I was born and raised in rural northern Indiana. I lived there until I was 17 when I left my Indiana home for good. I have decided to tell my story by highlights through the years.
When I was three years old my folks sent me off to Jack and Jill Kindergarten so they could have some peace and quiet for part of each day. When I was ten they put me on a Greyhound bus by myself to visit some cousins who lived 60 miles away. After that wonderful trip, my life’s goal was to be a bus driver. From that age until I left home we had monthly family trips either to Chicago or Indianapolis for my cultural exposure to theatre, dance, great music, poor people, slums, and people whose English was limited or non-existent. When I was 14 I went on a tour of New York City with a group of girls, escorted by other mothers. I met Eddie Duchin who dedicated a song to me.
After graduating from high school I entered Duke University and majored in botany, a brilliant move. The five of us botany majors were lumped in with the fifty Duke botany grad students, some of whom remain my academic heroes. My junior year at Duke I was an exchange student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, perhaps the best year of my life. My digs housemates were Scottish Nationalists who raised political hell, and were very sophisticated about world events. And I went back to Duke for my senior year.
After a pause in Bloomington Indiana to get a masters degree in botany, I went to San Francisco to visit my Duke roommate. She knew I was going on to grad school, and wondered why I wasn’t going to Cal in Berkeley. I called the department there and invited myself for a visit. I was welcomed and toured. Everyone I met had written my textbooks, same as Duke. I had already applied to some grad schools ‘Back East,’ but decided it was Cal or nowhere. I wrangled my way in. I was a teaching assistant for the next two summers at a Cal field station in the Sierra Nevada. There I met Carl Bock. The night I met him he played a song I Never Will Marry on his guitar. Never one to avoid challenges, I have been refuting his song for over 50 years.
After Cal we ended up in Boulder at the University of Colorado’s Biology Department, a group that has changed its name more times than I can remember. I enjoyed my young colleagues and bright students there and did those professorial things required in modern academia. The University rewarded me by allowing me to pursue my many research interests. Those interests suggest I am the longest living person with ADD that’s still alive. My US botanical work has centered on grasslands in the intermountain west and great plains.
In 1976 I went to Russia in an exchange of botanists between the two countries. I did that trip four or five more times, centering my work in the Republic of Georgia. Along the way I also took up forensic botany as applied to homicide investigations. The two courses I liked teaching the most at CU were Evolution and Applied Botany.
After our CU retirements we moved to Loveland. In some ways I have come back to my hometown in Indiana.