But I turned off in terms of ornithology as a result, especially because the replacement curator at the museum came down from Cleveland, Cleveland Museum. And all he was interested in were the lengths of the primary feathers on the wings of the local birds. And I felt this was… Read More
And so I spent a summer, sort of final summer in my college time checking all of the references in their book. And this involved, among other things, going through the Audubon Folio and the museum had original Audubons. It had Catesby, et cetera. So I had a wonderful experience… Read More
But he’d introduced me to so many things that, before I went to Michigan, my final summer was at the Emory University Field Station in Southwest in Georgia, in Baker County, Georgia. The Emory University Field Station was not populated by Emory University students. It was University of Georgia students… Read More
Both masters and doctorate were at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I only applied to three places. And because of my interest at that time in terms of going on in herpetological studies, I applied to Florida, Harvard and Michigan. Florida wanted some 200 bucks at that time. Read More
And he ran out to the guy, “You’ve killed my fox!” (George laughing) And the guy of course was extremely apologetic, et cetera, et cetera. And (chuckles) so Arthur comes back to the Model T with the fox in his arms. And so that was a pretty good specimen collection… Read More
Now your advanced degrees were where?… Read More
He offered an additional semester long course on advanced mammalogy in which we could do whatever we wanted. And I studied the Peromyscus, the wood mice and a friend who was in a class ahead of me Arthur Ravenel Jr., and Ravenel, by the way, is honored by the bridge… Read More
What are your degrees?… Read More
Well, I went to the College of Charleston after my high school in Charleston and at the College of Charleston, a very small faculty, a very small institution at the time, but it had been around for a couple of hundred years. So it was quite a delight in terms… Read More
What was your formal schooling?… Read More
Well, I’d… (chuckling) I’d grown up being curious about the creatures around and in Charleston, for instance, we used to try to bring the bats down by throwing objects in the air and then waving branches, et cetera, when they did swoop down after the objects. And we collected creatures… Read More
So there were all kinds of growing up adventures of that kind. But I do remember too in front of my grand parental home in Lumberton, North Carolina, there was a giant live oak that extended out into the highway. And I remember that, because I tracked the carpenter ants… Read More
Did you know then that nature or science was a direction you wanted to go into?… Read More
So when I went back to Charleston, I was really already turned on by the experiences that she’d given us and allowed us in terms of our experiments and so forth. So that was quite a turn on. And then when I got back, fortunately the Curator at the museum… Read More
And it was fortunate in terms of the mischiefs we got into with some of the bird walks with adults comprising the majority, but with us right alongside. So that’s my beginning. It wasn’t in a zoo or zoo circumstances. It was in the natural world in the low country. Read More
And she said, “Get out and sit down.” And we got out and sat down in what looked like just a vacant field, a little grassy vacant field. But it was really a turn on. It was a field of Venus flytraps. That’s the very age of the range, about… Read More
No, I wasn’t interested in zoos at a young age. I was interested in the outdoors and the creatures around. My turn on really came when the family moved for a year up to Lumberton, North Carolina. And in that circumstance, I was in the seventh grade when I left… Read More
We tested the white lightning on the lab rats, and so forth. We also manufactured explosives. And one of the incidents in that time was that there was a county agent meeting at the high school and they asked us to vacate the lab. And we warned them that in… Read More
Were you interested in zoos or working at zoos as a young age?… Read More
And when you were growing up, what zoos, if any, were you exposed to?… Read More