Raymond Tatalovich was born in the steel-mill town of McKeesport, PA, fifteen miles southeast of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. As he was nearing graduation from McKeesport High School, his mother urged him to leave their hometown for college and never move back. Ray took her advice. He was granted financial assistance to attend Ohio University, which he later told undergraduate students were the happiest four years of his life. Much later he endowed the Raymond and Anne K. Tatalovich Scholarship exclusively for students with need and merit who desired to enter OU’s Honors College.
From Ohio he accepted admission to the University of Chicago for graduate study in political science, on the advice of a Harvard-trained faculty member at OU who said that Chicago then was one of the three best departments in the country. Ray trained under Theodore J. Lowi, considered the leading light who effectively founded modern policy analysis. Ray was immensely proud of the University of Chicago, which would have a special place in his life. In 1969 he married his beloved wife of more than 50 years, Anne Katrine Recktenwald, in Bond Chapel; in 1971 he earned his doctorate in political science; and in 1980 he was cured of a deadly fibrosarcoma cancer thanks to an experimental protocol used at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
After some time in the teaching trenches, Ray was recruited by Loyola University Chicago. This meant that he and Anne were able to put down permanent roots in the northern suburbs, where Ray would take great pleasure in his beautiful home and gardens. His scholarly career had begun to flourish when he published the first empirical analysis of V.O. Key’s “friends-and-neighbors” voting thesis in the Journal of Politics in 1975. A huge body of scholarship on that topic has been published here and abroad, and virtually every study begins by citing Ray’s path-breaking research.
Ray is perhaps best known for his work on what became known as morality politics. Moral Controversies in American Politics, coedited with former Chicago classmate Byron W. (Bill) Daynes, was published in four editions. Ted Lowi contributed a foreword in which he acknowledged that his policy typology would not accommodate policy debates over contested values rather than conflicting economic views. Again with Bill, Ray co-authored The Politics of Abortion (1981), perhaps the first case study of the quintessential morality policy. More recently he teamed with sociologist Mildred A. Schwartz to write The Rise and Fall of Moral Conflicts in the United States and Canada (2018). Ray had taken a class with Professor Schwartz at the University of Chicago and over the years they became good friends as well as coauthors. He and Anne loved spending time in Canada, and Ray became an avid student of Canadian politics. Another area of scholarly interest was the US presidency, which led to coauthored volumes on presidential power, the president and economic policy, and The Presidency and Political Science (second edition, coauthored with Steven Schier and with a foreword by Theodore J. Lowi, 2014). Over his professional career, Ray produced seventeen books or editions, more than 50 articles in refereed journals, and many dozens of book chapters, book reviews, and presentations at professional meetings.
In 2012 Ray was diagnosed with a second cancer, one his physicians traced back to the radiation treatments he had gone through thirty years earlier. For a while he lost his sense of taste, but more troubling was the impairment of his ability to swallow solid foods; still later, he lost the ability to speak But Ray’s mind remained alert and he reliably used email to stay in touch with friends and colleagues and collaborators worldwide, although he was dismayed to realize that he was outliving many of his closest friends in the field. After retiring from Loyola in 2017, he continued to publish in professional journals, often with his departmental colleague John Frendreis, with whom he had a long-time collaborative relationship. In his last years he devoted attention to reviewing manuscripts and coauthoring articles with younger scholars. He drafted this obituary and sent it to his former editor a year ago (Ray never missed a deadline). He died on June 21, 2023, a week before his 80th birthday.
Raymond Tatalovich loved the field of political science and believed the life of the teacher-scholar to be one of the most intellectually enriching vocations on earth. His life and career are testimony to the truth of that belief.
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