John Kenneth Cashion

Service Details

Visitation will be in Draeger-Langendorf Funeral Home on Friday, June 28, 2024 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm. A memorial service will follow at 6:00 pm with Deacon Eric Sewell officiating.

Memorial Suggestions

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to a favorite charity or to the NorthShore Hospitals Foundation Cardiovascular Institute (foundation.northshore.org/impact-areas/cvi).

John Kenneth Cashion was born on June 18, 1930, in Vancouver, B.C., the second son of Faith Mary Corning and Daniel Edward Cashion. After graduating from high school in Calgary in 1947 he joined The Congregation of St. Basil, a teaching order based in Toronto, Canada. He was ordained in 1956. Ten years later he applied for a decree of secularization and a release from vows, which was granted by Pope Paul VI in 1966. In his nineteen years as a member of the Basilian order he made many of the deepest and most enduring friendships of his life. He earned a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D in chemistry, and the S.T.B. in theology; all from the University of Toronto. His doctoral thesis was the primary work for which his thesis director, Professor John Polany, shared in the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He held postdoctoral fellowships, first at UW-Madison’s Theoretical Chemistry Institute, and then at University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He next became a Research Associate at Harvard and was also an IBM Fellow of the Harvard Computing Center, which led to an industry position at IBM headquarters in New York. In 1969 he received an offer to help establish the department of Chemistry at a new third campus of the UW in the Racine/Kenosha area. He joined the faculty as a full Professor and spent the remaining thirty years of his teaching career at UW Parkside. Part of this choice was based on a definite preference for the academic over the industrial surroundings but an even stronger reason for coming to the Racine area was that the lovely lady he was soon to marry was Professor of French and chair of the Foreign Language Department at Dominican College.

He was married to Mary Catherine O’Connor in June, 1969, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City. They enjoyed nearly 55 wonderful years together.  It surely added to the happiness of both partners that they shared a lifelong passion for teaching which was undiminished by their retirements. World travels that were a lasting delight would have been empty had they been made alone.

The birth of their daughter, Mary Faith, in 1973 brought the special joys that only parents can know. Her M.D. degree from Tulane University was a source of great parental pride. Her marriage to Dr. Michael Terkildsen in 1998 gave her parents a young man to love as much as if he had been their own son. In due course it also gave them granddaughter Catherine and grandson Andrew to love and cherish as treasures beyond measure.

Visitation will be in Draeger-Langendorf Funeral Home on Friday, June 28, 2024 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm. A memorial service will follow at 6:00 pm with Deacon Eric Sewell officiating.

The family would like to thank Lynee Thompkins and the wonderful staff at Primrose retirement community, dear friends Chet and Ruth Melcher and Kim Glenzer for their devoted care and support in Ken’s final years.  In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to a favorite charity or to the NorthShore Hospitals Foundation Cardiovascular Institute (foundation.northshore.org/impact-areas/cvi).