John Massengale, Professor Emeritus of Kinesiology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, passed away at home on November 27, 2013. John was a good friend to many of us in NAKHE and other professional and academic societies, a mentor to still more, and a leader in kinesiology who helped to develop the profession of physical education into the discipline of kinesiology. He will be missed by all who knew him.

John D. Massengale was born in Pontiac, Michigan in 1939, and grew up in the Detroit area aspiring to be an athlete. After graduating from high school in the late 1950s, John moved to Missouri where played football at Northwest Missouri State University and studied physical education and sociology. This was the beginning of a 50-year academic career that revolved around sport, physical education, coaching, and higher education and which lasted until his retirement in 2008.

John’s first professional duties were as a high school physical educator and coach from 1963 to 1967, first in Kansas City and then in Illinois where he earned his masters degree at Illinois State University. In 1967 John moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he studied for his doctorate while working as an assistant football coach and adjunct instructor of physical education. It was at this point that John demonstrated the ability to balance his professional life as a coach with his academic life, a skill that the developing field of physical education promoted and which many of his contemporaries aspired to, but which few mastered as well as John.

John was proud of the New Mexico doctoral program of that period and spoke fondly of his days there as a student. He often noted that all of the graduates in his cohort at New Mexico either became a department chair or senior academic administrator, or published textbooks in physical education. Led by faculty such as Larry Locke, John’s fellow students at New Mexico included Ron Feingold, Chuck Corbin, and others who would became well-known scholars in our field.