Marcel Wingate, age 86, died on November 29, 2006, of a sudden heart attack while shoveling snow outside his ranch home near Pullman, WA. Wingate attended Pennsylvania State University, graduating from Grinnell College, and earning an MA and PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Washington.

Wingate was an ASHA Fellow and a professor emeritus in Speech and Hearing Sciences at Washington State University. He began working at WSU in 1975 where he served as chair of the Speech Department from 1975-1981, and continued teaching until his retirement. He was a prolific writer and researcher, presenting information at professional conferences and authoring 60 journal articles, chapters in edited books, and four books, including Foundations of Stuttering (2002) and Stuttering: A Short History of a Curious Disorder (1999). .

He presented a definition of stuttering in 1964 that was long considered the standard for describing the condition: repetition of a sound, syllable, or one-syllable word; silent or audible prolongation; or both.

His wife Cicely, a son, four daughters, and eight grandchildren survive him.

(Information from the ASHA Leader, February 13, 2007, p. 46 with permission and Washington State University Faculty, Staff and Graduate Student News, December 15, 2006)

From Joseph Agnello, April 18, 2007

I visited Marcel Wingate at his ranch many times and just recently three months before he died. Charles VanRiper said Wingate was the most linear thinker on stuttering, He went to his office every day all during his retirement and continued to write texts on stuttering. His book on Foundations of Stuttering was received by reviewers outside of ASHA with great compliments. Mike lectured on Foundations of Stuttering at the Seminar I conducted at Cleveland State University, The students had a great deal of interest/ideas on both his text and his lectures, He was a brilliant writer and teacher and had just just finished a text on "statistics" of spoken English and was working on yet another text. He was like a dogged prosecuting attorney. He really knew the scientific method and procedures when it came to critiquing studies on stuttering research. When he tangled with Wendall Johnson he doggedly persisted that he was right and that he won. He was like that in his writing and lectures, Students and his collegues in psychology and I in speech science had great admiration for him.