Richard Clinton Harris, the Quintessential North American Lichenologist
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Opuscula Philolichenum, 7: vii-xxvi. 2009. Biographical sketch: Richard Clinton Harris, the quintessential North American lichenologist 1 WILLIAM R. BUCK Richard (Dick) Clinton Harris was born on 6 December 1939, at 7:17 a.m., at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was the first child of Clinton Howe Harris and Esther Marion Dilman (Harris). His father worked for Argus Cameras (now defunct) and his mother was a housewife. When Dick was two years old, his sister Patricia Sue Harris was born on 18 January 1942. The two were very close as Dick grew up, and Dick even provided Pat’s middle name. A third sibling, Alan Leslie Harris, was born on 22 July 1947. Many of Dick’s interests—particularly reading and gardening—seemed to have developed early. His mother recorded that Dick’s favorite toys at both 18 months and two years old were books, prescient indeed of an early indication of what would become a lifelong bibliophilia. Similarly, Dick’s strong interest in vegetable and flower gardening developed in early childhood, perhaps a result of many visits to his maternal grandparents’ farm in Cass, in the Thumb of Michigan. His sister, Pat, recalls the two of them (Alan was considerably younger) at the Dilman farm playing in the hay loft. The farm was so remote that rural electrification and indoor plumbing only arrived in the 1950s. Dick attended Angell Elementary School in Ann Arbor (Fig. 1), and then grades seven through nine at Tappan Junior High School. He attended the only public high school in town at the time, Ann Arbor High School (now Ann Arbor Pioneer High School), and graduated in 1957 at age 17 (Fig. 2). During high school Dick worked at the Ann Arbor Public Library, the perfect place to indulge his love of books. It was around this time that his family moved down the block to the former home of an Italian count, where Dick and his mother lovingly restored the gardens together. Dick’s room was the former maid’s quarters, with its own exterior entrance and bathroom. His brother, Alan, remembers it this way: Another result of the house projects was some gainful ‘employment’ for Dick to earn spending money. As one example, the house had large formal grounds initially in very poor condition, including a large number of graveled paths. I remember one summer that Dick took on the job of cleaning out all the paths and putting down new crushed stone. He single-handedly carried tons of stone, barrow load by barrow load, from a huge pile dumped in our driveway and spread it with shovel and rake. (I was very impressed, as up to that time I had viewed my brother as more of an intellectual than a perspiring, red- in-the-face physical laborer!) Growing up in Ann Arbor, it wouldn’t have been surprising for Dick to attend the hometown University of Michigan, but instead he opted for Oberlin College in Ohio. He entered as a classics major, but although he enjoyed studying Latin and Greek, the department was a poor fit for him and he turned instead to the study of botany. He relates how on an early field trip with Oberlin professor George Tallmon Jones (1897–1998) he chanced upon a pigment-deficient form of Cladonia cristatella (British soldiers) with yellow, rather than the typical red, apothecia. He asked everyone around if they knew anything about this and no one did. This ignited his lifelong interest in lichens. In college Dick also became interested in musical theater and summers he traveled to Cape Cod to construct sets for performances of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. Dick graduated from Oberlin College in 1962 with his botany degree in hand. Before beginning graduate school, though, Dick moved back to his parents’ home in Ann Arbor and worked in the chemistry library at the University of Michigan. During this period, his sister Pat got married, and Dick decorated her wedding cake (Fig. 3). 1 WILLIAM R. BUCK – Institute of Systematic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY 10458-5126, U.S.A. – e-mail: [email protected] vii Figure 1 (top left), Dick Harris in elementary school (photograph courtesy of Pat Harris). Figure 2 (top center), Dick Harris’ high school graduation photograph, 1957 (photograph courtesy of Pat Harris). Figure 3 (top right), Dick Harris decorating his sister’s wedding cake, 1963 (photograph courtesy of Pat Harris). Figure 4 (bottom), lichen class at the University of Michigan Biological Station, 1974 (Dick Harris at far right; back row at left, Jerry Snider and Mason Hale; Bill Buck below Mason Hale). viii Figure 5, 1969 Campbell Island expedition. Dale Vitt is second from left, Rudy Schuster is far right and Dick is second from right (photograph courtesy of Dale Vitt). Dick began graduate school at Michigan State University in 1964, to work on lichens with Henry Andrew Imshaug (b. 1925). Shortly after arriving in Lansing, Dick and Imshaug sat down to decide upon a topic for Dick’s master’s thesis. Imshaug suggested the pyrenolichens and, after a short consideration of the topic, it became Dick’s area of lichen specialization for the next 45 years and beyond. In late 1966 he turned in his master’s thesis, “A survey of the corticolous pyrenocarpous lichens of the Great Lakes region.” It would be more than six years before he published it and validated the new nomenclature, but in that interval he almost doubled the number of species treated, and solved a number of taxonomic problems that had been left open in the thesis. At about this same time, Dick began his long affiliation with the University of Michigan Biological Station. In 1967 he assisted Howard Alvin Crum (1922–2002) in teaching the lichenology course at the station. In the summer of 1974 I met Dick and before the summer was over a romance developed. I had just finished my first year in graduate school at the University of Michigan and attended UMBS to take courses in bryology and lichenology, both with Crum, and boreal flora with Edward Groesbeck Voss (b. 1929). Dick was the teaching assistant in the lichen course, and Mason Ellsworth Hale, Jr. (1928–1990) visited that summer (Fig. 4). Starting that summer and working in subsequent years, Dick wrote a set of keys to the lichens of the Straits region of Michigan, among the first keys to crustose species in North America. These keys underwent several revisions, until Dick left Michigan in 1979. The first version came out in 1976, but was of limited distribution. However, a revised version was ready for the summer of 1977, and that edition is widely circulated. During that summer the American Institute of Biological Sciences met at Michigan State University and Dick and I organized the field trip for the American Bryological and Lichenological Society at UMBS. Dick’s keys were distributed to the many international lichenologists that attended. They were there because shortly following the AIBS meeting there was an international mycological congress in Florida and Mason Hale had organized a collecting trip down the Appalachians for them. Dick began work on his doctoral dissertation shortly after turning in his master’s thesis in 1966; he would not complete it until 1975. The dissertation topic itself was difficult (revision of Arthopyrenium s.l. in North America), but what really held up progress were wonderful opportunities for fieldwork. Dick’s advisor, Henry Imshaug, was very interested in sub-Antarctic lichens and received significant National Science Foundation funding for fieldwork in the region. Dick took part in three lichen-collecting trips. ix Figure 6, Dick Harris curating the University of Michigan Lichen Herbarium, ca. 1977. On the first, from mid-December 1967 to mid-February 1968, Dick and fellow graduate student John Jay Engel (b. 1941) accompanied Imshaug on a collecting trip to the Falkland Islands. My favorite story from that trip is about the group being served fried penguin eggs: with their bright red yolks and completely translucent albumen the eggs resembled large, bloodshot eyes, and the flavor was decidedly fishy. In late 1969, Dick, Imshaug, University of Michigan graduate student Dale Hadley Vitt (b. 1944), and well- known hepaticologist Rudolf Mathias Schuster (b. 1921) went to Campbell Island (Fig. 5), arriving on 22 December 1969 and leaving on 23 January 1970. Short trips by just the lichenologists to the Antipodes Islands and Snares Islands would follow in February 1970. Dale Vitt recalls his clearest memory of the Campbell Island trip. Each day the group would go out on treks through the scrub. On one of the longest of these treks, from one end of the island to the other, the group was returning after a long day in the field and hiking along a ridge top. Dick was directly in front of Dale and Dale was mainly looking at the ground for mosses. Dale recalls tripping and accidentally pushing Dick into a large mud hole, and his thoroughly mud-caked companion glaring angrily up at him. He is sure that Dick still hates him from that event! The following year, 1971, Dick, Imshaug and Engel went to Kerguelen Island, a French territory in the South Indian Ocean. They traveled by French freighter. Dick recalls the continual supply of wine on the island, delivered by the freighter, and playing cards with the French soldiers stationed there. To this day, Kerguelen remains remote and difficult to access. In November 1974 Dick moved from Lansing, Michigan, to Ann Arbor, where he had a job curating the University of Michigan lichen collection.