In Memoriam

Donald F. Haggerty, Jr.

Don Haggerty
1964 Yale graduation

September 10, 2024

Don died on September 10, 2024, of congestive heart failure in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina where he had lived for approximately 15 years. He had a PhD from UCLA in biological chemistry. Don had no surviving family or relatives. No obituary was published.

Don attended our 50th reunion in 2014, and sang with our Whiffenpoofs on that occasion.

Here is the essay which he wrote for our 50th Reunion Book.

Essay, 50th Reunion Book

May, 2014

by Don Haggerty

Don Haggerty
2014 Yale reunion

Arriving at Yale from Choate, I majored in biochemistry and sang in the Spizzwinks and the Whiffenpoofs. I went to U.C.L.A. for my Ph.D. in biological chemistry and, at the suggestion of an Argentine postdoc who had introduced me to the technique of mammalian-cell culture, got a twelve-month travel fellowship from the W.H.O. to open a laboratory in La Plata, the first in that city. Upon returning to U.C.L.A., I spent a second year of postdoc doing the same thing in the Psychiatry Department, leading to an assistant professorship. Over the next fifteen years I continued with the research and taught courses in my specialty, but being a Professor in Psychiatry as opposed to one in the basic sciences proved to be fraught with academic impediments and political difficulties.

When the competitive pressure in the research finally became too great, the intramural politics too parochial, and the grantsmanship too tricky; I saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to leave the arena of academic science behind. That decision was facilitated by the discovery, more than a decade earlier, that easel painting and single-lens-reflex photography gave me far more personal satisfaction than publishing research papers.

In the interim I became enchanted with the Republic of Ireland and bought a property in rural west Cork County, to which I moved in 1987 and became registered with the Irish government as a resident professional visual artist. After some 20 years of living in the Mediterranean climate of Southern California, however, the first Irish winter was a nightmare. I had revisited La Plata and discovered that the Argentines indeed make friends for life, so I began spending the Irish winters there, where I paint and exhibit my work at various venues within the city: both paintings and black-and-white photographs, the latter of which I print up in my darkroom while summering in Ireland. During my first stay in Argentina I met the man who was to become my artistic mentor for the next twenty years until his untimely demise 20 July 2009: the late Carlos August Pacheco, a world-class painter and printmaker. Indeed, my interactions with him, among other reasons, led to my decision in 1994 to sell the property in Ireland and move to La Plata permanently.

My activities expanded to other areas of interest — Indo-European languages, astronomy, writing, singing in the Yale Alumni Chorus (first American one to perform in the Kremlin in 2003), and my collection of over 2,000 vinyl LPs of classical music. I also swim 2,000 meters a day, just for the record.

Recently, though, my activities have been severely curtailed (except for the last of those) by the need to generate an income in pesos as a result of the recent economic crisis in the States, diminishing the value of my invested retirement money. I’m now teaching English classes and editing and/or translating scientific manuscripts for publication in English in international journals. It’s perhaps prescient that I, the science freak of my class at Choate, but nevertheless having received the prize for excellence in English at graduation, would — now for over more than the last two decades — be spending more time writing than doing almost anything else. My premature retirement has been anything but retired.