William Dymsza, 86, a scholar of international business
As a scholar of international business, William A. Dymsza traveled around the world encouraging sometimes disparate nations to forge beneficial economic alliances. Little surprise, then, that when it came time to contemplate marriage he pursued his own international relationship, with a woman from Spain he had met in France, conducting the courtship in a language neither his nor hers.
"We met in Paris," said his wife, Begona of Braintree. "I was studying French, and he was teaching the military there. He was amazing, a wonderful man."
She learned English, and he added some Spanish to his repertoire of languages, supplementing the French they had spoken while falling in love.
The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary a few weeks before Dr. Dymsza died of heart failure Wednesday in South Shore Hospital in Weymouth. He was 86 and in retirement had lived in Braintree, where his Polish immigrant parents had run a chicken farm decades ago.
Born in Cambridge, he grew up in South Boston and Dorchester, and was close to his brother, Henry, who was a year and a half younger.
"He was a lot of fun; we had a lot of good times together," said Henry, who lives in East Greenwich, R.I. "We did a lot of things together. We went to Penn State for our undergraduate work together. We joined the Marines together."
Dr. Dymsza graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1943 with a bachelor of arts in economics and political science. For the next three years he served as a Marine during World War II and was stationed in China with an intelligence unit, his brother said.
After the war, he went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1948 with a master's in business administration. He stayed at the university and received a doctorate in 1951, in the fields of international trade, finance, and managerial economics.
"Bill was always very intellectual and interested in learning -- even in high school this was a trait," his brother said. "So it's no surprise that he went all the way to get his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania."
"He was a real pioneer in studying international business and international trade, which were just beginning to take off at that time on a whole other level," said Dr. Dymsza's daughter, Madeline Dymsza Pearlmutter of Brookline.
Dr. Dymsza taught at Boston College, then became chief economist for the federal Office of Price Stabilization in Boston during the early 1950s, analyzing the administration and implementation of price controls during the Korean War.
As an assistant economic commissioner with the US State Department, he served in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam during the mid-1950s, and then took a job as a lecturer for the University of Maryland, teaching economics to US military personnel in England, Scotland, Germany, and France.
In 1958 he joined the faculty of Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he stayed until retiring in 1985. An inveterate traveler, Dr. Dymsza used Rutgers as a base while continuing to conduct research and to teach in other states and abroad.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii and at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., in the mid-1960s. In the early 1970s, he moved his family to Chile for two years while serving as a United Nations export development advisor.
At various times, Dr. Dymsza also lectured or taught in Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona, and in Egypt, Israel, and Yugoslavia. He published "Multinational Business Strategy," a key book in his field, in 1972.
"He loved traveling," his brother said. "What we used to do is, when he had money he would take me places and when I had money I would take him places. But we were always short of money in the early days."
At Rutgers, Dr. Dymsza also served for 10 years as editor of the Journal of International Business Studies, raising the profile of the academic publication, his family said. "The most important thing for him was being a teacher, to pass knowledge to his students," his wife said.
Throughout his career, he often listened to classical music as he wrote at home, whether home was in New Jersey, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Chile, or in Spain, where the family traveled to visit relatives of Begona, who is from Bilbao.
"Every year we used to go to Spain in the summer," she said. "We'd take a typewriter. He used to type on the oceanfront."
"He was such a lovely, calm, humble person," his daughter said. "He was very good at what he did, but he wasn't pretentious at all."
In addition to his wife, daughter, and brother, Dr. Dymsza leaves a sister, Janet Yukon of St. Martin in the Caribbean; a granddaughter; and a grandson.
A funeral Mass will be said at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree. Burial will be private. 