Ross S. Kilpatrick
1934-2012
Ross Stuart KILPATRICK was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on 3 October 1934, the youngest of three children of John Stuart, a streetcar driver who never owned an automobile, and Ellen May Kilpatrick. His mother taught herself to play the piano and her son Ross did the same, along with the ukulele, French horn, and recorder. After completing his secondary education at Malvern Collegiate Institute in Toronto. He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1957. While Ross was directing a production of Finian’s Rainbow, an undergraduate named Suzanne Mitchell auditioned for a part. She was not cast, but in 1960, she and Ross were wed, a marriage that would last for 51 years. Ross largely paid for his college education by serving as in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (1955-61) as a sub-Lieutenant. His first academic job was teaching Latin, English, Greek, and Instrumental Music at East York Collegiate Institute in Toronto. He returned to his alma mater, where he received an M.A. in 1964. He received another M.A. from Yale in 1965, and the Ph.D. in 1967, writing his dissertation, “Musis amicus unice secures: A Study of Consolation in the Odes of Horace.” Horace occupied a He taught at Yale as instructor (1967-8) and assistant professor (1968-70) for three years and returned to Canada in 1970 to teach at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. He chaired the Classics department for ten years and for many years was a faithful secretary to the Classical Association of Canada, a member of the Canadian Philhellenic Society, the Società Dante Alighieri and was past president of the Humanities Association of Canada. His chief love was Latin poets and his favorite Latin poet was Horace, but he also had an expert’s knowledge of the visual arts and was adept at finding hidden symbols both in poetry and visual arts. In his 60s, Ross wrote about the London-based Japanese artist Yoshio Markino in Italia: The Travels of a Samurai Artist (Queen’s University, 1999) and in 2010 found that in the “Mona Lisa,” Leonardo was alluding to Horace, Ode 1.22 and two sonnets by Petrarch. After 42 years he retired from Queens in 2000, teaching for no salary each year afterwards until a week before his death on February 24, 2012
— Ward Briggs