I would not stay around to see the mission end. Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker. The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms. Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane. The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over. I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be. After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.
The title page of my grandfather’s PhD thesis, a thick volume of scientific discovery, each page typewritten in carbon-paper triplicate by my grandmother during their time at Harvard. Interestingly, it was submitted on his (54th) birthday.
“Long before the term ecology became a part of the vocabulary of the scientist, primitive man, looking out over the expanse of blue-green water which characterized his favorite fishing haunt, was probably aware of the fact that notable alterations in the color and clarity of this body of water would occur as the seasons changed.”
The introductory sentence of Theodore Olson’s PhD thesis on algae blooms.
I was witness to my grandparents’ transition to an assisted living apartment from the home they had kept for more than half a century. Though modest, it was the center of a busy family’s activities, and had accumulated the corresponding mementos through the decades. It had also collected the technical artifacts of my grandfather’s scientific career, specimens of insects and fish and algae from his ecological and entomologist specialties. He kept copies of his and his peers’ published works, along with those of his doctoral students, who carried on these disciplines, with the scientific rigor and methods that he taught them over their years in his tutelage.
I was there on the day when he had to empty the ‘wall of books‘ in his home library, which included the dissertations of his students. There was no space for everything at the new apartment. A few important reference volumes could be retained, but the others? What to do with them? Here were the compiled and distilled understandings of pioneers in biology, acquired through years of painstaking research, building upon the pyramid of human knowledge. These breakthroughs of their time have now been incorporated into our general understanding of modern biology.
What should happen to the first-ever photomicrographs of blue-green algae blooming to produce cyanobacterial toxins? What should become of the tabulated counts of seasonal species of mosquitos that were the vectors of mosquito-borne diseases? What should be the fate of that first chart correlating taconite processing and asbestos-like fibers in Lake Superior? All of these new discoveries had been first reported in his research and in the dissertations of his PhD students.
