123,194 research outputs found
Dr. Ronald L. Kaye, 85
No full textDr. Ronald Lee Kaye, who founded the Rheumatology Department at the Palo Alto Clinic and worked at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation for many years, has died. He was 85
Interview with George Collins by Roger Kaye
No full textOral history interview with George Collins. Interviewed by Roger Kaye. Reference to National Park Service and Alaska.
George Collins helped to establish the Arctic Refuge
Name: George Collins
Keywords: History, Biography, Law enforcement, Wildlife refuges, National Park ServiceINTERVIEW WITH GEORGE COLLINS BY ROGER KAYE
PHOENIX, ARIZONA MARCH 28, 1993
MR. KAYE: George, could you tell me a little about your background, your
history, where you were born?
MR. COLLINS: All right. I was born on May 31, 1903 in St. Paul,
Minnesota. And my father’s name was Lynne, L-Y-double N-E Collins. My
mother was Emma Lincoln Walker. My father was in the newspaper business
in St. Paul, with the “St. Paul Pioneer Press.” He was a machinist in the
composing room. My mother was a proofreader and junior editor for the
West Publishing Company in Midway. I don’t know where their business
offices were exactly, but somewhere between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and
we called it Midway.
MR. KAYE: How did you happen to work for the Park Service?
MR. COLLINS: The Park Service? Well, when my parents and my brother and
I, with them, of course, moved to California about 1908, or so, we settled
in the upper Sacramento Valley. And in 1914, 15 or 16, a Congressman from
that district in California was a friend of Steven T. Mather and Horace
Albright who were the first two Directors. Mr. Mather was the first
Director of the National Park Service. And he was the man who conceived
the idea of having a National Park Service. And the Secretary of the
Interior at the time was very friendly toward Mr. Mather, and he said,
“you know so much about it, and like it so well, you go run it.” So
that’s how Mr. Mather became the first Director of the National Park
Service. And Mr. Albright had graduated in Mining Law from the University
of California at Berkley, where Mr. Mather had gone to school himself. So
while Horace Albright wanted to get into the mining business, Mr. Mather
prevailed upon him to become his assistant in the new National Park
Service. So naturally, when Mr. Mather had to retire because of illness
and age, why, Mr. Albright succeeded him as Director of the Service.
Well, my parents and our family up there in northern California knew
Mather pretty well and my brother went into the Park Service, and so did
I. We just sort of followed along with those people. And I worked odd
times in the summer, when I was going to school in Berkley. And finally,
what I did at the time was be a Summer Ranger, or worked as a laborer or
something for the Park Service. Then I took the Park Service Ranger
Examination about 1929, and was appointed to the Grand Canyon. I spent a
little time at Yosemite, and lots of time up at Lassen before the time I
went into the Service permanently. My first permanent job in the Service
was in 1930, at Grand Canyon, as a Ranger. I became not an Assistant
Superintendent, but Assistant to the Superintendent, for Grand Canyon
National Park. There is a lot of difference between those two titles.
See, when I finished going to school, and my folks thought I was never
going to quit going to school, and wondered what I was going to do, I
became a landscape architect, professionally. And they didn’t have any
jobs open for landscape architects, and I liked the Ranger work. I liked
the idea of being a Ranger, and I had passed the Ranger Examination at the
Civil Service, and, as I say, had a couple of little jobs, one at
2
Yosemite, and one at Lassen. Then I moved to Arizona, and was a Ranger
there at Grand Canyon National Park. I spent most of my time as the North
Rim Ranger. In those days we didn’t have a road all the way out, that is,
a good road for tourists.
[tape stops and begins again]
Representation in Alaska improved. We had Sitka, and we had Mt. McKinley,
and the big one at Katmi.. Those where rather remote places in those
days. McKinley was on the railroad, but not a lot of people got there. I
think the first time I went up there, it had a big season, about 900
people or something like that. Anyway, it was about 1949 or 1950 that Mr.
Connie Wirth who later became Park Service Director, he was then Chief of
Lands, he ran into me in San Diego where I was running an exhibition of
Interior Department activities. And he said, “what the hell are you doing
here?” I told him and he said, “you go on back to the Grand Canyon, I’ve
got other work for you, more in line with what I want you to be doing.”
So it was Connie who sent me to Alaska. The idea was to make a recreation
survey of the entire territory. And I went everywhere you could get with
an airplane and a boat. I went everywhere I thought I ought to go. So I
covered that territory and I found that most Alaskans, except for those
who fly, professional aviators, and so on, most of them know a lot about
their own little part of Alaska, but they don’t know very much of anything
about the rest of it. I found that they didn’t even see the thing in
their mind’s eye in its full proportion. From down in the southeastern
end of the territory, clear up to the islands of the chain and up north to
St. George, and St. . . .the names go out of my mind, up in the Bering
Sea. Well, I went to all of those places and got a tremendous perspective
of the territory. Of course, I just fell in love with that whole country.
It was country that I could feel at home in. I liked the people, the
wildlife and all that. I was married, with family, and I was torn between
Alaska and California where I had my family. At the time, I couldn’t
think of taking my wife and children up to Alaska. Because they were in
school, they had their home, and that’s where my home was. I felt at the
time like I shouldn’t do that, and I believe today that I made up my mind
in the right direction.
[tape stops and begins]
Around the top of the world, there were in Lapland, which is pretty well
settled, over in Siberia, and elsewhere, in Sweden, and Norway, and so on.
There were only four, five or six, nations that had very much to do in the
Artic. There was not a whole lot of activity nationally amount nations
that had responsibilities in the Arctic. Well, Canada was pretty
outstanding, they took it seriously. They had lot of people, not a lot,
the population of Canada, even today, isn’t all that big, but there were a
lot of people, Indians, Eskimos, and others. There was also an amazing
configuration of lakes and rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. That
always fascinated me. Also, as I went into northeastern Alaska, the first
river was very impressive because it started in Alaska, and wandered
around, and it too emptied into the Artic Ocean! The way I was raised,
where I went to school, and all, we never thought of any rivers that
didn’t go south and flow into the Gulf of Mexico, or into the Pacific or
Atlantic Oceans or something. Geographically, it was an amazing
3
revelation to me, to realize that there was an Arctic orientation to a
great deal of the country that the United States was responsible for. I
won’t say, “owned.” We don’t “own” anything. But we were fortunate
enough to have been given responsibility over that part of the world that
is up in the Arctic. And we know of it as Alaska, at least the north
coast of it.
[tape stops and begins]
My partner in most of the work that I did in Alaska and other activities
is dead now. But Lowell Sumner and I thought that we ought to recommend a
Conservation Area. We didn’t necessarily think it should be a National
Park, because you had native people living there who had established
themselves and their own ways. They had gotten firearms finally, and some
of them still used bows and arrows and spears and so on, and maybe they
still do today. I guess they do. But anyway, we didn’t want any of that
to change. And we thought that the best thing in the world for that
northeastern part of Alaska and the northern Yukon would be a great
international conservation area. It would be established for the purpose
of simply protecting it, and letting it alone, as it was.
And that was our recommendation.
MR. KAYE: Did you make this before you went up in 1952, or after?
MR. COLLINS: No, after we’d been there and seen a lot of it. We flew all
of the time.
MR. KAYE: You made two trips to the Arctic Refuge in the 1950s didn’t
you? Didn’t you spend two Sumners there?
MR. COLLINS: At least, I think I made more than that.
MR. KAYE: Your first trip, was that to Peters Schrader Lake area?
MR. COLLINS: We went to Schrader Lake from Barrow. We didn’t know
anything about the country. And John Reed didn’t know anything about that
part of the world, except that he had been in northeast Alaska, and a
little bit of the upper end of the Yukon. But he knew enough to realize
that what we were interested in from the standpoint of scenery,
configuration, and wildlife and all that, was best exemplified over in
that region.
MR. KAYE: The northeast?
MR. COLLINS: Yeah.
MR. KAYE: Now, Reed is with the U. S. Geological Survey isn’t he?
MR. COLLINS: Yes, that’s right.
MR. KAYE: Did he want you to stay east of the Canning River, to be away
from his area?
4
MR. COLLINS: He said, “your National Park.” He never did get over
referring to my interests up there in other than National Park terms. I
explained to him time and time again, in Washington, and up there in
Alaska and everywhere else, that I didn’t give a damn what they called it.
But I thought that a Conservation area wouldn’t fit particularly well into
the National Park Service system of protection area. And that we’d just
have to let people who were more concerned about things like that than I
was, decide, in the department, what to do. And my work was at the
department level, not any particular organization of the department,
except the Secretary’s office.
MR. KAYE: The Interior Department?
MR. COLLINS: Yeah, so I looked at this whole thing from a departmental
standpoint. The Secretary’s office, not from the National Park Service,
the U.S. Geological Survey or any of the rest of them. Well that was
good, to take that stand, that attitude. It was the only way to do good
land use planning. If you started out from a National Park Service
viewpoint, or from Fish and Wildlife, or Land Management, or USGS, you
would miss an awful lot. So I had to hold a general thought of Arctic
land use and conservation in my mind. And right away, I started going
over into the Yukon because it’s all one country. If you stop at the
international borders, you miss half of it. So, I went to Whitehorse, and
the Commissioner of the Yukon Territory was named “Collins.” That was a
peculiar thing to me. There was absolutely no blood relationship that
either one of us could imagine. He was an intelligent fellow, except that
he was drunk all of the time! He was as drunk as a skunk, most of the
time whenever I saw him! And the few times that I got his attention well
enough so that he understood what I was talking about, he was fine. And I
did more good for our interests in the Arctic by sitting in Whitehorse and
help write things for him to sign than I think I did anywhere else. But
we got along fine as representatives of the two countries. And the
interest in…[unintelligible town name] one of those pretty good sized
towns over there, where I used to go and stay, the name won’t come to my
mind right now. But, those people could never think of anything except
mining, and what you could get out of the ground, what you could sell or
convert into money. I didn’t find a good solid conservation thinker in
that whole country over there for a long time. I think there are a number
of them now, who are conservation minded. In the sense that you preserve
and protect something that is an important part of the ethical concept of
your country. You don’t have to do anything with it, just see that it’s
let alone. That’s the way that “Doc”[Sumner] and I felt about that whole
thing up there. It hadn’t been ruined, and why should it be? Well, it
should be because more and more traffic was increasing along the Arctic
coast between the Canadian outposts and Barrow, and those places, and
others in between.
[tape stops and begins again]
Our recommendations were more in line with Fish and Wildlife Service. The
head of that organization in Alaska was Clarence Rhode. I had known
Clarence for a long time, and we were very good friends. He said, “well,
you’ve got to put this in the hands of some outfit to take care it,
5
somebody had to be responsible.” And Clarence wasn’t unhappy, because we
both agreed that it should be U. S. Fish and Wildlife. And I think we
made the right decision. I don’t think that it was utterly National Park
in caliber. And there’s nothing like it and nothing in the National Park
system up there in the Arctic. In fact if I could have justified, in
fact, I wrote justifications, in my own mind, that maybe I should
recommend a National Park, but I fought against that. I didn’t think that
that was the proper attitude to have. I think I was right. I think today
that this was one of the best decisions in land use management terms that
I ever made in my own mind. Which was to keep a National Park out of
there.
MR. KAYE: Why was that George?
MR. COLLINS: Because, right off of the bat, if you have a National Park,
based on the popular concept of what parks are for, you would have to
endorse the idea of all kinds of people going up there. And I didn’t want
that. I didn’t think that there should be a whole lot of people from San
Francisco and Los Angeles running around up there. I thought that you
ought to preserve what was there, whether or not anybody ever got to see
it anymore than they did then. I always felt I was right about that. And
Conrad Worth did too. He is a landscape architect himself, and he said,
“I’ll go along with what you recommend.” So, we would have gotten a
National Park if any one of half a dozen other guys had been in the
position I was in, at that time. Because a lot of people think that
National Park means money. What “Doc” Sumner and I were after wasn’t
going to make any money for anybody.
MR. KAYE: What vision did you and “Doc” Sumner have for the future of
what’s in the Arctic Refuge? What did you see for it?
MR. COLLINS: Only to make sure that the Canadian people saw conservation
in that region pretty much as we did, and would agree that the great thing
about it was to let it alone. The international line divided it in half,
you might say, and we thought that it should be a common bond between the
two nations there, in terms of policy and practice in conserving that
whole region. We did a boundary that reached over on the Canadian side,
and not many years later, they came out with their own boundary on the
Canadian side, and it put ours to shame. They had a much better boundary
than we did.
MR. KAYE: You mean a better park?
MR. COLLINS: They did lean towards the park thing. I’m not sure but I
believe it is a park now. It was an established singular boundary with
provisions for expansion to the south. That surprised us, it surprised
me, but I didn’t raise any questions about it. Because to have them do
anything would help keep those damn prospectors and miners from tearing
the country to pieces. This was a big step ahead. Then Fish and Wildlife
did establish the area on the American side. That was pretty well taken
care of in principal and policy. So that you could, in those main
6
concepts of government, principal and policy, you could go forward and do
more and more with it in terms of protecting and saving it.
MR: KAYE: Let me go back a little ways. You and Clarence Rhode discussed
whether the area should be a park, or a wildlife area, who else was
involved in those discussions back in the 1950s, and tell me how they
went? What things were considered? Who was on what side?
MR. COLLINS: Well, there was a man from Stanford University whose name
escapes me for the moment. I’ve got it somewhere. And he ran the Arctic
Research Laboratory for a couple of years up at Barrow. We would go over
to Barrow and write up reports. Write up what we thought we had learned.
We’d go over there once in a while. And he came over to northeast Alaska
and he went down in the Sheenjek too with us. He was a fine professor of
geology, I think, at Stanford. He was great guy. He understood exactly
what we were doing. And he made available to us stenographic help and
things like that over at Barrow when we’d go over there. We were able to
keep up our reports pretty well. And they looked pretty good when we sent
them outside to San Francisco, and Washington. Of course, that’s all gone
now. No laboratory up there anymore. I think it’s been closed out, which
I think is wrong, absolutely wrong! They never should have discontinued
that effort. They need something, even though our part of the Arctic is
small compared to Canada.
[tape stops and restarts]
The Assistant Director of the National Park Service in Washington, a man
I’d known many, many years and most of my adult life, and of course
Clarence Rhode. Although Clarence was head of Fish and Wildlife in
Alaska, he thought first of the land, and the wildlife. [tape stops] He
was a great man, I think. There was this little fellow from Stanford who
was ahead of any of us. He could see your point of view, just like that.
And I can’t think of his name. But I don’t think, well, Ben Thompson, . .
.
The Superintendent of McKinley was “Mush” Pearson. He was a dog Musher.
He could have been up there for 100 years, and wouldn’t have known anymore
about Alaska than the Alaska Railroad and how to get from Fairbanks to
Anchorage. He was a hunter, and just wasn’t a conservation minded guy.
Those were the only people who had ever been there, who knew anything.
You couldn’t discuss this stuff with anyone. There were more people on
the Canadian side, by far, than there were on the Alaskan side who could
have discussed our views on the Artic with far reaching views.
MR. KAYE: Let’s go back to Clarence Rhode. Did he fly you around? Was
he involved in your survey?
MR. COLLINS: He flew me whenever he was up there in that region on his
own business for Fish and Wildlife. He’d take the time, I flew a lot with
Clarence. He was a good pilot, an excellent pilot. Highly trained, and
skilled. Not a man of great formal training or education, but he had
enough. Clarence had a tremendous business head, when it came to running
his outfit there. He and I talked about it all the time. You might say
7
that he and John Reed were my strongest confederates in discussions and
analysis of what the Arctic was, and why it should be left alone, and
things like that. I don’t remember other people. You had to have been
there and learned a little about it in order to have anything to say about
it. I know I couldn’t talk intelligently about it until after I had been
there for awhile, and I went there for that purpose.
MR. KAYE: Your second trip, was that to the Firth River, Joel Creek area?
MR. COLLINS: No, I don’t remember for sure. I made a couple of trips up
there to the Artic area before I got a consciousness of the vastness of
it. I could see, as anybody would, from a map that it was a big thing,
but the personality of the land, and when my concept came to the point of
thinking in terms of everything north of the Yukon River being another
world. I included the Brooks Range. But now, as I look back, that my
mind gradually took the crest of the Brooks Range on up to the Artic as
that world in itself. And south of there, I thought, was the Yukon, and
more Alaska. It was a normal way of dividing up the land, to even think
about it.
MR. KAYE: What was the best area, the area that you most enjoyed in Artic
Refuge? You camped all over, Joel Creek, Schrader Lake, and Sheenjek,
what did you like best?
MR. COLLINS: Well, it’s hard to answer that. I never spent a lifetime
there. I never spent enough time to be greatly impressed by, as I know I
would have been, by many other places besides Joel Creek. But in the
experience that I did have, I felt that Joel Creek was one of the most
representative and distinguished parts of the Artic region that I knew
anything about. And even now, in my mind’s eye when I think about the
Artic, I think first about Joel Creek. Where it started over there, up
Joel Creek and through the hills a little ways. And then, the next river
south, Manchu Creek, which runs into the Firth River. It seemed to me
that the difference between those two places, Manchu Creek in it’s own
way, and the Firth in the way that appealed to me so much. Then the whole
setting, going back to Peter’s Lake and Schrader Lake and the big mountain
that sticks up there. I include all that when I talk about the area where
“Doc” and I camped and worked so much. You can land a plane in there
pretty safely and comfortably.
MR. KAYE: With a float- plane? At Peter’s Lake you mean?
MR. COLLINS: No, I meant over at Joel Creek. Yeah, we had that big
willow patch. And there was a family of moose that lived in there. And
we lived on one end of it. But we went out and dug around a little bit,
and made a good enough strip so you could get in and out.
MR. KAYE: Who flew you in there?
MR. COLLINS: For heavens sake, (thinking) it was an Alaskan Airlines guy
who lived up on the coast there. Do you remember him?
8
MR. KAYE: No
MR. COLLINS: He had a place down Fairbanks.
MR. KAYE: Did he live at Barter Island?
MR. COLLINS: No, Barter Island is over on the Canadian side. He lived
about half way between Barter Island and Barrow. His
Interview with Dr. Brina Kessel by Roger Kaye, January 22, 2003
No full textOral history interview with Dr. Brina Kessel. Roger Kaye as interviewer.
Dr. Kessel discusses her involvement in the 1956 Murie Expedition of the Sheenjeck River and the Arctic Refuge.
Name: Brina Kessel
Keywords: History, Biography, Exhibitions, Biologists (USFWS), Murie Expedition, Sheenjeck River, Arctic RefugeINTERVIEW WITH DR. BRINA KESSEL
BY ROGER KAYE JANUARY 22, 2003
MR. KAYE: This is an interview with Dr. Brina Kessel conducted on January 22, 2003
in Fairbanks, Alaska by Roger Kaye. The subject will primarily be a discussion focusing
on her involvement with the 1956 Murie Expedition to the Sheenjek River. Dr. Kessel,
thank you for being here and doing this with us today. I’d like to ask you to begin with a
brief biographical sketch on yourself; where you came from, how you happened to come
to Alaska, some of the main things that you have done, and what you do now.
DR. KESSEL: Well, I was brought up on the east coast. I was born in Ithaca, New York
where my parents were graduate students. Then my Dad got a job at the University of
Connecticut at Storrs. He was an English professor. I was brought up then on a one
hundred and ten acre piece of land adjacent to the University. So I was brought up in a
University atmosphere, but in a more or less country living atmosphere. Both my Dad
and mother had taken Ornithology courses at Cornell under Dr. Arthur Allen. They were
both interested in birds and we had feeding stations and things around the place. My Dad
would take me out for hikes, identifying birds. I guess that’s where my love of birds
began. I worked my way through College working on a poultry farm, which also helped
me a great deal in my knowledge of birds, believe it or not. I was cleaning dropping
boards and things like that. And when I first went up to Cornell, which I did end up at,
working with Dr. Arthur Allen, but during my first year up there I earned money as a
Freshman working in the Poultry Department there. Then, Dr. Allen and Peter Paul
Kellogg were going to come up to Alaska. You may have known their work from out on
the Y-K Delta. Dr. Allen and Dr. Peter Paul Kellogg had worked together on the sound
recordings of the first bird sound recordings that had been made. I was very fortunate
when I went to Cornell that the War was on, and all of the Graduate Students were off in
the Service. Even as a freshman vitally interested in Ornithology and hanging around the
Labs, I automatically became their “gopher”. This gave me an awful lot of good training
scientifically, logistically, and that sort of thing while I was there. I don’t know why I’ve
always been interested in tundra. I think it must have been a mutant gene that I had.
Because as long as I can remember, I have loved particularly, the high alpine type of
tundra. I remember it first from the top of Mount Washington. Then, as kids in grade
school, my Dad took a sabbatical out to California and we had a trailer that we went
across the country in. I can remember at any stop where I was anywhere near the high
country that I would either take a horse up, or take a hike up to the top of the tundra. So,
when I was looking for a job as I finished my Ph. D., I decided that I would go were there
was tundra. Frankly, I would have been out at Nome, had they had a University out
there, at that time. I ended up in the Taiga here in Fairbanks. And I told my mother
when I came “way up to Alaska” that I would stay for at least two years because I didn’t
want to be a job hopper. I was up here teaching summer session and Ira Scarlon took us
up to Cleary Summit where there was tundra right there at the very tip top. At that
summer session picnic, I knew for sure that I was never going to leave Alaska. So, I am
still here. The only place I applied for a job was to come to Alaska. There were
probably two reasons for that. I knew that I could be in tundra here, or near it. And a
man by the name of Neal Hosley was the head of the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit
at that time. I had put up specimens for him while he was in the Forestry Department at
the University of Connecticut. So, I knew him. And my proclivity for tundra, plus
having someone that knew me here… so I applied for a job. He told me “no” there
wasn’t a job at that time. But the next year I went to Milwaukee to the North American
Wildlife Conference meetings to try and job-hunt. I met Hosley there and he asked me if I
had gotten a job. I told him no, and that I hadn’t really been looking. And he told me that
they had an opening and that I should send up my stuff. John Buckley, who had just
been the second person in the Biology department, had taken the job of Cooperative
Wildlife Research Unit when Hosley moved to Dean, which left that position open. So I
applied for it, and came up here, so there were two of us in the Biology department at
that time.
MR. KAYE: So you were to be a professor, or an assistant professor?
DR. KESSEL: Yeah, I came for summer session as just an instructor because that was all
they had in summer session. Then I was immediately in an assistant professor of
Zoology, or Biological Science is what I guess they called it at that time. I slowly worked
my way up from there. I did a lot of teaching in the early years. And did quite a lot of
research around the edges. Then, when Mrs. Schible died in a fire in the Lathrop in about
1967, I guess, I was immediately made acting Department Head. Then, when Dr. Wood
came in he reorganized the whole University into Colleges and he made me the Dean of
the College of Biological Sciences and Renewable Resources. There was no difficulty. I
think it was partly because it was kind of a frontier arrangement up here. The school was
very small. It was more who you were, or was more what you could do than you were or
what you were. I had absolutely no visible sex discrimination and that sort of thing here
around the University. I had some other interesting experiences, which I’ve told
elsewhere. We talked about George Schaller. He was one of my freshman students there.
And I got Buckley, the head of the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit my second year
there. He said, “Brina, you should have a research project,” it was something to do for
the summer. We put in a proposal to the Arctic Naval Research Station. It came through
and Tom Cade and I were going to float the Colville, a full boat. Narell was going to fly
us up from Umiatt, upriver. Then we were going to coast down and then go back up on.
It was all approved, and I got a letter from the boss up there at Narell saying, “Everything
is fine. Put in a little more money for photographs, because we’d like to have them”. He
said that we had one problem. He said, “You can not come up on to the Reserve because
the Navy will not allow any woman on the Petfore Reserve unless they are married, and
with their husband”. So, instead of taking a Ph.D. in Ornithology to do a bird job, they
took a freshman man! But his name was George Schaller. I feel that I was able at my
misfortune, to kick him along in the right direction. It was a little bit fortuitous as far as
his expedition went.
MR. KAYE: You are referring to the Murie Expedition of 1956?
DR. KESSEL: Right, right. In the early 1950’s apparently, Otto Geist, and Earnest
Patty who was then the President of the University of Alaska recommended me to the
Muries for their planned trip to the eastern Brooks Range. I first met the Muries then, in
Washington, D. C. at a North American Wildlife Conference in the early 1950’s. I think it
was 1953. I think that was the year I was able to get to that Conference on a Naval flight,
because of my work at Barrow. I know that that is where I met the Muries. I can
remember standing in the back of the big conference room and chatting with them for the
first time. They were interested because I had been recommended to them. We were
going to go up about then, in the early 1950’s. But if you recall, Olaus came down with
spinal Tuberculosis. He was hospitalized and had to put it off. I remember that when Ira
Gabrielson was up here helping with the Statehood document, and so on, he told me,
“Forget it, Olaus will never be up here”. Spinal T.B. in a man that age was not a very
good thing. But he did. [get better] And we went up in 1956. It was interesting because
he was still recovering from his Spinal Meningitis. He was still weak. And it was
interesting as we were working around up there; there is a lot of tussock country up there
and you people with long legs have a definite advantage. You don’t have to go down in
those pits quite as often. Olaus was magnificent because he was kind of wobbly on his
legs when he got up there. And he just kind of managed to wobble between them in the
right sequence. It was marvelous to watch him strengthen in the early part of the summer
as he became better and better at getting around up there.
MR. KAYE: So, let me ask you; what was your impression of the Muries both as
Naturalists, and as people?
DR. KESSEL: Well as people, they absolutely cannot be beat! They were very
understanding, sensitive to other people and their weaknesses and strength. Scientifically,
Olaus was always a good scientist. And Mardy was his partner in note keeping and
taking care of Olaus. I think neither one of them would ever have reached the heights that
both of them did of it hadn’t been for the other. It was a beautiful partnership that they
had.
MR. KAYE: And as a naturalist; what kind of a scientist was he? You had worked with
many scientists by then. Did Olaus stand out as different from other scientists?
DR. KESSEL: Only that sometimes Naturalists are not considered Scientists. But he
was. He was a Scientist. And he was both. He was wonderful in his observational
abilities and his note keeping. I don’t know whether you are familiar with the Bulletin on
the Birds and Mammals of the Aleutians?
MR. KAYE: The Bering Sea.
DR. KESSEL: Yes, the Bering Sea. It was mostly just the Aleutians they were on. But
it’s a magnificent thing and you can absolutely depend on it. He was always, he is
always in his publications, accurate on everything that he puts in. You can count on his
dates. The book that Gabrielson and Lincoln put out on the birds of Alaska; there are a
lot of typos in that. And in many places it has been incompletely referenced. But if it’s
on the Aleutians, you can always go back to Olaus’ and pick up those original references
and so on.
MR. KAYE: And he was an artist too. Did he do artwork and so on?
DR. KESSEL: Oh yes! I am not sure how much he was doing while he was up there. He
was doing sketches. We know that. One picture I am very proud of is in my living room
is a picture that he painted as a result of his trip with A. H. Brandt on the Y-K Delta in
the 1920’s. What’s the name of that book? Is it Arctic Alaska by Herbert Brandt, in
which he participated with Conover, the Ornithologist? He was down on there while
Mardy was here in Fairbanks and when they left after many months on the Y-K Delta.
Mardy took the boat down and they met in Anvik, or some place down there where they
got married.
MR. KAYE: In 1924.
DR. KESSEL: I have a picture that he painted on my wall at home of Stellers Eiders on
the Y-K Delta. It was in their cabin there at Jackson Hole. They gave it to me, which I
am very proud of.
MR. KAYE: Some of the descriptions that Olaus made were like a childlike curiosity
about the natural world. Did you sense that, or not?
DR. KESSEL: I wouldn’t have called it childlike at all. He was just a naturally curious
person and scientist. And he loved the outdoors. I don’t think he varies that much from
other naturalists that I know, and use every excuse to get out in the field, and just plain
enjoy it.
MR. KAYE: How about the area. What was your impression of the area when you first
went up there? At that time, did you have a sense of the importance of the project in
terms of leading to establishment of a protected area?
DR. KESSEL: I personally didn’t, particularly. When we, I think it was our first
morning at breakfast, Olaus gave us our work papers so to speak. Olaus said “I want you
to get the best that you can out of your experiences here this summer”. And that was our
assignment.
MR. KAYE: Really?
DR. KESSEL: Yeah, and so it was do what you can and what you want to do, and have
fun. So, I did birds and plants. George did hiking and birds. We both collected some
small mammals. Of course, Olaus was setting some small mammal traps around. We
helped put them up. I made quite a plant collection up there. It’s in the University of
Alaska Herbarium now.
MR. KAYE: When we talked earlier once, you told me about how you apparently went
on a walk, or a trip and you hiked into an area that had been off of the topographic maps.
And it was a special quality of that experience. What do you remember of that? What
can you tell me about it?
DR. KESSEL: Well, I think more what impressed me was that we were in a part of
Alaska that had not been mapped by USGS. That was what impressed me. In fact, while
we were in the Last Lake camp USGS was up there in a helicopter taking the photographs
of that area. And on the east side of this mountain, I guess you’d have to call it a
mountain; they were taking the photographs in order to make the USGS maps in future
years. But what I had done one day; it was very close to camp. You left the camp and
walked a very little distance and you started to climb up in the foothills to that particular
mountain. But I went up the valley that was just a little bit south of that. Then there
was a valley that ran north and south. So, I then went into that unmapped valley which
was just like any other valley up there, with sedges and things in the bottom of it; and
rubble on both sides. I walked up there, but I was a little bit disturbed when I met a
Grizzly bear. I could see it way down the valley. So I slowly climbed up on the east side
of that valley up into the talis, and I tried to remain out of scent and everything else from
that bear. I figured that if I was far enough up that talis slope and he started to come up
there, I could start rolling rocks and boulders and things down on him. But the bear
continued on up where I had been coming. We kind of passed without him seeing me.
And then, I walked the rest of the way around the mountain to the north, and then back
to camp.
MR. KAYE: You talked about this sense of being off the map, and I guess, this sense of
the unknown, and how that added something to the experience?
DR. KESSEL: Well, it did just knowing that we were in an area that hadn’t been mapped.
When you knew that so much of the area had been mapped, it was kind of fun. One
time…I set up a research plot. The head of the Wildlife Cooperative Unit, Dr. John L.
Buckley had done some work for the Air Force, or was in the process of making it. They
wanted to know what foods that people who might get downed in Alaska could find that
would be edible for them to feed on. So he was very scientific about it and randomly
picked plots to be surveyed. One of them was way up at the headwaters of the Sheenjek.
So, Brina had to go up there and test that one. George and Bob Krear walked up there
with me, and we surveyed the plot and set it out. In the process, we met a Grizzly Bear
which you may have read about in Mardy Murie’s book, in which it was a hot day and
the Grizzly was sleeping there in the woods. Bob Krear was in the lead, George was
behind him and I was following George. All of a sudden that Grizzly Bear shot up in
front of Bob. He was of course scared witless. He tossed his little tripod at the bear, and
it was quite startled. George and I turned around and headed in the other direction. The
bear took off. Bob Krear was absolutely white. But anyway, that was on out trip up
there to set up that plot at the headwaters. So, when I was going to go up there and run
that plot by myself, they walked me up there to make sure everything was all right. I
then spent, is it three nights that you run a trap line? I stayed up there alone, way up by
the headwaters all by myself for three nights. Then I packed up my stuff and walked
down. But I didn’t go through the woods. I was walking down mostly the ouf ice along
the edge of the river. I got maybe about a third to a half way down, I was still on elf ice,
and there were Olaus and Mardy coming up to meet me. So then we walked back
together. Actually, we crossed the whole river. We had to take off our boots and pull up
our trousers and everything else to get across the water. It was too deep. We finally
turned around and came back.
MR. KAYE: Did you folks carry a gun for Bears?
DR. KESSEL: Not most of the time. I carried an over and under .22/.410 with the rifling
taken out of the .22 barrel because I wanted to use a .22 shot. You can’t get decent
pattern out of a rifled barrel. I used that to collect Warblers and that sort of thing. I did
carry a couple of single-shot, oh what do you call them, things in the shell?
MR. KAYE: A flare?
DR. KESSEL: I don’t know, it looks like a big lead ball in the end of it. But anyway, I
would carry one of those in my pack. The bears were more likely to avoid us than we
had to avoid bears. It was just that one instance that we were worried about. There was
another one that I think Mardy tells about. I was nearby. That was when a bear was
coming down the hill, and it appeared to be chasing Bob Krear. So he dropped his pack,
it stopped at the pack. Then Bob came on down. He went back later and picked up his
pack. You had to be careful. I am not sure we were careful enough! We didn’t have any
really bad accidents.
MR. KAYE: You mentioned George Schaller, and of course he was one of your students.
Is there anything that indicated at the time; any of his traits as a biologist or a student that
would lead one to think that he’d become the preeminent conservation biologist, kind of
world known as he is today?
DR. KESSEL: I don’t think there was at that time. He was very interested in natural
history. I remember he had, I think a Raven at one time, that he kept over near the
Dormitory or maybe even in the Dormitory. But no, I think that probably the Colville
River was his first experience in that. When he went up with Tom Cabe to work on the
birds of the Colville. He really enjoyed that very, very much. And that was probably his
kick-off. Then, to have the additional opportunity to be with the Muries on the
Sheenjek, I think that much more of a boost. He loved to walk. He would leave camp and
be gone for two or three days, just walking the ridges around there. I remember one trip
that he took, where he went on the ridges on the eastern side of the Sheenjek all the way
up and around the headwaters where he would look over into the Colleen. Then, he
walked around and came down the other side and came back to camp. I know that he
wore out at least two pairs of shoepacks. We had to order more for him from Fort
Yukon! I don’t know whether I answered your question there or not.
Here’s something from my notes that make me chuckle when I reread them. We
arrived up there on the first of June. I think the two fellows, Kreer and Schaller went up
there on the preceding day and the Muries and I went up on the first. On the morning of
June 2nd, I wrote in my journal, “had a horrible sleep last night. I was pretty cold. It
didn’t seem possible. I had flannel PJs on. I was inside both of my double down bags. I
had a blanket over that. Most of the trouble came from below. Anything that touched
the ground hard got cooled off in no time. It must have been the frost in the ground.
Today I cut some bows and put a layer of them under the tent floor below my air
mattress. Then I put my blanket, doubled, between my sleeping bag and mattress. Let’s
hope I am warmer tonight.” And sure enough, I was. That was probably one of my first
lessons that I learned about Arctic camping. I had the same trouble on the Seward
Peninsula when I got stranded with the lack of an airplane at the town of Dearing. Again,
it was that cold. They had some Caribou skins all stacked in a rack. I guess they were
going to send them out and have them tanned, I don’t know what. Anyway, I asked if I
could barrow one of those and I through it on the ground underneath my sleeping bag. Of
course, I was nice and warm. To this day, I have that lying on one of my beds upstairs,
just in case I ever have to use it again. But that’s just an example of the kind of thing I
learned up there.
At another place in my journal, I was writing about how wonderful the area was
and what nice weather we were having. “The mosquitoes are still scarce, even while
sitting in that damp area I only had two or three bothering me at a time. I did have a few
‘noseeums’ around me today however. I am afraid that this environment is too good to
last. Gorgeous beyond words. The birds are just getting started on nesting. The Caribou
are migrating. Everything seems perfect, it’s hard to believe that I am here. Why should I
have been chosen to come on a trip like this, out of the many persons that applied. Now
that I am here, I feel woefully inadequate to fully appreciate everything and to make full
use of the opportunities provided. I am not sure how best to spend my time; what
information to gather, how to gather it, etc. It’s easy to lay plans in the laboratory, it’s
another thing to fully utilize, synthesize and appreciate this great outdoor laboratory.”
So that was part of my learning experience, my early learning experience about working
away from
Arithmetic of the Asai L-function for Hilbert Modular Forms.
No full textArithmetic of the Asai L-function for Hilbert modular forms
Adam Kaye
Chair: Kartik Prassanna
We prove two results on rationality of
special values of the Asai L-function
attached to Hilbert modular forms at
critical points. Such L-functions only
admit critical values when the Hilbert modular form has
non-parallel weight.
Our rationality results generalize
previous work of Shimura on algebraicity.
The first result uses a period defined by
transferring the Hilbert modular form
to a Shimura curve.
The second result uses a period defined
using rational structures on
the coherent cohomology of Hilbert modular
surfaces.
We also give some partial results
towards integrality of such L-values.
Our results are motivated by the study of a
p-adic analog of the Beilinson conjecture,
which is a deep conjecture relating
algebraic cycles (and motivic cohomology) to values
of L-functions.PhDMathematicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120693/1/adamkaye_1.pd
Nonlinear dynamics of water and energy balance in land-atmosphere interaction
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-147).by Kaye Lorraine.Ph.D
Damus-Kaye-Stansel procedure: midterm follow-up and technical considerations.
No full textThe Damus-Kaye-Stansel operation is useful in the management of complex congenital heart defects. We reviewed our experience with 23 patients who underwent a Damus-Kaye-Stansel procedure. The anastomotic technique was individualized depending on the anatomy. The aortic and pulmonary artery incisions were carried into the sinuses of Valsalva in 9 patients, the aorta was transected in 11 patients, and a patch was used to augment the anastomosis in 13 patients. Concurrent procedures included a Fontan operation (n = 9, mortality = 0), right ventricle-pulmonary artery conduit (n = 5, mortality = 0), bidirectional Glenn procedure (n = 6, mortality = 1), and central aortopulmonary shunt (n = 3, mortality = 2; emergency = 1). Survival is 87% with a median follow-up of 7 years (range, 2 months to 9.2 years). Four patients underwent late revision of the Damus-Kaye-Stansel connection. All survivors are asymptomatic. We conclude that the Damus-Kaye-Stansel connection provides excellent midterm results when the proximal anastomosis is adapted to the anatomy of the patient
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Square Dancing with the Stars to Enhance Dynamic Hirschman Linkages?
No full textIn this Presidential Address, the author takes the reader on a reconnaissance of his life and time as a regional scientist. He points out scenery he found scintillating along the way, hoping that some may pick up the banner and chew on a few of the ideas for a while. He suggests a revisit to Albert O. Hirschman’s notion of key sectors and more empirical analysis related to Marcus Berliant’s and Masahisa Fujita’s notion of knowledge creation and transfer.Presidential Address, San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 2014 (53rd Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association
- …
