Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
vironments, and evolution—and in testament to their resilience, those principles have
guided subsequent researchers into the twenty-first century.
9
When I reached Berkeley as a new faculty member and curator in 1978, forty years
after Grinnell's death, he still dominated local lore with regard to field acumen and
scientific standards. One morning in the Mohave Desert, M.V.Z.'s founding director re-
portedly looked out of a horse-drawn buggy and, motioning toward a string of tracks
in the sand, nonchalantly remarked to students that kangaroo rats were breeding.
“Between the hind feet,” he probably noted tersely, pointing at large dimples left by the
nocturnal rodents' sagging testes. More ominous was the story, related by ornithologist
Ned Johnson—among the legendary naturalist's academic grandsons—of an assistant
who prepared several bird skins but hadn't attached their museum tags before briefly
leaving his worktable. Grinnell was obsessed with tying tags
immediately
so that collec-
tion data couldn't possibly be confused; thus the young man returned to find his work
jumbled in a wastebasket.
Back then rumor had it that only one in eight completed the rigorous M.V.Z. graduate
program, and Henry Fitch's inaugural year was perhaps more difficult than most. He'd
entered the University of Oregon as a shy teenager, and those four years around older,
more urban students had left him withdrawn, even hostile in some social situations. In
1931, with no financial support that first term in Berkeley, he subsisted on a pot of mush
for breakfast and twenty-six-cent dinners at a restaurant near campus. On one daunting
occasion he was summoned to meet with Charles Kofoid, who chaired the zoology de-
partment and feuded with Grinnell over museum policies; the imperious parasitologist
remarked with chilling bluntness that “disgraceful” undergraduate grades would doom
the newcomer's doctoral hopes. Henry, however, stubbornly got an A for a paper about
herpetology in Kofoid's history of biology course and graduated after his grumpy antag-
onist retired.
Henry also took classes from other Berkeley luminaries, including paleontology,
taught by Camp; invertebrate zoology with S.F. Light; and heredity, evolution, and be-
havior with Samuel Holmes. He generally did well, but mediocre performance was a
chronic threat; a few low marks could result in dismissal, and his near-nemesis was the
foreign language requirement. In an introductory class, competing with younger stu-
dents who'd learned pronunciation from their immigrant parents, hard work yielded
only the dreaded C. Rather than risk another bad grade, he slogged through a German
translation of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species,
thereby gaining the vocabulary and
grammar to pass the graduate reading test.
Things soon improved within M.V.Z., where, despite his rural speech and dress, there
was respect for Fitch's resilience, dependability, and field skills. Within a year Grinnell
judged him “ideally industrious, with marked independence and originality, does things
on his own initiative.” For Henry, the museum was “for a long time the center of my
universe,” one that in his memories always retained a “rather magical quality.” In 1933,
M.V.Z. gained expansive new quarters in the Life Sciences Building, and grad students
were active in the intellectual life of the place. They were employed quarter-time as
teaching assistants and got by comfortably on thirty dollars a month; they worked in a
superb natural history collection, on a campus where snakes, birds, and small mammals
were common. Beginning in his third year Henry assisted with the economic vertebrate
zoology class for forestry majors, and each spring he helped Grinnell in vertebrate nat-
