George Gallup Jr., of Polling Family, Dies at 81

From The New York Times-

George Gallup Jr., who led the firm that his father made all but synonymous with polling and expanded it to become a barometer of Americans’ views on religion as well as their political attitudes, died on Monday in Princeton, N.J. He was 81 and lived in Princeton.

He learned he had liver cancer a year ago, his daughter Alison said.

Mr. Gallup had once considered becoming an Episcopal priest, and after graduating from Princeton with a degree in religion in 1953, he went to Texas to work in a ministry on Galveston Island. But the pull of the family enterprise proved stronger, and he joined his older brother, Alec, at his father’s firm, serving as an executive from the mid-1950s until his retirement in 2004.

While Mr. Gallup lamented late in his life that politicians follow polls rather than their conscience, he echoed his father in arguing that polling was vital to democracy. “It’s removed power out of the hands of special interest groups,” he said in an interview on PBS a few years ago. “It’s given people who wouldn’t normally have a voice a voice.”

More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/us/george-gallup-jr-of-polling-family-dies-at-81.html