Carl F. Stover, 79, was a public affairs executive with a long career of managing and leading many nonprofit organizations. He was an admirable example of someone who bridged connections between civic education and civil society.
From 1962 to 1964, Mr. Stover served as a senior political scientist at SRI International and as a director of the Public Affairs Fellowship at Stanford University. From 1964 to 1970, Stover was president of the National Institute of Public Affairs, where he directed fellowships, seminars, and other programs to improve the quality of the civil service and advance learning and communication among leaders of the private and public sectors.
In 1971 and 1972, he served as president of the National Committee on United States–China Relations, which he helped found in 1966 for the purpose of advancing public understanding of China and the relationship between America and China. In this post, he guided the historic U.S. table tennis tour between the citizens of China and helped foster the beginnings of renewed contact between the two countries.
From 1972 to 1974, he was president of Federalism Seventy-Six, an organization that encouraged civic education and participation in observance of the United State's 200th anniversary.
Before Stover suffered a stroke in 1988 that left him unable to continue working, he led and served on many nonprofit boards such as the Center for World Literature, the Student–Parent Mock Election, the Committee on the Constitutional System, the National Partnership to Prevent Drug and Alcohol Abuse, the American Committee on U.S.–Soviet Relations, and the International Society for Panetics, an organization dedicated to the understanding and reduction of humanly engendered suffering, and in which he was a founding member and chairman emeritus.
With Melville Bell Grosvenor, Stover also founded the Hearing, Education Aid and Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing hearing impairment, for which he served as trustee, treasurer, and president. He was a volunteer consultant for the National Executive Service Corps. He was a founder and first president of Kinesis, Ltd., an organization for the advancement of poetry-in-dance and other mixed art forms, and a founder and treasurer of the Coordinating Council on Literary Magazines.
Mr. Stover has written and edited many articles and books, such as The Government of Science (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962), Science and Democratic Government (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1963), and The Technological Order (Wayne State University Press, 1963). He was the founding editor of the Journal of Law and Education.
He was an elected member of Phi Beta Kappa and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Brookings Institution. In 1969, Stover was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration and was a scholar in residence there from 1980 to 1982.
He was also a member of many professional associations, such as the APSA, the American Society for Public Administration, and the Federation of American Scientists.
A native of Pasadena, California, Stover received his undergraduate degree in 1951 and his master's degree in political science from Stanford University in 1955.
Stover died on February 19, 2010, in Silver Spring, Maryland, from congestive heart failure. He is survived by his wife of 36 years, Jacqueline Kast Stover of Silver Spring; three children from his first marriage, Matthew J. Stover of Chester, New Hampshire; Mary S. Marker of Columbia, Maryland; and Claire S. Herrell of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; and seven grandchildren.
