"The entire Chaminade University community expresses their profound regrets at Brother Becker's passing," said Sue Wesselkamper, the university's president.

Becker, who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., died yesterday morning at St. Francis Hospice after what the university described as a long bout with cancer.

Earlier this year, he said he felt that God had called him when he was 13 to become a Marianist brother.

Becker was assigned to Hawai'i in 1955 to help establish Saint Louis Junior College, which grew out of the popular Saint Louis School the Marianists have led here since the late 1880s. Two years later, in 1957, the junior college was expanded into a four-year college and renamed for the founder of the Society of Mary, Father William Joseph Chaminade.

Becker, one of the school's five founders, was highly regarded as the chairman of the English department but was also known for his art and humor, dressing up as Santa Claus for his students and writing skits and poems for the Marianist Christmas pageant. He told The Advertiser in 1967 that he just sort of assumed the role of Santa the first Christmas after he arrived. "That Christmas morning, one of the brothers decided we needed a Santa," he said. "I don't know why they chose me, except that I'm a ham and like to dramatize."

Linda Iwamoto, a Chaminade English professor hired by Becker, said she will remember his humility and his deep, moving voice. A student of British literature, Becker wrote about the "Images of Light in the Poet's Romantic Verses" in his doctoral dissertation.

"He was fluent in middle English. He would come into class and read Chaucer in middle English," she said. "He was really a renaissance man.

"He was very, very sharp and had a droll sense of humor. He was also very humble. There was this great sense of peace about him."

Becker obtained his B.A. from the University of Dayton in Ohio, his M.A. from Dominican College in California, and his Ph.D in English at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He also worked as the principal at St. Joseph's High School in California.

Father Bill O'Connell, director of the Marianist Hall Community, said Becker was an excellent professor who seemed pleased at the way Chaminade has grown. At the start, the junior college had only 31 male students, and Becker wrote at the time that the Islands needed a four-year school open to both men and women. The Kaimuki school now has more than 2,800 students.

"I do get the sense that he was proud of it," O'Connell said.