Raymond Albert Marquardt, professor emeritus of marketing, died on July 23.
At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Marquardt served as the Nordin Laboratories Distinguished Professor and director of the agribusiness program from 1987 to 1997. He taught a generation of Huskers, chaired and co-chaired nine doctoral dissertations, and secured more than $1.8 million in scholarship funds and $153,000 in research grants. He co-authored two marketing textbooks, published 95 journal articles and presented more than 50 papers worldwide from Norway to New Zealand.
Marquardt traveled to Albania to teach entrepreneurship to government officials after the fall of Communism and taught a two-week seminar at Senshu University in Tokyo and a three-week seminar at Karl Marx University in Budapest. He received numerous honors and awards but his family shared that one honor he especially enjoyed was being a guest coach with Tom Osborne at a Nebraska football game.
Born January 16, 1938, at the home of his grandmother, Alma Hahlweg, Marquardt was baptized at his parents’ home on February 6, 1938. He later graduated from Venango High School with five classmates in May 1995.
He earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Colorado State University and a doctorate in agricultural economics with an emphasis on marketing statistics at Michigan State University. He started his career as director of research for Market Facts in Chicago. He later taught at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado; the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he served as associate dean and a professor in the College of Business Administration; and Arizona State University in Mesa, where he served as dean of the Morrison School of Agribusiness and Resource Management.
Moving to Arizona allowed him and his wife of 64 years, Alberta, to move closer to their daughters, Debbi Shano-Baiel and Ruth Ann Miller, and their grandchildren, who “all lived within a mile of their house in Gilbert,” as they shared in a Department of Marketing newsletter in 2013. They kept busy attending their grandchildren’s activities, and Ray enjoyed fishing and golfing with them. He even wrote a pamphlet titled “Financial Advice for My Grandchildren.”
The Marquardts hosted foreign exchange students in their home from Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. They tried to spend summers “at an elevation of 7,200 feet in the cool White Mountains of Arizona.” They traveled, including a cruise to Alaska and a foliage tour of the Northeastern states, and Marquardt visited western Nebraska “to keep up on their farm activities in Wallace.”
Marquardt is survived by wife, Alberta, daughters, Debra and Ruth Ann, along with his grandchildren: Morgan, Madison and McKenna Shano; Jay Baiel; and Kaden Miller; and his brother, Kenneth Marquardt. He was preceded in death by his parents, John Herman and Helen Hahlweg Marquardt, and his sister, Marcine Patterson.
The funeral service will be at Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church in Venango, Nebraska, at 10 a.m. Aug. 7. Open casket visitation will be at the church at 9 a.m. All are welcome for lunch at the church after burial in the Venango cemetery. Memorial gifts may be made to La Mesa Ministries or Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church in Venango. A Celebration of Life will be held at a later date in Gilbert, Arizona.
