* H. Homer Aschmann; Founding Faculty Member of UC Riverside

H. Homer Aschmann, 72, a founding faculty member of UC Riverside and an internationally recognized geographer. Aschmann, an emeritus professor at UCR at the time of his death, was a noted authority on Baja California and the ecology of aboriginal people of the American Southwest. He had written extensively of those two places and other areas of cultural geography. Aschmann, who held a doctorate in geography from UC Berkeley, was shot down over Germany during World War II and after being freed from a prisoner of war camp, served as an intelligence officer. He came to UCR in 1954, the year the university began, and played a key role in establishing a Phi Beta Kappa chapter there in 1962. In Fontana on Friday after what a university spokeswoman described as a brief illness.