John C. Donnell, 87, professor and linguist

John Corwin Donnell, 87, a political science professor at Temple University and a whiz at languages, died of cancer May 25 at Cathedral Village, a retirement community in Roxborough.

A native of Seattle, he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1941 from the University of Washington.

During a college summer break, he wanted an adventure. At 19, he took his life savings ($200) and bought a train ticket from Seattle to Los Angeles. He met a couple of movie stars and was eventually conned out of all of his money in a card game, said his son, Richard.

"He washed dishes for a while and then jumped on the top of a freight train to make it home to Seattle," he said. "His face was covered with black soot."

He worked for a few months in a herring-reduction plant in Alaska until he was drafted by the Army in 1942. He had a good ear for music and a knack with languages. Those talents served him well in the military.

He was assigned to counter-intelligence in the Philippines during World War II. Later, he was a war-crimes field investigator in Japan until being discharged in 1946 as a staff sergeant.

That same year, Dr. Donnell joined the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency. He was already fluent in French, Japanese and Vietnamese. The State Department sent him to study Chinese for a year at Cornell University, where he met his future wife, Ruth L. Carpenter. They married in 1953.

She traveled with him to various posts, including Taiwan, South Vietnam and Malaya.

He returned to the United States in the mid-1950s and earned a master's degree in political science from Columbia University in 1957. Later, he taught at Dartmouth College for a year before moving to Santa Monica, Calif., to do research at the RAND Corp. in the 1960s.

"One of his projects at RAND was to interrogate Vietnamese prisoners of war to study the possible effects on North Vietnamese citizens if the U.S. dropped a bomb on their city," his wife said. "He presented a report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff stating that the bomb was not a good idea."

He earned a doctorate in political science in 1962 from the University of California at Berkeley.

By 1965, Dr. Donnell had had enough adventures. He and his family moved to Wyncote, and he taught political science at Temple until retiring in 1982. He enjoyed music and photography, and sang in his church's choir.

Aside from his wife and son, Dr. Donnell has no immediate survivors. His daughter, Joyce, died in 1982.

A memorial service will be held at 2:30 p.m. June 17 at Unitarian Society of Germantown, 6511 Lincoln Dr.

His body was donated to science.