ENHS Nature Trails October 2002 Article 4

Autobiographical Notes
from Bayard McConnaughey

Even if one didn't know Bayard, a reading of his "Autobiographical Notes" in their entirety is a good read. Reprint from the January 1984 NatureTrails:

My earliest memories are of Benzonia, a small rural village in northern Michigan, to which my mother moved with her father and three small children following the death of my father. My most vivid memories of this period are of tramping through the woods with my grandfather to go fishing at Casey's pond - of the wonder I felt at the beauty of the rainbow trout, and the mystery of the fish, frogs, turtles, and snakes of which I got occasional glimpses around the snags at the pond's edge. My excitement was unbounded upon finding one day the beautiful green and gold chrysalis of a monarch butterfly suspended from a milkweed leaf. I raced home with it to find out what it was. My mother encouraged me to keep it to see what might happen. I cannot adequately express the amazement and awe I felt when a beautiful big monarch butterfly emerged from it.

It was during this period that I began to take on large projects and persist in them for long periods. The two I remember best: 1. I was going to level all hills and uneven places in the world so there would be no impediments in riding my tricycle. 2. I was going to "unempty" Crystal Lake (a nine mile lake near Benzonia) by bailing it out with a tin can which I emptied a few steps up the beach. My older sister sometimes expressed doubts that I would complete either of these projects but that did not deter me.

When I was 7 we moved to Claremont, California - then a nice place not yet Los Angelized. Here I came under the spell of a wonderful old man, Mr. Delacourt Kell, a retired agricultural agent who loved children and who gave weekly natural history talks, illustrated with his own drawings, at our grammar school - an activity he was later forced to discontinue because he didn't have teaching certificate. He also took a load of kids every Saturday in his rattletrap model T and box trailer to Puddingstone Dam where we could swim and roam in the open countryside. He was also always available for trips to the mountains or streams or lakes to learn natural history. With his help and the encouragement of my mother I began to collect insects and to maintain a menagerie of lizards, snakes, salamanders, scorpions, and spiders in our backyard, as well as keeping pigeons and chickens.

It was also at age 7 that I first saw the ocean - an utterly new world to me. This made such a lasting impression that as soon as I got out of high school I enrolled in the summer session at the tiny one-man marine station of Pomona College at Laguna Beach - before Laguna Beach was a town: no highway, no pier, no town - just a little marine station and a small nearby artist's camp. This was so thrilling that I went six summers in a row - the last two as an instructor. I have been hanging around marine stations ever since.

At Pomona I was fortunate to work under two great teachers - Dr. William A. Hilton and Dr. Phillip Munz, father of Fred Munz of our biology department, whom I used to baby sit. Drs. Hilton and Munz were about as different in personality and in teaching and research methods as two people could possibly be but each played a major role in the biological program of Pomona and made lasting contributions to the lives of generations of students.

I took my master's degree at the University of Hawaii and then became, of all things, a camouflage engineer for the USED in Honolulu - with no previous engineering experience of any sort, and after induction into the army was assigned to the "Fighting 65th Engineers" as a camouflage man. When the Central Pacific Area Medical Laboratory was formed, I managed to get transferred to it and spent the rest of the war as a technician of bacteriology and parasitology in that laboratory - in Hawaii, Kwajalein, Okinawa and Korea.

In spite of my efforts, we managed to win the war and I returned to graduate studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, LaJolla. Upon completion of this I accidentally stumbled into a job at the University of Oregon without even applying for it or knowing of its existence, and have been here ever since, with two notable diversions.

The first was a three year leave of absence to help set up and teach in the Faculty of Fisheries, in Bogor, Java - the first faculty of fisheries in any institution of Higher Education in Indonesia. I was there from 1963 through the first half of 1966 - an exciting time, as the country underwent a period of total chaos the last year I was there, with a communist coup, a counter campaign by the army and moslem irregulars in which half a million or more persons lost their lives, inflation at 100% per day for a time, and the downfall of Sukarno - all while I was the last American in Bogor.

The other adventure was a semester with World Campus Afloat in 1974 - visiting 14 countries for a week or so in each and teaching marine biology and ecology while at sea. My wife and two daughters were also along. It's the most wonderful way to see the world.

I have always kept my biology near the hobby level, so as to enjoy it thoroughly, rather than committing myself to trying to do anything high powered. My tendency to persist in large, improbable projects has however stayed with me. For the past 30 years my major project, aside from biology, has been to rid the world of everything military.

Perhaps my sister was right - the world still has some bumps on its surface that are difficult to negotiate on a tricycle (the Himalayas, Alps, Urals, Andes, Rockies, Brooks Range and the Cascades, to mention a few). Crystal Lake is still unemptied, and my advancing years and present world trends suggest that I may not get the world completely demilitarized in my time either. In fact, I haven't even succeeded in demilitarizing the University of Oregon.

Bayard McConnaughey, 1984

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