Clinton Ph.D.

Clinton Warne, age 87, emeritus professor of economics and former department chair at Cleveland State University, was a natural as a teacher, and was also ongoing president of Consumers League of Cleveland for nearly forty years. Dr. Warne not only was loved by his students, but also was a popular speaker during his teaching years and after retirement. He spoke often at schools, for organizations such as Rotary and Kiwanis, and many others. He taught a course in Consumer Economics for many years at Cleveland State. He enlightened many youngsters and adults alike with his talks about the dangers of deceptive packaging and demonstrated how to avoid being fooled by misleading sizes, shapes and data. One of his students, Arthur Schlosser, commented that his course with Dr. Warne was absolutely the best course he took in all his time spent at CSU. CSU colleague Dr. John Burke said, "Professor Clinton Warne arrived at CSU in the fall of 1967 teaching in Quonset-huts and temporary classroom buildings. He helped transform the small sleepy Department of Economics into a large, thriving center of learning to include the introduction of a Masters program in Economics." Dr. Warne was active in a broad spectrum of consumer organizations and held official positions in many of them, including as president of the American Council on Consumer Interests beginning in 1973, president of the Ohio Consumers Association in 1972, re-elected in 1973 and as acting president in 1979. He was a trade negotiator as a member of the United States Delegation to the International Lead and Zinc Study Group in Geneva, Switzerland in 1978 and to the Natural Rubber International Conference in Geneva in 1979. He was elected to the Consumer Advisory Committee of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1982-1985, and he served on the Consumer Panel of the Ford Dispute Resolution Board during the 1990s. He also served the city of Cleveland on the consumer panel in the administration of Mayor Ralph Perk, and as Board member of Cleveland Consumer Action Coalition from 1973 forward, Consumer Credit Counseling Service 1977-1998, Consumer Economics Subcommittee of the Cleveland School Board 1977-1987, Cleveland Saves, 1997 to the present time and the Consumer Advisory Panel for Ameritech from 1985 to the current AT&T panel. In addition to standard economics courses, Professor Warne often taught a course in Transportation, which was a specialty that interested him from his graduate days at the University of Nebraska, when he traveled the state and slept in his car to learn the details about the history of the development of the automobile in the lonely counties that had previously had no transportation other than the horse and buggy. All his life he had an avid interest in cars, and he could identify most car models and years, as they were seen on the street. He published with Robert Patton a book, The Development of the American Economy, booklets Cement and The Consumer Looks at Deceptive Packaging, eighteen articles on various economic issues, numerous speeches, testimonials, book reviews, professional reviews, authored a syllabus and in 1967 edited the Jefferson Encyclopedia. A tireless consumer activist, between 1967 and 1983 he gave 31 TV interviews, 380 speeches, 36 newspaper interviews and 138 radio interviews. Born in Binghamton, New York on September 12, 1921, Clinton Warne was the son of Colston Warne, chief founder in 1936 of Consumers Union, and Frances Corbett Warne, a dietitian whose father, Dr. Lee Cleveland Corbett was instrumental in designing the National Botanical Gardens in Washington, D.C. He spent his boyhood in Amherst, Massachusetts where his parents moved when he was six years old for his father to become a professor of economics at Amherst College. A high school graduate of Monson Academy, he attended the University of Colorado for two and a half years until called into service during World War II, when he served in the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific, where he was stationed in Fiji, New Caledonia and finally Iwo Jima. He was a Teletype operator and cryptologist and returned to the United States only after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945. He finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder, after which he earned a Master's degree at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and a doctorate at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. His teaching career began at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, included two years at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa as department chair, and after another two years in Kansas, led to his becoming associate professor of economics at Ohio State University from 1960 to 1967 and full professor at Cleveland State University from 1967 until 1985, when he became emeritus professor. Dr. Warne also spent a year as visiting professor at Northwestern University, 1965-66, and a summer session as visiting professor at his alma mater, the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1967. He was a Summer Fellow at Harvard University in 1965. After he had achieved emeritus status, Dr. Warne continued to teach part time in First College at Cleveland State, with smaller classes for talented students. Even after retirement from post-emeritus teaching, he read constantly and for a number of years took notes on important ideas he came across. He was a continuing reader of the Plain Dealer, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist until the end of his life, and read as well a variety of other magazines and books. He had great interest in the history of all American wars, and especially in that of World War II. For a very long time he planted flower and vegetable gardens. He liked to border the flowers with pansies, until the year when a young resident rabbit ate each flower and its stalk as it bloomed. In 1952, when he began teaching at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, he met Katharine Mulky, who taught music theory there, when faculty filled out student class cards for three days during enrollment. They were married on June 27, 1953. He was a devoted father to their three children, F. Katharine Kate, married to Bob Riggs, Jr., St. Louis MO; Clinton Jr., MD, married to Kimberly, parents of three children, Colston, Beth and James Clinton, Eugene OR; and Carolyn, married to Richard Ross, parents of Nicholas Sebastian, Petersfield, England UK. When Kate, Clinton Jr. and Carolyn were living at home, the Warne family traditionally spent summer vacations camping in Colorado, the Canadian Rockies, or elsewhere. They had covered 48 of the 50 states by the time all the children were graduated from high school, and the wanderlust persists.


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