Charles Warner, 88; scholar of wide interests and affability

Tailored English suits were Charles G.K. Warner's preferred attire. As a college professor, though, he was in the thick of a more casual approach to fashion in the mid-1960s. Unperturbed, he took the long view.

"I recommend the study of history to all classmates who believe the world is going to pot," Dr. Warner wrote in 1966 for the 25th anniversary report of his Harvard class. "Properly perused, history will show there was no such time as 'the good old days.' . . . Gentlemen, after all, once wore their hair long, and sandals were in high style in the Roman Senate."

A scholar of French history whose interests ranged from salmon fishing to Icelandic culture, Dr. Warner taught in Vermont and in the Midwest before finishing his career at Brandeis University. He died of complications from Alzheimer's disease on Dec. 30 in the Hampshire Care nursing facility in Leeds. Dr. Warner was 88 and had lived in Lincoln from 1972 until late last autumn.

"He liked people, he liked the company of people, and he liked learning," said his son Christopher of Cambridge. "He could be talking to a duke or a dishwasher; it made no difference. If someone had something interesting to say, he'd be all ears. He was both a professor and a lifelong student."

Dr. Warner and his younger brother, William, grew up in New York City, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a family that expected the boys to pursue careers in the business world.

"Neither did," Christopher said. "They chose more intellectual pursuits."

William Warner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1977 for "Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay."

Remaining close all their lives, the brothers attended St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., where Dr. Warner's love of the outdoors blossomed. He became so adept at trap shooting that friends dubbed him Shot, a nickname that stuck.

"Everybody called him Shot, everybody," his son said.

Dr. Warner went to Harvard College as part of the class of 1941, but took time away to serve in the US Army Signal Corps in Italy during World War II. He returned to finish his bachelor's degree in 1947 and soon after started a ski lodge in Stowe, Vt., with his brother.

In 1951 he married Patricia Cutler Fowler, the widow of a friend from St. Paul's who had died during World War II. After a brief stint working as a bank teller in Boston, Dr. Warner began commuting to New York City, where he received a master's from Columbia University in 1954 and a doctorate in 1958, both in French history.

The couple began raising their family in Cambridge, where Dr. Warner's gregariousness and easy charm made him popular among friends.

For his 75th birthday, family members collected tributes, including one from a Cambridge neighbor who wrote that Dr. Warner "always seemed to me more like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character, a boulevardier in his smart clothes and delightful chatter, a man without a care in the world, bringing general cheer and light-heartedness to his friends and neighbors."

"But of course I was wrong; though light-hearted, he was not light-minded and was busily engaged in getting his PhD in French history," the neighbor wrote.

"He was extremely affable, and he didn't have a mean bone in his body, and people responded to that," his son said. "He was good at drawing people out and leading conversations in interesting directions."

Dr. Warner published his doctoral dissertation, a history of French winegrowers and government, and taught in the early 1960s at Middlebury College. The family lived nearby in Cornwall, on a 109-acre farm.

He returned to Cambridge in the mid-1960s to research and write a textbook, then taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Kansas.

In 1972 the family returned to Massachusetts, settling in Lincoln, and Dr. Warner taught at Brandeis.

Though French history was his vocation, his avocations included astronomy, fly-fishing, and Iceland. He first traveled to that country to fish and later audited a class in Icelandic literature at Harvard.

"I would describe him as an omnivore," his son said. "There was always a new passion that he was studying, that he would throw himself into totally."

In addition to his wife, who lives in Lincoln, his son Christopher, and brother, William of Washington, D.C.; Dr. Warner leaves his stepson, Robert Fowler of Los Angeles; two other sons, Nicholas of Plainfield and Joshua of West Hollywood, Calif.; two daughters, Cecily Noble of Acton and Rosalind Schreiber of Philadelphia; four grandsons; and four granddaughters.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow in St. Anne's in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln. Burial was private.