Glen Stassen

Stassen, the son of former Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen, had cancer and died Saturday May 9th at his Pasadena home, said a spokesman for Fuller Theological Seminary, where he had taught since 1997. In 1939 the elder Stassen became the United States' youngest governor at 31. Decades later, after he tried futilely to turn his fellow Republicans against up-and-coming party leader Richard M. Nixon, he became known as a perennial — and quixotic — candidate for president. Born in St. Paul, Minn., on Feb. 29, 1936, Glen Harold Stassen spent his early years there. As a teenager he moved with his family to Philadelphia, where his father had been appointed president of the University of Pennsylvania. Although raised in a religious household, Stassen had a scientific bent and studied nuclear physics at the University of Virginia. After graduating in 1957, he worked at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., probing the structure of atoms. Unwilling to aid in weapons development, Stassen abandoned nuclear physics to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1967 he received his doctorate from the Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. In the 1960 and 1970s Stassen taught at Kentucky Southern College and Berea College and from 1976 to 1996 at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, all in Kentucky. Stassen's survivors include his wife, Dot Lively Stassen; sons David, Michael and William; six grandchildren and a sister, Kathleen Berger.