In Memoriam: Adam Frączek (1935–2020)

On October 18, 2020, Adam Frączek died at the age of 85. Adam was one of the earliest members of ISRA, served as ISRA’s President from 1990–1992, and was one of 16 ISRA Life Fellows. Below, L. Rowell Huesmann provides a heartfelt remembrance of Adam.

I first met Adam in the spring of 1978 in Warsaw when I was coming to Poland on an IREX fellowship to teach for a month at Wroclaw University. My senior colleague Len Eron had met Adam at an international conference and told him that I was coming to Poland. Adam immediately invited me to visit him in Warsaw at PAN where he was doing aggression research. 

His warmth and friendliness when I met him could not have been greater. He arranged all sorts of professional activities and entertainment events for me and really introduced me to the culture and history of Poland. We quickly became both research colleagues and personal and family friends. We started a cross-national longitudinal study of media violence and aggression that has become well known. He introduced me to a score of other Polish scholars whom have become friends and research collaborators. On this and subsequent meetings in Warsaw, in Chicago where I lived, and in other places in the world where we met, I got to know Adam’s daughter Marisha and her mother, and he got to know my daughter Kimberly, my son Graham, and my wife Penny. We readily accepted him into our family. He taught my children to play soccer. He endured my minimal Polish vocabulary without complaint and treated me as more of a renowned scholar than I deserved at that point in my career. We discovered many common interests beyond psychology—for example, soccer (your football), and books about European history, and detective and spy novels. All through the 1970s and 1980s, I always brought him books of this genre when I visited, though once around 1980 I had a history book (William Shirer’s, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) confiscated at the border because it had a swastika on the cover. The good news is that Adam complained, and it was eventually returned to Adam’s office after I left Poland; so he got it anyway!

Adam’s intellectual strengths and broad knowledge captivated my colleagues both when he visited me at the University of Illinois in Chicago and at the University of Michigan. But what every American who met him remembers most is his warmth, gentleness, and beautiful manners. When I told my daughter that he had passed, she cried even though she had only met him a few times many years ago. She knew how much he meant to me. I will miss him greatly. 

A Memorial Page can be found here.
A Condolence Book for Professor Adam Frączek may be found here.