George Thomas Tisue's Obituary
G. Thomas Tisue, known as Tom, died at age 85 on December 3, 2025, in Muskegon, Michigan, with his partner and several of his children at his side. He had suffered a major heart attack at his home in nearby Whitehall a few days earlier and never regained consciousness.
A retired scientist and academic, Dr. Tisue was born in rural Iowa in 1940 to Garold Tisue and Grace (Sparr) Tisue. The family later lived in Fargo, North Dakota, and they treasured the time they spent vacationing in Minnesota near Ten Mile Lake.
Dr. Tisue entered Beloit College in Wisconsin at a young age, having skipped two early grades because of his excellence as a student. He graduated magna cum laude from Beloit in 1961 with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and Latin. That same year, he married Mary Warren of Chicago, also a Beloit graduate.
He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Yale University in 1966, followed by a brief stint as a working chemist in Corpus Christi, Texas, and then a year of postdoctoral research in Freiburg, Germany. In 1968 he returned to Beloit College as an associate professor of chemistry. There he and Mary started a family, with the birth of daughter Kaarin in 1968 and son Seth in 1971.
In 1975 the family moved to the Chicago suburbs when Dr. Tisue took a job at Argonne National Laboratory. A divorce in 1980 was followed by a second marriage to Harriet Story; the couple lived in suburban Hinsdale, often hosting Kaarin, Seth and Harriet's two children, Sarah and Tate Garner.
After the end of that relationship, Dr. Tisue met and married Krystyna Neuman, a child development professional who was living in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. They soon moved to Clemson, South Carolina, where Dr. Tisue taught at Clemson University beginning in 1982 and later rose to full professor of environmental analytic chemistry.
The couple bought a house in a nearby old mill town, Newry, and there they adopted two children: Daniel Pedro Tisue in 1985 and Heather Elena Tisue in 1989.
While teaching at Clemson, Dr. Tisue participated in multiple visiting professorships and research trips abroad. Work related to the use of radioactive isotopes in environmental chemistry led to Dr. Tisue accepting a post in 1996 with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. He lived there with Krystyna and his two younger children until returning to the United States in 2001.
Dr. Tisue worked at Chicago-area colleges until moving to Whitehall in 2006. He taught chemistry at Muskegon Community College and participated in citizen science initiatives in Duck Lake and other nearby waterways, often donning waders to capture invertebrates with a fine net or using an outrigger canoe to record water quality data.
Dr. Tisue was intellectually and physically active throughout his life. He liked skiing, hiking, scuba diving, camping, boating, motorcycles, travel of all kinds, reading, vegetable gardening, cooking, and a good stiff drink. When his older children were small, he had a series of Volkswagen vans that he used to transport the family on vacations. He achieved a 3rd degree black belt in hapkido, a Korean martial art, and taught the practice to students at Clemson. He loved blues, jazz, classical and other types of music, and he enjoyed playing the trombone and other low brass instruments. In his 70s he embarked on multi-day cycling excursions in which he towed camping equipment in a trailer behind his recumbent bicycle. He and his partner, Margitta Rose, later made a series of long road trips through the U.S. and Canada with their RV hitched to his pickup truck.
Dr. Tisue was preceded in death by his third wife. His first two wives survive him, as does his partner, his four children and five grandchildren. He had no siblings. In accordance with his wishes, there will be no public memorial service and interment will be private.
Shoreline Memorial Services of Whitehall Ph. 231-893-5300
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