rev. Sara Pugh Montgomery will offiicate. Burial will be in Riverside Cemetery.

Snow’s Memorial Chapel, Cherry Street, has charge of arrangements.