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Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

University of California
Source of Community Leaders Series

Joel W. Hedgpeth

MARINE BIOLOGIST AND ENVIRONMENTALIST: PYCNOGONIDS, PROGRESS, AND PRESERVING

BAYS, SALMON, AND OTHER LIVING THINGS

With an Introduction by
John A. McGowan

Interviews Conducted by

Ann Lage

in 1992

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Joel W.
Hedgpeth dated October 29, 1992. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Joel W. Hedgpeth requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Joel W. Hedgpeth, "Marine Biologist and
Environmentalist: Pycnogonids, Progress,
and Preserving Bays, Salmon, and Other
Living Things," an oral history conducted
in 1992 by Ann Lage, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley, 1996.

Copy no.

Joel W. Hedgpeth, Salt Point, Sonoma County, 1984.

Photograph by Steven Obrebski

Pity ddysg im, pa ddunies gain,
Wir araitli i aru-yrain?

The motto reads, "The squirrel against the world."
The original Welsh is "The truth against the world."

qwir-- truth
qwiwer — squirrel

They sound very much alike. --JWH

Cataloging Information

Joel W. Hedgpeth (b. 1911) Marine Biologist

Marine Biologist and Environmentalist; Pycnogonids. Progress, and
Preserving Bays. Salmon, and Other Living Things. 1996, xiv, 329 pp.

Hedgpeth and McGraw family history; childhood in Oakland and the Sierra
foothills; studies in biology at UC Berkeley, University of Texas; comments
on Monterey Bay marine biologist Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck character and
ecologist; founding the Society for the Prevention of Progress, revising
Between Pacific Tides; Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1950s;
director, University of the Pacific's Pacific Marine Station, Dillon Beach,
1957-1965; discusses opposition to Pacific Gas & Electric Company's
proposed nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay, CA, 1957-1964; director of
Oregon State University's Marine Science Center, 1965-1973; pycnogonid (sea
spider) research, lifelong and worldwide; research trips to Antarctica;
estuarine studies; research and testifying on San Francisco Bay and Delta
environmental issues.

Introduction by John A. McGowan, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Interviewed 1992 by Ann Lage for the University of California, Source of
Community Leaders Series. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Bancroft Library, on behalf of future researchers, wishes to thank the
University of California Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment and the
following persons and organizations whose contributions made possible this
oral history of Joel W. Hedgpeth. Special thanks are owed Michael Herz,
the Baykeeper project of the San Francisco Bay-Delta Preservation
Association, William T. Davoren, and Irwin Haydock for their leadership in
organizing the funding.

Foundations

San Francisco Foundation

Mar in Community Foundation

David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Individuals

Carlo and Eleanor Anderson

Bill Austin

Karl Banse

Dick Barber

Mary Bergen

Charles P. Berolzheimer

Jerry and Faith Bertrand

Harold Bissell

Michael Black

Thomas E. Bowman

Margaret G. Bradbury

Gray Brechin

Richard C. Brusca

Ralph Buchsbaum

James T. Carlton

Lloyd Carter

James S. Clegg

Peter and Carolyn Connors

L. Eugene Cronin

William T. Davoren

Paul K. Dayton

Douglas R. Diener

Alyn C. Duxbury

Evan C. Evans III

Phyllis M. Faber

Daphne Fautin

Rimmon C. Fay

Harold Gilliam

Gordon Gunter

Cadet Hand

Irwin Haydock

Alice Q. Howard

Douglas L. Inman

Ray B. Krone

Kris Lindstrom

Wesley Marx

David T. Mason

Mr. & Mrs. John A. McGowan

John L. Mohr

William A. Newman

Frederic H. Nichols

Larry C. Oglesby

Barry Paine

David E. Pesonen

Joseph & Freda Reid

Nancy J. Ricketts

Michael Rozengurt

Virginia Scardigli

Doris Sloan

Mr. & Mrs. Felix E. Smith

Robert B. Spies

Edgar M. Tainton

Margery & Fred Tarp

Eleanor S. Uhlinger

B.E. & Toni Volcani

Craig J. Wilson

TABLE OF CONTENTS--Joel Hedgpeth

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION- -by John A. McGowan ill

INTERVIEW HISTORY xi

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xiv

I FAMILY HISTORY AND BOYHOOD INTERESTS 1
Mother's Family—the McGraws 1
Nellie Tichenor McGraw Hedgpeth- -Joel's Mother 9
Joel Hedgpeth, Mountain Blacksmith 10
Some Early Memories and a Traumatic Injury 13
A Family of Aunts—Family Stories 16
Early Interest in the Natural World: Ants, Seashells, and

Childhood Reading 22

Book Collecting, Book Critiquing, and Music 28

Boyhood Wanderings in the Sierra Foothills, 1920-1921 34

Father's Tenuous Tie to the IWW 42

Solitary Time in Nature 45

II FORMAL EDUCATION, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY 47
Public Schools, Homes, and Family in Stockton and the Bay Area 47
Palo Alto Military Academy, 1922 56
Junior High and High School in Oakland 57
A Summer Idyll 61
San Mateo Junior College, 1929-1931 62
Studies at UC Berkeley, Class of 1933 65

English from George Stewart 67

Zoology Studies 70

Choosing Marine Biology, and Sea Spiders 71

Professors S. F. Light and Joseph Grinnell at Berkeley 77

The Controversial Professor Lund at the University of Texas 80

A Boyhood Interest in Shells and Sea Creatures 83

More on College Studies in Zoology and Biology 87

III ECOLOGICAL THINKING, ED RICKETTS, AND PROGRESS 90
The Concept of Ecological Communities in Marine Biology 90
Ed Ricketts, a Marine Biologist and Steinbeck Character 93
An Ecologist and Systematist 96
Revising Between Pacific Tides 97
Ethology: A Recent Development in Ecology 101
Ricketts and the Influence of Between Pacific Tides 104
"Philosophy on Cannery Row" --Ricketts, Steinbeck, Joseph

Campbell 107

The Society for the Prevention of Progress 113

Various Articles and Papers Noted 117

Jinglebollix 120

Ed Ricketts' Innovative Work 122

IV BEGINNING A CAREER AS A PROFESSIONAL BIOLOGIST 127
An Introduction to Pycnogonid Studies 127
Evolution of the Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology 131
Research Biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and

Editor of the Big Red Book 135

Cold War Concerns of Naval Intelligence at Scripps 137

Responsibilities of Editing the Treatise on Marine Ecology 142

Association with College of the Pacific 149

More on Oregon State University 224

"Steinbeck and the Sea" Conference 227

Retirement 230

VII ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ISSUES OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND DELTA 231
Estuarine Studies 231

An Encounter with the Archdruid 233

Estuaries in Texas 235

The Sea of Azov 236

Research on San Francisco Bay- -Geological Survey, UC, and

Stanford 238

Testimony Regarding Water Rights 243

Conflict between Agribusiness and Environmentalists over Water

Distribution 244

Testifying for the Bay Institute, 1987-1990 247

The Sea of Azov Comparison 248

Problems with Water Diversion in Russia 250

Using Some Texas Estuarial Data 252

Measuring Water Conditions in the Bay 254

The Tule Hypothesis and the Oyster Shell Challenge 257

Striped Bass Population and the Flood of 1863 262

Outcome of the Bay-Delta Hearings 26A

Testimony by Scientists on Public Policy Issues 265

Questions for Future Bay and Delta Research 269

The Roman versus Celtic View of Life 273

Recognition for Work to Save the Environment 274

TAPE GUIDE 276

APPENDICES 277

A. "A Boy's Life at Mather, 1921-1922" by Ted Wurm. 278

B. "Sea Spiders (Pycnogonida)", introduction to the
proceedings of a meeting held in 1976 at the Linnean
Society in honor of Joel Hedgpeth, and a listing of

Hedgpeth entries in "A pycnogonid bibliography." 282

C. "Ed Ricketts, Marine Biologist" by Joel Hedgpeth, from

the Steinbeck Newsletter. Fall 1995. 293

D. Letter from Aldo Leopold, 1947. 295

E. "Progress—The Flower of the Poppy," by Joel Hedgpeth, in

American Scientist, vol. 35 (3) 1947. 296

F. Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology, 1957, Foreward

and Contents. 300

G. Family placenames: Tichenor Rock, Nellie's Cove, Nellie

Lake, Hedgpeth Heights. 302

H. Statement on San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary--An Ecological

System, 1969. 303

I. The Edward W. Browning Achievement Awards, 1976. 305

J. Curriculum Vitae of Joel W. Hedgpeth. 308

K. Commencement Speech to Class of 1970, Fresno State College 316

INDEX 326

PREFACE

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of our graduation from the
University of California at Berkeley, the Class of 1931 made the decision
to present its alma mater with an endowment for an oral history series to
be titled "The University of California, Source of Community Leaders." The
Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment provides a permanent source of funding
for an ongoing series of interviews by the Regional Oral History Office of
The Bancroft Library.

The commitment of the endowment is to carry out interviews with
persons related to the University who have made outstanding contributions
to the community, by which is meant the state or the nation, or to a
particular field of endeavor. The memoirists, selected by a committee set
up by the class, are to come from Cal alumni, faculty, and administrators.
The men and women chosen will comprise an historic honor list in the rolls
of the University.

To have the ability to make a major educational endowment is a
privilege enjoyed by only a few individuals. Where a group joins together
in a spirit of gratitude and admiration for their alma mater, dedicating
their gift to one cause, they can affect the history of that institution
greatly.

The oral histories illustrate the strength and skills the University
of California has given to its sons and daughters, and the diversity of
ways that they have passed those gifts on to the wider community. We
envision a lengthening list of University- inspired community leaders whose
accounts, preserved in this University of California, Source of Community
Leaders Series, will serve to guide students and scholars in the decades to
come.

Lois L. Swabel
President, Class of 1931

William H. Holabird

President, retired, Class of 1931

Harold Ray, M.D. ,

Chairman, Class of 1931 Gift Committee

September 1993

Walnut Creek, California

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SOURCE OF COMMUNITY LEADERS SERIES

Robert Gordon Sproul Oral History Project. Two volumes, 1986.

Includes interviews with thirty- four persons who knew him well.

Bennett, Mary Woods, class of '31, A Career in Higher Education; Mills
College 1935-1974. 1987.

Browne, Alan K. , class of '31, "Mr. Municipal Bond"; Bond Investment
Management. Bank of America. 1929-1971. 1990.

Dettner, Anne DeGruchy Low-Beer, class of '26, A Woman's Place in Science
and Public Affairs: 1932-1973. 1996.

Devlin, Marion, class of '31, Women's News Editor; Vallelo Times-Herald.
1931-1978. 1991.

Hassard, H. Howard, class of '31, The California Medical Association.
Medical Insurance, and the Law. 1935-1992. 1993.

Hedgpeth, Joel W. , class of '33, Marine Biologist and Environmentalist;

Pycnogonids. Progress, and Preserving Bays, Salmon, and Other Living

Heilbron, Louis H., class of "28, Most of a Century; Law and Public
Service. 1930s to 1990s. 1995.

Kay, Harold, M.D. , class of '31, A Berkeley Boy's Service to the Medical
Community of Alameda County. 1935-1994, 1994.

Kragen, Adrian A., class of '31, A Law Professor's Career: Teaching,

Private Practice, and Legislative Representative. 1934 to 1989. 1991.

Peterson, Rudolph A., class of '25, A Career in International Banking
with the Bank of America. 1936-1970. and the United Nations
Development Program. 1971-1975. 1994.

Stripp, Fred S., Jr., class of '32, University Debate Coach. Berkeley
Civic Leader, and Pastor. 1990.

Trefethen, Eugene E., class of '30, Kaiser Industries administrator, in
process.

ill

INTRODUCTION— by John McGowan

I first met Joel Hedgpeth in the winter of 1951 when I was a
beginning graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). I
was very uncertain of his position at Scripps but soon discovered that here
was a very interesting, knowledgeable, and accessible man whose outlook on
biology and on many other topics appealed to me. Further, he was able to
express these views brilliantly, wittily, and often. It took some time to
discover that his role at SIO was "editing" Volume I of the great two part
Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology to be published as Memoir 67 of
the Geological Society of America. This Treatise became one of the great
classics of marine ecology and paleoecology. Volume I alone has 1,296
pages. Joel wrote six of the chapters in this volume and they are among
the best in this or any other book on this subject of the next two decades.

One reason it was difficult for us young students to understand just
what he was doing was his habit or arriving at 5:00 a.m., working hard at
editing for maybe five hours, then spending the rest of the day visiting
various offices and laboratories around Scripps. Typically, Joel would
arrive unannounced, with a great, long complicated story — which he began
somewhere down the hall — about events and situations that were frequently
obscure, but always amusing. Some time into these monologues, it might
turn out to be about a dispute between eminent Victorian naturalists that
took place some 90 years earlier. It took me some time to realize that
these were not pointless recitals but rather his way of introducing
important, fundamental questions that had cropped up during his early
morning editorial work. Joel was very democratic about these excursions,
everyone's office was fair game, and I /suspect he used his visits to us
students as sort of warm-ups for visits to the higher strata. This method
of scientific interchange unfortunately did not go over well with some of
the old mossbacks in white lab coats, especially since he had the habit of
sitting on the corner of one's desk and sorting through the mail, •
interjecting parenthetical comments on it during the mostly one-way
discourse.

It is perhaps not well known that in addition to the six chapters in
the Treatise which are clearly his, he did heroic editing jobs (practically
rewrites) of several others — so the term "editor" in this case involved
considerably more than tinkering with, correcting, and arranging the work
of others. The same is true of several editions of the equally famous
textbook, Between Pacific Tides. But it is typical of Joel to be reticent
about claiming credit where it is clearly due him.

In those days, even at Scripps, we were aware of the "Molecular Wars"
chiefly through the efforts of the geneticist Adriano Buzzati Traverse
(whom Joel persisted in. calling transverse). Apparently Roger Revelle, the
then director, had been convinced by Buzzati and others that the kind of
"bug-counting" observational ecology we were doing was on its way out and

that "a revolution was needed in marine biology." As a reaction to this,
we bug counters formed the Neo-Victorian Biological Society, an evening
seminar group that included plenty of home brew. Joel was one of the
founding members and in many ways its mentor.

Joel did manage to do some other writing while he was working on the
Treatise. One effort was a lovely letter to the La Jolla Light, our local
newspaper. He noticed that on the morning of certain days of the week
there were large numbers of dead skunks on the streets of La Jolla; they
had been hit by cars. He pointed out that not only was this very unseemly
for patrician La Jolla, but that skunks were intrinsically valuable and
beautiful. There followed a wonderful description of the sterling
qualities of the skunk and a suggestion that everyone get up half an hour
earlier on garbage days instead of setting out their cans the night before.
Nothing came of this, of course. The letter was signed Jerome Tichenor,
president (and sole member) of the Society for the Prevention of Progress.
Many of us graduate students rushed to join the Society but were turned
down; after all, additional members would have represented progress.

In 1954 a major, five-month expedition set out from Scripps for the
North Pacific. One of the many purposes of the trip was to dredge the deep
ocean with the newly invented Isaacs deep sea dredge. But the operation
was run by an exceedingly timid technician more concerned about losing the
dredge than exploration of the depths, so rather few hauls were made.
There was a total of three successful dredge hauls, one of which caught a
single pycnogonid. Joel wrote a paper on this result where the purpose was
"...to discuss the interesting capture and its significance to science and
the welfare of mankind." [See page 120a] .

In this one-page report with a grandiose title, he compares the
Scripps Expedition (Trans-Pac) results with the Swedish Deep Sea Expedition
(fourteen months at sea) results by means of a "detailed statistical
analysis." He points out that the Swedes caught only one pycnogonid as
well, but out of nine deep dredges, so that number of "pycs" per haul for
Sweden was 0.11 while SIO caught 0.33, and the Swedes' number per month was
0.07 while SIO's was 0.20. Therefore as can be seen from the table of the
results, the SIO expedition was three times as successful both in terms of
catch per unit of effort and per unit of gear.

"But the only justifiable conclusion, one that cannot offend any
national sensibilities, is that the pycnogonid population of the world
ocean has increased threefold since 19A8. At this rate it is estimated
that the pycnogonids may support a major fishery sometime in the next
millennium." My reprint is signed "compliments of the author and
statistician." A few years later a very serious professor of statistics at
UCLA told her class that this paper was a serious misuse of statistical
strong inference and null hypotheses testing, which, of course, was exactly
Joel's point.

About the time his work on the Treatise was winding up, Scripps
received a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, presumably to
foment Revelle's "revolution" in marine biology. Buzzati-Traverso was in
charge of a large symposium supported by this grant, one of the first with
global representations. He sought Joel's help with the invitations. Joel
wrote (in 1995) to me "I told him (Buzzati) also that the CIA had a ringer
who would attend as a zoologist, although it was his fluency in Russian
that they wanted him there because several Russian bigshots would be there
(they never showed up). 1 knew also that the State Department was sending
an official Russian speaker to tell them what it was all about. I told
Buzzati that there would be both official and covert Russian speakers, but
that we needed a Russian who was also a real zoologist, so he obligingly
invited Gene Kozloff, and more Russian was spoken than if Zenkevich et al.
(the invited Soviets) had appeared. The State Department's Russian was
really someone from the East Side who knew Yiddish better than Russian, and
one morning they let go comparing dirty words, and Dave (Joel's friend)
apologized to Gene (Kozloff) who said he knew all those words, after all he
was the son of a Czarist officer." This little story is rather typical of
Joel for he not only remembered the darndest stuff (the above event took
place around 1958) but he was a confirmed Russophile (also an Anglophile
and a Germanophile) and delighted in deflating the pretentious (i.e. the
CIA and State) .

Part of the Rockefeller money allowed the appointment of some new
research/ faculty, and Joel had quite a clique recommending him. He also
had written a very fine and detailed memorandum to the director on a
"Proposed Program in Marine Biology." That is what he would propose to do
at Scripps. In it are three specific suggestions: (a) the establishment of
a course in invertebrate zoology, and as part of this course "there would
be assigned ecological exercises which would serve to accumulate repeated
observations" in the same place throughout the years; (b) expansion of the
activities of the museum to include research and reference collections; and
(c) a chair in the history of oceanography might suitably be included in
the museum building.

He was particularly concerned about the matter of continuing
observations: what we now know as time-series. What followed in the memo
was a superb essay on the value and need of time-series. Without one bit
of the statistical jargon which, in any event, he did not know or had not
been invented yet, he clearly was talking about what we now know as
frequency spectra, aliasing, correlation length scales, coherence and cross
correlations. All this stuff is now on the verge of high fashion in marine
biology.

He went on to point out what dire straits the field of taxonomy was
in and that a proper museum at Scripps would include taxonomic work and a
study collection for ecologists and physiologists. This sort of argument
is now high fashion also; it's called diversity studies and is one of the
darlings of the National Science Foundation. Anyone at Scripps today,

reading his words, would sincerely regret that none of this came to pass.
Our science would have been greatly enhanced.

After the last manuscript had been sent in for the Treatise
(Revelle's, of course), Joel informed Revelle that he had a comfortable
offer from somewhere else, but Roger informed Joel that all had been
arranged for him at SIO, budget, supplies, equipment, etc. Hadn't anyone
told him? No, nobody had told him. When he was finally shown the budget
he discovered that one of the "eminent" mossbacks had already spent $5,000
of it. It was clear to Joel that he was to be part of someone else's
department. The someone else in this case was well known to be arbitrary
and self-important, characteristics that would not bode well for a
productive, happy future for an unconstrained free thinker like Joel.

This was a great loss to Scripps Institution as subsequent events
were to prove, for Joel went on to become a distinguished leader in the
environmental movement, a prolific author in the history of West Coast
marine science, a much sought-after consultant and lecturer, and a highly
successful director of two important marine biology stations.

He was not bluffing Revelle when he told him of his other offer. He
became director of the University of the Pacific's outstanding marine
biology teaching and research laboratory, the Pacific Marine Station at
Dillon Beach on Tomales Bay. Joel has said, "I think some of the best
years of my life were spent at Dillon Beach." Certainly these were some of
his most productive years, ones that firmly established him as one of the
west coast's premier environmental scientists and a world reputation as a
marine scientist. Many students look back on their experiences at Dillon
Beach with great fondness for their time there and for their time with
Joel. Many remember collecting specimens for class at 5:00 a.m. on the
foggy > wet intertidal rocks, with Joel perched on one, serenading them with
his Irish harp. Whether this happened more than once, I do not know, but
it seems hundreds of former Dillon Beach students "remember" this. We all
wish it happened to us.

Along with the teaching program, a first-class research effort was
going on, particularly that of Ralph Johnson of the University of Chicago
who was stimulated by Joel's great knowledge of natural history and
invertebrate zoology. Some very fine community ecology of mud flats was
done at this time.

But perhaps the most famous episode of these years was the Battle of
Bodega Head. Bodega Head is a remarkable headland jutting out into the
Pacific with Bodega and Tomales Bays to the south and a cold water,
upwelling coast to the north. This was (and is) an ideal spot for a power
generating plant from an engineering standpoint because of the availability
of cooling water, so Pacific Gas and Electric began, apparently in the mid-
1950s, to discuss acquisition with various state and county agencies and
probably the University of California, Berkeley, who had plans for a marine
laboratory on the head. None of this "gray labyrinth of maneuvering in the

vii

back hallways of power" was made public and not until 1957 did Joel hear
some vague allusions to it in a casual conversation at Berkeley.

Since Dillon Beach was very near Bodega Head and Joel has a great
fondness for the local landscape, he tried to learn more and he did. PG&E
did indeed plan to build a large nuclear-fueled power-generating plant on
Bodega Head, and negotiations were well underway with no public
announcement, let alone hearings, but with the full cognizance of the
administration at UC Berkeley. The news broke in a local paper (Joel's
secretary at Pacific Marine Station was a local correspondent) . At that
time Joel wrote the president of PG&E questioning the wisdom of siting a
reactor near the San Andreas Fault. This turned out to be a very prescient
question. He wrote many letters and recruited many allies to oppose this
venture, but the iron-pants management of PG&E, the bureaucrats from the
county, and the studied ambiguity of the UC Berkeley administration formed
a solid phalanx of orthodoxy against which the nobodies of the opposition
were supposed to shatter themselves.

This did not happen. Opposition, both well reasoned and semi-
hysterical, grew and grew to PG&E and its plan. One inspired public
relations stunt in 1963 engineered by Lu Watters, the great Dixieland jazz
musician, was to release 1,000 balloons at Bodega Head, each with the
message "This could be a radioactive molecule," to the jazz tune specially
written for the occasion, "Blues over Bodega."

Joel wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March, 1965, "The
battle was finally won on the basis of geological uncertainty," (a research
vessel from Scripps Institution of Oceanography had done a seismic
reflection study near Bodega Head and discovered a new complex of faults),
"yet it [the battle] has become part of the growing movement in California
to prevent the destruction of California as a livable environment by
freeway builders, subdividers, and developers."

It is not clear to me which of the principles in this affair Joel was
most angry with. He was certainly hurt by the attitude of the university
for somewhere within the university administration there was a willingness
to oblige outside interests. He has written "...it seemed to me at the
outset that the university should serve the highest interest of the people
of the state and that such interest should be above that of a mere gas and
electric company no matter how large it was. It was this conviction that
committed me to fight for Bodega Head." But sometime around 1963 or so, I
asked him why he spent so much of his time and effort on the fight. As
near as I can remember he said, "I just don't like the way those sons-o1-
bitches do business." [See "The Battle of Bodega Head," p. 177a.]

Jerome Tichenor memorialized in 1965 the affair in a thin book of
poetry, "Poems in Contempt of Progress," published under the auspices of
the Society for the Prevention of Progress, by the Clandestine Press. On
the last page is the colophon, "We regret to inform the reader that this
book has been printed with the aid of electricity."

viii

Of course he did many other things while fighting the Battle of
Bodega Head. Teaching and running the highly successful marine station
occupied much of this time, but as his fame grew he became a very popular
lecturer on environmental issues, especially among the "don't trust anyone
over thirty" crew. They saw immediately that this man was not about to
pander to them nor indulge their many biases, but rather was one who had a
great store of information in his head and the social and historical
perspective to make sense of it. At the same time he was a frequently
invited keynote speaker at national and international conferences and
workshops .

He was so well connected with European scientists that most of them
made a special effort to visit Pacific Marine Station to see Joel, and he
was always a wonderful host to them. One special incident was his
entertainment of a group of Soviet scientists and their political shadow.
Joel crammed the group together in a small car for a trip up the coast to
Fort Ross, the former Russian colony (now a park). The countryside was
quite rural, but Joel kept up his usual rapid fire and erudite commentary
on all manner of things—especially the not-very-interesting local history.
In the middle of this monologue he said, "See that circular barn over
there? A hired hand went mad there looking for a corner to piss in." How
much of this the dignified and rather puritanical Russians got I do not
know, but perhaps they missed it all together, for Joel's conversations
were (and are) so full of parenthetical cracks that one tends to evolve a
sort of low-pass filter.

I know little of Joel's spell as director of the Marine Science
center at Oregon State University, but I have the suspicion that the
administration who hired him thought they were getting a big Grant Swinger.
In this they were surely disappointed, for although he surely could have
played the right sort of footsy games with program managers in Washington
(he'd seen enough of them to be an expert), this not only was not his
style, but was repugnant to him, I am sure.

But it was during this time that a renewal of interest in John
Steinbeck's early years was occurring among the literati. Joel had already
written on the Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts collaboration on the book, The Sea
of Cortez , and knew them both from his own early days on Cannery Row. His
marvelous editing of several editions of Between Pacific Tides was also
linked to those times. I believe it was then he began his historical
research on Ed Ricketts1 life and his late relationship with Steinbeck.
This culminated years later (1978) with an extraordinary history of,
chiefly, Ed Ricketts and his philosophical interweaving of ecology and
society. The ecology, of course, was marine intertidal ecology. This
history appeared as a two-volume set called The Outer Shore, and was
published by the Mad River Press. I asked him why them, since it could
have been Oxford or Chicago (but not Stanford) . I got only a very
ambiguous answer. My theory is that he liked their name--Mad River —
further they did a very good job of printing it.

Once again there is much of Joel in these two volumes and the term
"editor" does not fully describe his contribution. His introduction to
Volume One is a pocket history of Monterey in the 1920s and 1930s and of
the philosophical backdrop of marine ecology. This was very important in
those days of the beginnings of experimental embryology (which relied
chiefly on the eggs and larvae of marine organisms) and the "Organismal
Conception"-- especially the study of colonial organisms such as ascidians.
Part of Joel's fascination with Ricketts had to do with their shared
fondness for poetry. These two volumes are history in the best sense of
the word and are important contributions to our understanding of the
development of marine science on the west coast of North America. Like
most of Joel's publications, The Outer Shore will have a long intellectual
and scientific half-life.

Surely one of his most famous papers is "Models and Muddles," (1977,
Helgolander wiss. Meeresunters, 30, 92-104). Subtitled "some philosophical
observations," it is often thought of as another Joel joke but it is
anything but that. It is a sophisticated and witty dismemberment of
mathematical ecosystem models. The practitioners of this field rank only
slightly below molecular biologists in their messianic manner and their
"I'm smarter than you are" tone. Joel could never resist deflating the
pompous. He shows two box model diagrams of impossible complexity and a
set of equations (all three from published sources) with so many parameters
that no numerical "solutions" are remotely possible.

He goes on in two beautifully written pages to describe the work of
Karl Moebius on the oyster banks of the North Sea, from which Moebius
derived the concept of the biocoenosis. . .what we now call communities. He
compares Moebius' descriptions to the amount of information it is possible
to include in modern mathematical ecosystem models. But he does not damn
models categorically, after all. Moebius had a conceptual and verbal model
of oyster reefs which Joel suspects is quite incorrect or at least "to
proceed upon them [Moebius' ideas] for the management of the oyster beds
would have been unsuccessful." I think what generated this paper was
Joel's experience with various workshops and public hearings on
environmental matters. He says himself that this paper is a sequel to an
earlier paper on "The Impact of Impact Studies." I'm sure he heard many
models presented which were grossly oversimplified abstractions but which
appealed to managers who needed "answers" and needed them quickly.

He says, "There is of course no inherent evil in attempting to
simplify what we know or suspect of nature. . . . Unfortunately, however,
many, and for the most part those not directly concerned with modeling
activity, see in equations facts rather than ideas." This paper was
reprinted in Russian and perhaps other languages. The question he raises
is, what, after all, do we really know?

Joel in retirement has accomplished more than some do in entire
academic careers, and he continues to be a much sought-after speaker and
advisor. He continues to be an unusually alert environmental watchdog (and

advisor. He continues to be an unusually alert environmental watchdog (and
attack dog). He still plays the harp, sings, and writes poetry. He still
calls his friends around midnight with animated and zealous orations of
events and persons they are only dimly aware of, but are soon made to
understand.

So take a good look at Joel Hedgpeth everyone, for when he's gone
there will never be another!

John A. McGowan

Professor, Marine Life Research Group

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

August, 1996

San Diego, California

INTERVIEW HISTORY

The Bancroft Library has an ongoing collection emphasis on the
environmental history of California and the West, and its Regional Oral
History Office since its founding in 1954 has interviewed major figures in
the development of the environmental movement, forest and park policies,
and California water issues. So we were very receptive and pleased in
August of 1990 when we received a call from Michael Herz, then executive
director of Baykeeper, the watchdog project of the San Francisco Bay-Delta
Preservation Association. Mr. Herz urged us to undertake an oral history
with Joel W. Hedgpeth, marine biologist and environmentalist. He knew Joel
through their joint efforts to preserve the San Francisco Bay environment
and knew from their many conversations that Joel's memory bank contained an
irreplaceable record of coastal and estuarine scientific research, as well
as memories of California history dating to his early childhood.

When we consulted with some of Joel's colleagues and collaborators
for more information, he was described variously as "a character,
irascible, bristling with opinions"; "widely educated, with an archivist's
instincts, has a tremendous amount to say and will say it"; "a true
Renaissance man--a respected marine biologist, a poet, an incisive
commentator on the human condition, a raconteur of wonderful talents,
friend to hundreds of people in the arts and in science who revere him."

David Pesonen, who led the citizen battle to defeat a PG&E nuclear
power plant at Bodega Bay, spoke for Joel's environmental credentials:
"Joel's trenchant correspondence, his enormous energy, his knowledge of
many subjects, and his unflagging determination kept a flickering
opposition alive [in Bodega Bay]. I am convinced that were it not for his
determination there would be today a menacing nuclear power facility
sitting on the San Andreas fault a few miles upwind from San Francisco."

It was clear that Joel Hedgpeth was an ideal candidate for an oral
history memoir. Since all of our work is funded by outside gifts and
grants, we turned to Mr. Herz for help. He was able to obtain
initial support from the San Francisco Foundation and the Marin Community
Foundation to enable us to begin research and interviewing. The UC Class
of 1931 was happy to include the Joel Hedgpeth memoir in the University of
California, Source of Community Leaders series funded in part by their
endowment for the Regional Oral History Office. Additional funding came
from more than sixty friends and admirers of Joel Hedgpeth, who responded
generously to a request from Mr. Herz, William T. Davoren (founder and
former director of the Bay Institute of San Francisco) and Irwin Haydock (a
former student of Joel's at Pacific Marine Station). The David and Lucile
Packard Foundation, through the efforts of Mr. Davoren, supplied the final
gift that allowed us to complete the processing of the oral history.

xii

Not surprisingly, given his interest in history, Mr. Hedgpeth
responded positively to the idea of working with ROHO to produce an oral
history memoir. At the age of eighty, he still was leading an active life,
attending conferences, giving keynote addresses, editing papers, and no
doubt keeping up a steady barrage of letters-to-the-editor on issues of
concern. But he was willing to set aside time for the oral history
project.

Preparation and planning for interviews included research in the
papers Joel Hedgpeth had placed in the Bancroft Library, which consist
largely of documentation of the Bodega Bay controversy; reading a variety
of Hedgpeth publications on Ricketts, Steinbeck, and marine biology;
perusing poems (written under his psuedonym Jerome Tichenor) , letters-to-
the-editor, hearing testimony, book reviews, and reports written by Joel;
and conferring with Hedgpeth colleagues in his many enterprises.

We began interviewing in June 1992 at his home in Santa Rosa,
California. In July he underwent open heart surgery, but bounced back
quickly, and we resumed our interview schedule in September, with the
seventh and final session (a total of fifteen recorded hours) on November
19, 1992. Joel's wife, Florence, was quietly present during many of the
interview sessions and a supportive ally in the editing process, as well as
an active figure in her own right. She was most often busy reading
prodigiously to help select appropriate titles for her large and well-
organized book club.

Taking Joel Hedgpeth from tape to type was challenging: his speaking
style was idiosyncratic; the interviews were filled with allusions to
people and works known only to Joel; his comments were sometimes elliptic;
his progression not necessarily linear. The transcript, filled with more
than the usual requests for clarification and elaboration, was sent for his
review in June 1994. Joel's review of the transcript took some time; his
schedule continued to be full. Finally, when we enlisted Mrs. Hedgpeth to
encourage him, he set himself to the task. He went over the transcript
carefully, responded to our queries, made a number of additions which are
noted in brackets in the text, and returned the corrected transcript in
March 1995. After we had entered his corrections and prepared the text in
final format, he again read the entire oral history and made a few more
additions and corrections.

Initial interview sessions dealt with Hedgpeth/Tichenor family
history, with Joel commenting on photos and memorabilia in a family
scrapbook. He described the roots of his interest in marine biology--the
childhood books in his grandfather's study and the seashell collection of
an Oakland neighbor. He had vivid memories of his childhood stay in 1920-
1921 in the small town of Mather in the Sierra foothills, where he
witnessed the building of the dam that flooded Hetch Hetchy Valley and
where he incurred permanent injury to his hand while playing with a
blasting cap. In a later unrecorded conversation Joel recalled that even
at that early age he viewed the damming of the Yosemite National Park

xiii

valley as an act of destruction, and as he talked I had the impression that
in some way the simultaneous injury to his hand was connected in his
youthful mind to the environmental destruction he was witnessing. These
correspondences might help explain his fierce lifelong opposition to
environmental devastation.

Other discussions of his early life, complete with colorful anecdotes
and characterizations, indicate landmarks in the development of Joel
Hedgpeth, ecological thinker and founder of the Society for the Prevention
of Progress. These influences include his education, both formal and
informal, in grade school, junior college, at UC Berkeley, and the
University of Texas; his youthful contact with Monterey Bay biologist Ed
Ricketts and his later work revising and updating Ricketts* Between Pacific
Tides', his field work in 1938-1940 on the Shasta Dam and its potential to
destroy the salmon runs.

And, of course, the interviews covered the major epochs of his career
as a marine biologist: editing and writing significant sections of the
monumental Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology (known as the Big
Red Book) ; directing the Pacific Marine Station at Dillon Beach and the
Marine Science Center at Oregon State University; research far and wide on
pycnogonids (sea spiders); and his contributions to estuarine studies, from
Texas to Russia to the San Francisco Bay.

An interview with Joel Hedgpeth is bound to be accompanied by
appendices, because he liberally refers to his many writings as he speaks
and then produces copies of letters, reports, articles, poems, and
illustrations from his copious files and the extensive library in his home
office. Nine appendices are included in this volume, along with numerous
illustrative pages inserted in the text. Additional supplementary papers
have been placed in the Bancroft Library, where tapes of these interview
sessions are also available.

When the oral history was nearing completion, Joel suggested that we
ask John McGowan, professor of marine science at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, to write the introduction to this volume, and a felicitous
suggestion it was. Professor McGowan has produced an introduction that not
only captures Joel and his unique personality but makes very clear his
contributions over more than fifty years to marine science and protection
of the marine environment. This is especially important because our
narrator was sufficiently reluctant to claim credit for his accomplishments
that it is difficult to access his contributions from his own words alone.
We thank Professor McGowan for his comprehensive introduction and recommend
it as a first stop for readers of this volume.

Ann Lage
Interviewer

September 1996
Berkeley, California

xiv

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library

University of California
Berkeley. California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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I FAMILY HISTORY AND BOYHOOD INTERESTS
[Interview 1: June 25, 1992] ft1

Mother's Family — the McGraws

Lage: As sort of a rationale for what we are doing, I want to read

something I found that you had written. You wrote it in talking
about Ed Ricketts, I guess. You said, "Boys do wander about the
cities they live in. And the little events during such
wanderings that may have had a large part in shaping their way
of looking at the world are seldom remembered and even less
often recorded for the benefit of those who come later." That's
what I want to get at, the little things that shaped your way of
looking at the world. I think some of that is your parents'
experience too so maybe that can be in the back of our minds as
we start up.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Do you want to start telling about what you consider the most
important in shaping you, in terms of your parents and their
past?

Hedgpeth: There is a problem there. My parents weren't too well matched.
They probably shouldn't have married. My father was a
blacksmith, and he didn't belong to my mother's social class.
He never really made enough money to support us, so he lived
apart from us a great deal. He worked off in the ranches and
small towns that needed blacksmiths.

About the time I got to college, he had a pretty good job
rebuilding some of the very fancy ironwork on the big estates on
the Peninsula because he was a master blacksmith. He had about

'If This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.

Grandfather McGraw's Home
929 Chestnut Street, Oakland, California

•g

o
o

a fifth-grade education but somewhere along the line he learned
to read plans very well. You would just lay a diagram out for
what you wanted and he would do it. So [he would be]
reconstructing all those fancy iron gates which I suppose
subsequently were taken down and sent in for bullets later on.
A couple of them are maybe still around down there. So we
really didn't have much family life until--.

Lage: So your father was away while you were living in Oakland?

Hedgpeth: Yes, or in other places. Well, we lived together when we were
in Stockton.

Lage: Where were you born? Let's start with that, the most
fundamental kind of question.

Hedgpeth: I was born [September 29, 1911] in a very large house. It had
three floors. The third floor was really an attic but my
mother's girlhood room was in a little room there under the
eaves of that house. It was in Oakland, West Oakland. It was
built by Dr. Cole, who was a dentist. Cole School in West
Oakland is named for him, of course; that was in the
neighborhood. I went there for a period. Then the house was
purchased by Governor Perkins, who lived there several years.
Then my grandfather bought it in 1889 and moved his family from
San Francisco.

Lage: Do you know why he moved from San Francisco to Oakland?

Hedgpeth: Not really, except that I think the climate was considered

better, though the house my mother was born in in San Francisco
is still standing on 21st Street between Valencia and Guerrero.
The fire stopped at 20th Street. They say the climate is better
in the Mission. It's sunny in the Mission, they used to say.

For one thing, the family was simply too large for the
house. A total of thirteen children were born, and nine or ten
survived into adulthood. My mother was the fourth born.

Lage: She was Nellie?

Hedgpeth: She was Nellie. She was named for her mother who was called

Nellie, though her given name was Sarah Ellen. But apparently
Nellie was a fairly common version of Ellen in those days. The
first daughter, the first girl, was named Ellen Isadore. Sarah
Ellen was the youngest girl in southern Oregon in 1850. She was
brought over from Ohio, I think by way of ship, and then crossed
the Isthmus [of Panama] rather than in a wagon across the
plains.

Lage: So the family didn't stop at San Francisco.
Oregon.

They went on up to

Hedgpeth: The other way around. They probably stopped over briefly at San
Francisco. My great-grandfather William Tichenor was a coastal
sailing master who founded the town of Port Or ford, Oregon in
1850-51. Then my grandfather met my grandmother, apparently as
part of his legal business. He was the first city attorney for
Portland, Oregon. He got his law degree in about 1859 or 1860
and he came to Portland. At that time there was hardly anybody
in that town. Portland until our time was considered a suburb
of San Francisco.

Lage: What was the attraction of Portland for your grandfather?

Hedgpeth: Well, he thought there might be a future there because there

wasn't anything around. Everything was up for grabs, I guess,
including a law practice. He apparently had a very good
knowledge of law. I still have one of his law notebooks; he
went to the Albany School of Law in New York after graduating
from Michigan. He met my grandmother in Port Or ford, Oregon.
Then he moved on to San Francisco; it was about 1867, I think.
Edward Walker McGraw and Sarah Ellen Tichenor were married at
Port Orford, Oregon, on June A, 1869.

All the children were born in San Francisco or Oakland.
They came over to a hospital or something on the Oakland side.
What did I do with that darn book? It will tell us. Here, the
Walker book. This was my grandmother's personal copy. She
entered all the family one by one. My mother carried it on, so
I've carried it on too, only I don't have the one from my last
cousin who died a few years ago now. So we have them all listed
here exactly as they arrived, except for one slightly amusing
note. My mother put down the wrong year of the marriage of one
of her sisters, making one of my cousins look illegitimate,
[laughter] We had a laugh over that one.

My mother, Nellie Tichenor McGraw, was the fourth girl,
then fifth was Susie Lois — Sue. She was the tomboy of the
family. Then a boy finally occurs, Edward Walker McGraw, Jr.,
San Francisco, January 31, 1877. And Aldyth McGraw.

Lage: The boy didn't live long.

Hedgpeth: 1877, January, 31, to February. No, he did live just over a

year. I was often told that he died of lead poisoning from poor
plumbing. That always kept me from drinking water from bathroom
taps.

Lage: But none of the rest of the children were affected?

Hedgpeth: No. So I don't know what it was. Probably just a convenient
diagnosis in those days. So we go down through Aldyth. She
died of exposure. She was about four years old. My grandfather
laid her out on the marble-topped table and couldn't bear to see
her go for several days. She was apparently a beautiful little
girl.

Then Aunt Elva Brinkerhoff McGraw; that is another old
family line from New York State that comes in. You know the old
ferry Brinkerhoff? They are mainly in New Jersey.

We go right on down the line. Hazel, born in San
Francisco, July 1882. Rena Geraldine--! think she was named
after some character in a popular novel at the time, Geraldine.
I've seldom seen the name Rena. The first name she never used.

Lage: Those aren't traditional names of the time, it doesn't seem.

Hedgpeth: I think this was, as I say, a novel of some sort. At least I
was given to understand that. We all called her Spud. Why, I
don't know.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Was she another tomboy?

No. She was the beauty of the family, as a matter of fact. She
was born in 1884. Then Alexander Tichenor. He didn't live very
long either. There was a problem with the boys. Two of them
died. The last born child was a boy.

Was this Frederick here?

Yes. Frederick.
1930.

He was killed in an automobile accident in

But he survived into adulthood.

My grandmother became ill before all the children were born,
from rheumatoid arthritis we think. So Isadore raised most of
the younger children. She was the little mother of the family.
When she died in '94 or so, it was very sad.

Was that traditional that the grandchildren were born there in
Oakland at the family home?

No. You see, Aunt Edith was having trouble. The Bigelow she
married, he ran off with another woman or something. He said
she wasn't exciting enough, so she got divorced, and she came to

live in the big house. I don't know why my Aunt Sue did. I
guess she just came home to give birth because it was near a
doctor. They lived out in Moraga then. That family owned what
is now the big reservoir there in Moraga, the one that extends
from Moraga down to near Richmond.

Lage: The San Pablo Reservoir?

Hedgpeth: Yes. They were sworn to deep, dark secrecy what they had been
paid. They owned the key property in the middle of the valley
that had to be had if you were going to have it at all. So they
lived off of that the rest of their lives. The Rowlands were
pretty sharp.

Lage: Was your family of some means?

Hedgpeth: My grandfather was a very successful attorney. I only have two
items of my grandfather's professional practice. Of course,
they lost so much in 1906. He was completely burned out then.
That [indicates document] is probably one of the dullest things
ever written. I can't get anywhere with it.

Lage: This is a petition of the San Marino Company and a brief in
support of said petition in the Supreme Court of the United
States in 1918.

Hedgpeth: I don't know if he had any other cases before the court there or
not. Anyway, that's all I have. I don't know about always, but
sometimes he would read Alice in Wonderland before going into
court. It put him in the right mood for what was coming up, I
guess. [laughter]

Lage: He must have had a good sense of humor. Do you remember him?

Hedgpeth: I remember him pretty well. He was going blind. He would come
home in the evenings. He would commute to San Francisco. We
lived on Chestnut. That part of Chestnut no longer exists;
that's the middle of the Acorn redevelopment thing. So they
tore all those big houses down and built that pseudo something
or another.

So anyway, that's the kind of family my mother came from.
I have pictures here of the whole lot of them.

Lage: Was that your mother who put this scrapbook together?

Hedgpeth: No, I did this.

[Mrs. Hedgpeth enters and comments]

Mrs. H.:

Lage:
Mrs. H.:
Hedgpeth:
Mrs. H.:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Mrs. H.:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

His grandfather was an authority on maritime law and Spanish
land grants. He was a famous attorney. He sent his underlings
to most of the hearings but when it was a big one, he would hop
on a train to wherever. But at that time Spanish land grants
were being contested and marine rights. So many ships had been
abandoned in San Francisco Bay. He had a famous lawyer-
grandfather who practiced — .

He's not giving me a straight story?

I'm going to stand here and cue you. [laughter]

That's all right.

For fifty years he practiced on Pine Street. He was known far
and wide as Judge McGraw. He had this huge house [at 929
Chestnut in Oakland], twenty-one rooms. He had installed an
elevator for his invalid wife, and these ten girls grew up, you
see, in it, what he bought.

There we go. Look at those pictures of those girls. That's
wonderful.

This is the one that I never knew. That was Isadore. She died;
maybe from TB or maybe something else.

She was twenty-nine and she had something in the bowels that
bothered her. She dined out at restaurants and they gave pork
and eggs . But they said later that now all they have to do is
open it up and let the air hit it and it cures them.

She is the one who had raised the younger ones.

This is my mother. My mother had copper red hair,
strawberry blond types.

These were

So this is the house?

Yes.

That was a big festive place.

This is Spud in her young days. So she really was--.

Very pretty.

Her problem was that my grandfather never brought any young men
home for dinner. He built a fourteen- foot fence to keep them

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

all in when they were young and skittish.
meet very many men.

Did most of them not marry?

So they just didn't

Yes, four of them married out of all of these girls.

Their father didn't go about trying to find them good matches?

No, and of course he met all the best men in town. The curious
thing though, the F-2 generation- -this is F-l of course in the
genealogical slang—out of these four marriages there were six
children. My father had a single sister and I have the same
number of first cousins, all from one marriage. Six. My Aunt
Carrie, my father's sister, had six children. Four of my
mother's side had a total of six. So the population hasn't

really grown, you see.
anyway .

It's shrunk a bit. Our share of it

Very interesting. Now tell me about your mother's going into
missionary work. Was that something her father encouraged or
allowed?

Well, I think by that time—it was the 1890s of course— she was
heading on into her twenties I presume. She was twenty years
old when he gave her that big book on China. She was a very
devout member of the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland. It
was the largest church in northern California.

You mean the actual, physical--?

In members of the congregation. She got inspired by one of her
teachers there, Julia Fraser, the owner of that fancy chair
which she finally claimed--. When these ladies get old, they
start promising things to everybody. Sometimes they forget and
promise something to somebody else at the same time, then the
inevitable bickering comes from that.

So you had a chair that she later reclaimed?

No, what happened was that my mother decided that she had better
hurry up before dear Julia lost her mind and gave it away to
somebody else. So she went over there with my aunt in her car
and persuaded her that she might as well give it up now since
she was hardly ever using it anyway. I don't know why my mother
wanted that particular chair. It's a very nice chair. It's
down in the other room here. You see, all this furniture in
here came from the old house. Not all of it, not the coffee

table. The chairs and that great, big, overstuffed thing are
modern.

So anyway, this is the way the family name ended.
Lage: You're saying that with the death of your uncle — .

Hedgpeth: Yes. You see, he had no children. So that branch of my

[grand] father's family ended with him, that is, the name. On
the other hand, my [grand] father's brother Theodore lived in
Grosse Pointe, and there is still a Theodore McGraw there.

The old Alexander, my great-grandfather, made a great pile
of money. I think he outfitted shoes and boots for a good part
of the Union Army or something like that to make all that kind
of money. He was a manufacturer of shoes.

Hedgpeth: We have all these family records from the McGraw side. They
were stuffed in a lap desk.

Lage: When you were a little boy, did this kind of thing interest you?

Hedgpeth: I got interested right then and there not so much in what was in
the letters but--. It was a coolish night. My Aunt Jane had
appeared on the scene with this box. She opened it up and
started to pull these papers out one by one and was starting to
throw them in the fireplace. Evidently my grandfather brought
the box over from his law offices.

Somebody said, "What are you doing there?" I don't
remember which of my several aunts were around there at the
time. My mother was there. They started picking them up and
looking them over. They said, "Look here, this is a letter
dated 1837. It's our grandfather's proposal of marriage to our
grandmother." They found the reply too. Fortunately nothing
particularly serious had burned. There was a very nice letter
offering my great -grandmother her first Job as a teacher in
upstate New York. She got $136 for the year plus living
privileges with the chairman of the school board. Of course, I
gather that in those days, if the chairman of the school board
had eligible young sons, that was a fringe benefit not to be
scorned. [laughter]

Lage: What happened to these letters? Where are these letters now?

Hedgpeth: I've got some of them. Those letters which were specifically
referring to matters of the University of Michigan, I sent to

the Michigan people, because two of my great-grandmother's
brothers were regents of the University of Michigan. The letter
that started me off on that years later when 1 was looking them
over said, "President Tappan (the guy who was president of the
University of Michigan at the time) visited me yesterday. I
gave him $100 for a new telescope for the university and a pair
of boots for himself." I sent that back to the archivist and
said, "You ought to hang this up in a frame as an early example
of fringe benefits."

Nellie Tichenor McGraw Hedgpeth — Joel's Mother1

Hedgpeth: Anyway, my mother was the saving one. I think it had something
to do with the fact that she had gotten burned out when she had
been teaching missionary school in North Fork, California. Then
she was asked to go on speaking tours; she left a lot of her
notes and a lot of her books with some friends who stored them
in a cabin, and it burned down. She always lamented that loss.
She was kind of conditioned.

Lage: So when she became a teacher, basically, was it? Or a
missionary.

Hedgpeth: Right. She was teaching missionary school.
Lage: Did she travel in northern California then?

Hedgpeth: No. She was based first in the Hoopa Valley, the Hupa Indians
there. Before that, she had gotten interested in taking
pictures in a very casual way. So she had a big box Brownie to
start with.

Lage: Wonderful. Did she do her own developing?

Hedgpeth: Yes, she did. There were a couple of notes in some of her
journals that survived, indicating that.

I had quite a few of these pictures here. There's some
kind of a picnic going on, obviously. I sent them to Anne [Bus]

'See Nellie McGraw Hedgpeth, My Early Days in San Francisco (San
Francisco: Victorian Alliance, 1974) and Nellie Hedgpeth papers, San
Francisco Theological Seminary Library. Also published in two installments
in Pacific Historian.

Lage: Did Anne Brower know your mother?

Hedgpeth: Her mother and my mother were very good friends. Her mother is
also named Anne. Her maiden name is Bus. As we were waiting in
the rain for Clem Miller's funeral, she said, "You don't know
who I am." I said, "I'm afraid I don't." "Does the name Anne
Bus mean anything to you?" I said, "I have heard that name
fairly often." That's the way she introduced herself.

Lage: These are your mother's pictures of her missionary days?

Hedgpeth: These were taken in North Fork. My mother had some very dear
friends she made in North Fork she never gave up all her life.
I stayed with them one time or another, a thing I don't remember
at all. It's funny about memories because every time I would
see one of the girls, the one nearest my age, a few months
younger, she would point at me and say, "Frogs." Apparently,
when we were about four years old, I had dropped frogs down her
dress. [chuckling]

Lage: She didn't forget.

Hedgpeth: She didn't but I did completely. I don't know why.

Lage: I can understand that it would be more vivid to her.

Hedgpeth: I suppose, but there were a whole lot of other things. Even
being there, I have no clear memory except of eating a lot of
olives one time. I guess I ate a whole small barrel of olives
in the course of our stay there.

Lage: These are pictures of the Indians.

Hedgpeth: There were just a few selections I put in here [the photo

album] . The negatives of all the Indian places are on file in
the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Joel Hedgpeth. Mountain Blacksmith

Lage: Now we're coming to you. How did your parents meet? Did your
mother meet your father out in this country?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was in North Fork. He had a blacksmith shop there.

Lage: It does seem like an unlikely match now that you have described
your mother's background.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it was. Of course, these were hill people really,
Methodists.

Lage: This is your father's family?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: So they were not urban or educated?

Hedgpeth: They were all pretty well educated one way or another. Of

course, most of them were men of the Book. Four of my father's
uncles were ministers.

Lage: I see.

Hedgpeth: And cousins. Lewis, the one who settled in Arizona, apparently
founded the Methodist Church in Phoenix, Arizona. There is a
place called Hedgpeth Hills near Phoenix. I saw a picture of it
in an engineer's display down at the Bay model, of all places, a
while back.

Lage: Hedgpeth Hill at the Bay Model?

Hedgpeth: Well, they had a picture of something they were doing in the
middle of Arizona. They had a series of big posters of their
projects all over the western district, which included Arizona.

Lage: So your father was in a family of parsons but he didn't take up
the call?

Hedgpeth: I had a copy of a letter was sent to me from Sheridan, Wyoming,
out of the blue. I didn't know my great-uncle Thomas Riley who
was one of the senior members of the family. He was writing to
my grandfather and saying, "I'm getting on. Barely enough
strength to chop enough wood for breakfast. Praise be to God I
can preach as loud and as long as I ever could." [laughter]
They were circuit riders of course, most of them. One of them
got burned out in the troubles in Missouri in 1859, I think it
was. I always thought that was why they came West. They packed
up in 1858, manumitted their slaves and came across the plains.

Lage: Where did they settle? Or did they settle?

Hedgpeth: They settled in the valley around first, I think, Visalia, then
up in Millerton. Then my grandfather moved up to the high lands
a bit, to North Fork, to get out of the malaria. You may know
that malaria was endemic in the Central Valley until fairly
recently. So it was a very different group of people, yes.

Lage: Did the Methodists and Presbyterians fit well together or did
that present any problems?

Hedgpeth: I don't think there was any quarrel about that.
Lage: Not that much doctrinal difference?

Hedgpeth: I think some quarrel arose somewhere along the line when my
father and I argued over who was going to bless the food, so
finally my parents decided to give that up rather than struggle
with me. [laughter]

Lage: When your parents married, did they live in North Fork?

Hedgpeth: They went back to North Fork first. They weren't making enough
in the winter time so they had to move on out. A number of
places I have been told that I've been to but I have no memory
of, like Purissima down south near Half Moon Bay, and Fort
Bragg, to one shop or place or another. They borrowed money
against the estate and it didn't pan out.

Lage: You had kind of a traveling childhood it sounds like?

Hedgpeth: Well, in my school record--.

Lage: A year in each school.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Was your mother a predominant influence, would you say?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, that and the house. Of course, it was a big house.
We stayed there. It was probably my generation that spent more
time--. We called the house 929 [street address].

Lage: This is the one in Oakland.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage:

Hedgpeth

How much time were you there?

Several years in the twenties. For a while, we lived in
Berkeley and I took the streetcar to 929. My father was working
in shipyards during the war. First he started out in Stockton.
We moved down from Clipper Gap to Stockton. That was around
1917 or so. He got a job at the Holt manufacturing plant. They
had the contract to make tanks for the British army. He worked
on the big steam-powered hammer, bending armor plates, curved
ones that fit in the front of the tank. Once in a while, I used

to take his lunch over there to him. We lived about two blocks
away. That house is still standing; it was a cheap little
cottage, but it's still there. At least it was the last time I
was in Stockton and I went by there. It is on Pilgrim Street.

So then we moved up to the mountains, up to Mather.
Lage: Do you remember that pretty vividly?
Hedgpeth: Yes. 1 was ten years old.
Lage: You were in Oakland in between.

Hedgpeth: Yes, or actually, we lived also in South Berkeley. That was

where we lived when he was working in the shipyard. Of course,
in 1919, the contracts ended and work wound up by 1920.

In the summer of 1920, we spent a couple of weeks near the
Big Basin in a rented cabin on the San Lorenzo River. The train
stop was Brackney. It was our family's happiest memory.

Some Early Memories and a Traumatic Injury

Lage: You told me, before we turned the recorder on, your earliest
memory was being reintroduced to your mother. Do you really
remember this?

Hedgpeth: That's what bugs me. I have this memory, very distinct, of

about three men and a woman. I was in a crib. One of the men
was wearing a head mirror, like those used by doctors.

I was just coming into consciousness. I had been here
unconscious or asleep or something. I don't know which. I
don't know whether he said, "Don't be frightened," or anything,
but anyway I do remember he said, "This is your mother." That1!
all.

Lage: This was when you were ill at about age six months and went to
the hospital for several weeks?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Isn't that strange. Did you ever talk to your mother about it
to see if she remembered that?

"Sierra Bill" at Mather, Yosemite National Park, July, 1921,
[About a month before my accident.]

Hedgpeth: No. In fact, I'm not sure it occurred to me until afterwards.
It's not the kind of thing you would make up as something you
wished had happened or anything.

Lage: No, not at all. But it seems so young to really have a memory.

Hedgpeth: True. Well, I don't know. I see by his latest book [Let the
/fountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run, 1995] that Dave Brower can
also remember from the same age.

Lage: What about this note [in the photo album]? "It's a long story
why I remember these flowers." You have a drawing which I
assume is your drawing.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, what happened was my father, of course, being a

blacksmith, didn't quite understand what an automobile was. It
works by explosions, and the force is transmitted by gears, and
the thing is controlled by electricity. These three different
things were all a little much for him to figure out. We had
some great big old Haynes automobile, we were heading out one
afternoon for an excursion, slid off the road and wound up
against a tree about six or seven feet off the road. Nothing
spectacular or unsafe or anything, but I think he had put the
steering gear back with baling wire or something, which he
shouldn't have done.

So anyhow, while they were arguing and waiting for rescue,
I sat in the middle of this beautiful patch of these little owl
clover, the yellow ones. Very nice little flowers.
Orthocarpus. Cream sacs is the English name.

Lage: This must have been about age four?
Hedgpeth: No, a little older than that.

Lage: What would you say your parents encouraged in you as you were
growing up? Maybe not the same thing from each parent.

Hedgpeth: That's true. My mother definitely didn't want me to go into a

trade or become a blacksmith. She hoped I would become a lawyer
or doctor, something like that, go to college, that sort of
thing, which I eventually did.

Lage: Did your father think that was a good future for you or did he
want you to work with your hands?

Hedgpeth: No. He didn't offer to teach me his trade, though he asked me
to help him now and then when he needed somebody to hold the
other end of a large piece of iron or something. I never asked.

Of course, after I hurt my hand it was impossible for me to do
that anyway.

Lage: That happened at Mather?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: What were the circumstances?

Hedgpeth: There was a fulminate of mercury cap that I found in a shack I
was putting on the end of a stick.

Lage: What kind of mercury cap?

Hedgpeth: A blasting cap. They are mean things.

Lage: You were just playing?

Hedgpeth: I was working it onto this stick and it went off.

Lage: Did you know what it was that you had in your hand?

Hedgpeth: No, I didn't know what it was.

Lage: You were just playing. That must have been pretty traumatic.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it was. [I should have thought to remember that I was

playing at blacksmithing at a small forge my daddy had made for
me. Every trace of it was gone when I returned from the
hospital. --JWH]

Lage: How long were you in the hospital then?

Hedgpeth: What was it? Six weeks or something? No, it wasn't that long.

Lage: We had the bill we were looking at. Six weeks and the bill came
to $90.

Hedgpeth: $90.11 does it say? Three weeks? August 17-September 9, 1921.
About three weeks. It was shock and everything.

Lage: Your mother's shock must have been great also.

Hedgpeth: Oh yes. She accompanied me to the hospital of course. They
just put us on an empty boxcar and that was that.

Lage: You took a boxcar down — ?

Hedgpeth: It was a regular running train,
anything .

There was no special run or

A Family of Aunts — Family Stories

Lage: Then you moved back to the Bay Area.

Hedgpeth: Yes. My mother bought this place over in San Leandro and set up
a drygoods business, emulating her sister, my Aunt Edith, who
had become a very successful merchant in Walnut Creek.

Lage: So the sisters did go into business?

Hedgpeth: She was the only one who really went into business. My Aunt

Elva was a probation officer. She worked with Earl Warren when
he was D.A. for Alameda County. Then of course, my Aunt
Geraldine was a school teacher. She had been asked by a chum to
go over with her when the friend was trying to enroll in the
normal school in San Francisco. I don't know what she had with
her. My impression is she didn't have anything except she wrote
her name on a piece of paper along with her friend and got in
there. The superintendent came out and said, "Yes, you are both
accepted." My Aunt Geraldine was too flustered, I guess, to say
no, so she entered normal school and became a teacher,
[laughter] At least that's the story.

But she became a very good teacher. She was held up as a
national model for her handling of retarded and disadvantaged
students.

Lage: So she went into special education?

Hedgpeth: Yes, but she had never had any training in this. Some of her
methods are now, of course, illegal. She went around and got
written permission from all the parents to thump the kiddies
with a ruler or whatever other corporal punishment might be
necessary. She told most of them, "You're not stupid. You just
haven't got the advantage. You're trying to speak a foreign
language. Your folks don't seem to know anything at home.
You'll just have to do it by yourself." For years later, her
students used to come around to see her. They had gotten jobs
as waiters and bellhops and similar levels of employment. Just
a few years before she died, quite a delegation — there were a
couple of dozen of them I think—came around on an occasion, her
birthday or something, I don't know what at this point. There
is a piece in the paper about that.

Lage: Was she teaching in Oakland?

Hedgpeth: Yes. She taught what is called Z-section. They are the same

kind of people they have too many of now. There is nothing done
at home to help them out. Their parents may not even speak
English. She once got into quite a fight. She was taking a
course — teachers are always taking courses to get more units to
get another raise in pay or keep their salary status — in
Berkeley, or starting to.

Anyway, she got into an argument with an instructor and
said, "You don't know what you are talking about." The
instructor got annoyed and said, "Madam, there is not room for
both of us in this room. Either you or I are going to have to
leave." She said, "That's all right. I'll leave." The other
teachers said, "No, we want to find out what this is all about."
The poor guy had to back off a bit. Finally, she had gotten him
tamed down, I guess. He was afraid to say anything serious, I
presume. Then he said that he wanted to obtain some returns
from the students on their reading. He handed her a bundle of
forms. She said, "This is a waste of time."

Lage: She said, "This is a waste of time"?

Hedgpeth: Yes. "They will sit down and write something about a book they
have never read just to satisfy you."

Lage: She was pretty outspoken.

Hedgpeth: I think you should knew that this whole crew of ladies had very
strong opinions of what they were going to say. They seldom if
ever spared you their opinions.

Lage: Is this true of your mother also?

Hedgpeth: I had a feeling she was a bit more diplomatic, but not too much.

Lage: They all should have been lawyers, probably.

Hedgpeth: Probably. They missed their calling. Of course, in those days
women lawyers were just beyond the pale. It was a thing ladies
didn't do. Don't ask me why.

My mother loved to tell stories about her adventures,
mostly involving my father's misfortunes or something or another
like that. He used to leave the room. But when she got
together with this Mrs. [Constance Bigelow] Mainwaring, the
friend she had made in the mountains, they really could spin
them.

Lage: Were these told at the expense of your father more or less?

Hedgpeth: No. These were just stories about everything, about adventures
in the mountains or snakes and robbers and so forth. In fact, I
have memories now of wild days in Clovis and Samson's Flats and
other places in the Sierra--.

Hedgpeth: I still see Dan's [Mainwaring] professional name and credit

line. He wrote a lot of the scripts for Errol Flynn under the
name of Geoffrey Homes, his two middle names. The Bigelows had
some genes for writing, and one of my cousin's boys, Michael
Bigelow, is on the Chronicle staff today.

Lage: Did you know him from Clovis and Samson Flats?

Hedgpeth: Oh yes. He was one of the kids whose little sister I favored
with the frogs.

Lage: I see. [Laughter]

Hedgpeth: Dan wrote a novel. His first novel [One Against the Earth] is
very much like In Dubious Battle [by John Steinbeck] . A piece
got written about that by a friend of mine. [Richard Astro,
"Steinbeck and Mainwaring: Two Calif ornians for the Earth."
Steinbeck Quarterly vol. 3, no. 1: 3-11, 1970.]

Lage: About the similarity?

Hedgpeth: Yes. The piece was partly my doing.

Lage: When did he write the book?

Hedgpeth: The book was published in 1933, which was three years before In
Dubious Battle was written.

Lage: Was it enough alike that you assumed it was an influence on
Steinbeck?

Hedgpeth: Well, nobody knows. His mother thought that Steinbeck stole

Dan's thunder. It was talking about the same things. They both
had the same ability for describing scenery. I have a copy of
that I loaned to Gerald Haslam, to see if he could do something
with it. I told James Hart once, "You left him out of your book
of California writers." Dan was writing detective stories by
the bushel under the name Geoffrey Homes for years. Hart said,
"Go ahead and write him up." About that time, Dan's sister

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Nell, named for my mother, began to lose her mind. It was
probably Alzheimer's.

I've been talking about this with other people, that Alzheimer's
seems so common now and yet, looking back, do you remember a lot
of older people that had similar symptoms but just no real
diagnosis?

It never happened in our family. Everybody kept a clear mind.
Did they all live to a pretty good age?

My Aunt Doll lived to be ninety-nine. Most of the others lived
to their eighties except Isadore, who died young, and Elva who
had bone cancer. My Aunt Jane was run over by an automobile in
what is now the Haight Ashbury District. She wore dark clothing
and was attending various evening classes for self -improvement.
She was into everything like this at one time or another. She
once had a soldering iron and did burn work on nice new pine.
It was called xylography.

They sound like very independent women.

Yes, they were all different, to say the least. My Aunt Elva
was the domineering one. She was the one who arranged things
after my grandfather's death. I was looking at his will
yesterday.

When did he die?

He died in 1921. [shows will] He wrote this will on the 6th
day of June, 1921. Since it is typed, I assume he dictated it
to his secretary. He was almost completely blind; he could
barely find his way home. He goes right down the list and he
specifies, being an attorney, some material object from the
house for each and every one specifically. There is a legal
reason for this, you see.

What's the legal reason?

So that they not be neglected in anything. [Reads from will] "I
give and bequeath to my daughter Nellie T. Hedgpeth of Berkeley
two water colors frames hung in the front of my house." These
happened to be pastels. I don't have them here on the wall
anymore. "A framed agate piece made by her grandmother
Elizabeth Tichenor, now hanging in the sitting room, and my
library table now at the library at my house." That's the table
there [indicates]. I got the agate thing. It was a box with a
glass cover and the agates are all glued up in designs. After a

Mrs. H.:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

few years, it began to fall apart. Finally, the whole thing
fell apart. So I don't have that anymore.

Then you go down here. "Painting and frame representing
school examination. Woodpath Library of University Literature
in twenty- five volumes to my daughter Susie. To my daughter
Elva, the picture of the old harbor and my marble-topped
rosewood table." My cousin has that now. That's the one they
laid out the babies on when they died. "Aunt Hazel [Doll]
Nasburg, sailboat on the beach."

Each cousin in

Then he even includes me in this thing,
the next generation, we each get $100.

Seventy years ago that was a lot of money.

I got two framed "water color" pictures, each of a single bird,
now hanging in the library. Those turned out to be chromos of
magazine covers. I had to take the glass off one once. They

That's all I got

are not paintings but they are nice frames,
out of it except, of course, the $100.

Was his money--?
He was a lawyer.
I know, but what did he do with the--.

Okay, that's complicated, because the money borrowed by Edith he
cancelled, because she was divorced.

That was not approved of?

Yes. He disapproved of him. He cancelled for her. The one
successful one, Hazel--he called her Doll--had married a
merchant in Coos Bay, Oregon. It used to be known as
Marshfield. They ran a stationery store there. Paying back,
some of it he cancelled.

He had made a loan to her also?

Yes. "I nominate and appoint my daughters Elizabeth McGraw,
Edna McGraw and Elva B. McGraw the executrixes in my last will,"
and so forth. He had given all his money in sections. I think
each got about $20,000.

Lage:

So he divided that rather evenly?

Hedgpeth: Here we go. "Section 21, I give and divide and bequeath all the
rest, residue and remainder of my property whatsoever situated
in equal proportion to my daughters," listed all by names, "or
the survivors at the time of my death provided either of said
children should die before I do leaving a child or children
surviving. Such children will receive that share. I make no
other provision for my son Frederick B. McGraw for the reason
that he has already all of that portion of my estate to which I
think he is entitled." He did give him his gold watch.

Lage: He had given him a considerable portion earlier?

Hedgpeth: He was borrowing money all the time. He was in all kinds of

little things that didn't amount to anything. You can follow it
through the city directories. I went down to Bill Sturm, his
little parlor down there in the Oakland Public Library.
Incidentally I made a file about the old house, photos of the
interior (by my mother), floor plans and all for his collection
about old Oakland houses.

Lage: Did Edith, the one who had been divorced, get an equal share?

Hedgpeth: Who?

Lage: Was it Edith who had been divorced?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Did she get an equal share?

Hedgpeth: Yes. It calculated out. "Whereat and Whereabout, April 4th, I
purchased my daughter Nellie some lots of land and so forth, at
the expense of $2,650." He took that out. Of course, she sold
the property at Clipper Gap later anyway, so that isn't quite as
bad as it looks there. A loan and so forth, $500. "Said sum of
$2,000 ought to be considered an advancement to my daughter
Nellie and shall bear interest from the 24th of April until my
death 3 percent per annum. The distribution of my estate,
7/8ths of said sum and interest earned shall be deducted I/ 8th
share," and so forth. You won't follow all that stuff. But
anyway, they were all cared for and I think they each got about
$20K. He would have had a lot more money if he hadn't invested
in mines and similar schemes.

Lage: Did this make your mother secure then? Would that have been a
sum of money that would have left her in a secure position?

Hedgpeth: Little enough to get along with. The story of all this--. He
wrote this will on the 6th of June. He died on the 3rd of

August, 1921, two months afterwards. He came home, said, "Well
daughters, girls, I've given up. I'm not going to work
anymore." He went to bed and died, several days later, of
course.

The reason the family lived there was because he couldn't
get around too easily. He knew the way, the trains in San
Francisco. His office was on Pine Street. It was only about a
quarter of a mile from the Ferry Building, I think—the 300
block.

There is something here about his law. He had a junior
partner at the time. There we are. Barry. Yes. The number is
35A Pine Street. "I here bequeath to my friend, Joseph E.
Barry--" all his legal library. Of course, he had built up
quite a heap of that too by that time, and he must have replaced
most of his loss from 1906.

Early Interest in the Natural World;
Childhood Reading

Ants. Seashells, and

Lage: Did any of these early experiences, any of them, bring you in
the direction of your interest in the natural world? That
hasn't come out.

Hedgpeth: No.

Lage: Were you a budding naturalist as a boy?

Hedgpeth: My mother said she could always find me if she knew where the
nearest ant hill was. When I was very small, she would visit
people, especially out in the mountains and so forth, I would
wander off, so she just kept looking out for the ant hills and
she would find me watching the bugs crawl around. It was more
than ants quite often.

Lage: Are these vivid memories for you?

Hedgpeth: Well, I do remember looking at ant hills and just looking at
things moving and wiggling around.

That's where the natural history aspect became serious.
Lage: When did your interest in natural history become serious?

Hedgpeth: Well, see, next door-- [shows picture] Next door to my

grandfather lived Henry Hemphill, who was a very famous shell
collector and a pretty good student of mollusks. He didn't just
gather them. He arranged a lot of his shells on cards to show
all these evolutionary sequences or relationships in a rather
interesting way. But the whole house was full of stuff. It was
sort of like the pictures of the grand salon of the Nautilus
from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They had a parrot that was
quite often aired out in the backyard.

1 used to go over there quite often to see the seashells,
and ask Bee [Jennie Hosmer], who was Hemphill 's granddaughter,
to open it up so that I could see them. In fact, it all started
one day when she offered to show me and my cousins the
seashells. They never came back, but I kept coming back and
looking at them.

Lage: So it really kind of entranced you.
Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: You say that it was all organized and displayed in such a way
that it made some sort of--?

Hedgpeth: Well, all these displays were not in view. They were in drawers
and things. They had very fancy cabinets of course. [The
remains of the collection are now in the possession of Dennis
Murphy at Stanford, a descendent of Hemphill. --JWH] For a
while, my Uncle Fred was trying to collect shells. He started
to build up a collection. He had a cabinet but it was relegated
to the attic in my time and there was hardly anything in it.

Lage: You didn't build on that.

Hedgpeth: Right. The other thing of course was that my grandfather had a
library. My education may be mid-Victorian rather than post-
World War I influences because the attic had a good stock of old
children's magazines, serials and things. Harper's Roundtable.
How they happened to subscribe to that instead of St. Nicholas I
don't know. This man Kirk Munroe was a very good writer. He
edited the magazine.

Lage: Was this writing for boys or for adults?

Hedgpeth: Primarily for boys and/or girls. One of the best ones he wrote
was called The Flamingo Feather. It was in print as late as
1940. He moved down to Florida and became very friendly with
the Seminoles. I looked him up in the Cyclopedia of American
Biography.

Lage: What was his name?

Hedgpeth: Kirk Munroe. Apparently, he was the person who introduced

organized cycling in this country. Those were the days when you

had wheels about six feet in diameter. How you managed I don't
know.

Lage: But he wrote natural history?

Hedgpeth: No, he wrote stories and they had quite a lot of natural

history. Actually, in reading about him I find that one of the
things that he did is that he never wrote about an environment
that he hadn't seen. So he was going out on all kinds of field
trips casing up these places. He wrote one about the Painted
Desert, which I remember very well. Then I remember something
else. [retrieves book] In one of these books is a little
German song. For about seventy years I've tried to find that
song. Anytime I saw a book of German folk songs I would flip it
open. The last trip to the local library sales about two or
three months ago here, I found it in this book. The reason I
hadn't found it was because it was Swiss. This book is brand
new, obviously never been sung out of, not been squashed flat on
a book rack or anything. It's got nice little color plates in
it. The first line of the song is "Wohlauf in Gottes schdne
Welt." My Aunt Edith translated it for me. It was the first
time I had ever become aware of the German language. This was a
story about people coming West in the wagon train and they were
singing this song.1

Lage: That's why the song appeared in the story.

Hedgpeth: It appeared, and I had been looking for it ever since. Then all
of a sudden. . .

Lage: You really had vivid memories of these books that you read.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, I had one--. It was a nice big book. I can get it
for you if I had to. It's very easy; I know exactly where it
is. That's why I wish I had been there, because this copy is
not very good binding; it's secondhand.

Lage: You mean, you wish you had been there when they divided up your
grandfather's things.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

"'Wohlauf in Gottes schone Welt," Schweizer Singbuch. Mittelstufe,
Ausgabe fiir den Kanton Zurich, Verlag Hug & Co., Zurich, 1960.

Lage: Did you get much of the library?

Hedgpeth: My mother grabbed a lot of stuff. He had a big library.
[Wanders off to get the book and sings]

Lage: What was that you were singing in the distance?

Hedgpeth: That was "Deutschland iiber Alles." [laughter] It's a very
pretty tune. Do you have this thing on again?

Lage: Yes.

Hedgpeth: I've been to Helgoland and the words to "Deutschland iiber Alles"
were written by Hoffman von Fallersleben during a weekend at
Helgoland. He deliberately wrote the words to fit Haydn's tune.
The tune that Haydn wrote of course is the national anthem for
Austria. The story goes that he once heard "God Save the King"
and tried to write a similar tune for his own country. Haydn of
all people knew how to write singable music as you may have
noticed. Have you ever been in a choir?

Lage: No, I haven't, unfortunately.

Hedgpeth: Anyway, I thought it was kind of treason to a take a tune like
that, the so-called "Emperor Quartet" or "Emperor Waltz," or
anyway, Haydn's name for it. "Deutschland iiber Alles" is
essentially a bunch of corn. I took some satisfaction in
learning that this publisher had paid him 30 Kroner for it.
[laughter] .

Anyway, this is one of the principal influences. This is
Sea and Land [Sea and Land: A Natural History of the Sea, by J.
W. Buel] . [shows book]

Lage: Was this a book of your grandfather's?

Hedgpeth: Yes, it was in his library. Not this particular copy; I bought
this one at a book store later for I think seventy- five cents.

It was sitting in his library; it looked like a law book.
Same old calf -colored thing, about four inches thick. This is a
subscription-only thing, by a man named J. W. Buel. "A
wonderful curious thing of nature existing before and since the
deluge. An illustrated history."

Lage: I can see how this picture, this frontispiece, would capture the
imagination of a young boy though.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it looks like a circus billboard, a little bit of

everything. It's got all these pictures. Some of them are not
very well--.

Lage: [Reads] "Mysteries of the deep sea."

Hedgpeth: Yes. This copy, alas, is falling apart.

Lage: How old would you have been when you discovered this?

Hedgpeth: It was right down on the lower shelf. I discovered it as soon
as I could read, somehow.

Lage: You had to read pretty well to plow through this.

Hedgpeth: The second half is about land. Obviously all these animals do

not occur on the same continent. You have an anaconda, a

crocodile, lions and tigers all mixed up in a glorious mess.
Here are South American Macaws sitting there.

Lage: Is there an evolutionary approach?

Hedgpeth: Not really. It's a rather primitive evolution to say the least.

Lage: It refers to the deluge, "Shall the earth be again destroyed?"

Hedgpeth: Some of the facts in here are not exactly facts. One of the
most notorious is of the nautilus flying in the air. This of
course is an octopus, the argonaut. They build a little shell
for the egg case. There is a picture in here somewhere showing
it getting up and flying around. That is something we know
can't be. Here are serpents: sea serpents!

Lage: There is the octopus, battle with the octopus.

Hedgpeth: This is from 20,000 Leagues; that's the picture. Doing a

hatchet job on the octopus, or the great Kraken or whatever.
Now, here we are. It shows this thing flying, which it can't
do. These are specialized surfaces for building this egg case.
It didn't walk around carrying it like a hermit crab either.
Here there are sails, holding up the sails, the sail on the
surface. It doesn't do any of those things in those three
positions.

Lage: There are probably a lot of mistakes like that in there I would
guess.

Hedgpeth: But in the middle of the book, there is something that is very

fascinating. My first introduction to poetry. The pictures are

a bit small, but here is the entire text of the Ancient Mariner.
Tossed in the middle there just to separate sea from land.

Lage: Did you like this book a lot as a child?
Hedgpeth: Oh yes. I read it over and over again.

Lage: Is this something you shared with your mother and aunts, or was
this solitary?

Hedgpeth: No, just all by myself. In fact, my Aunt Edna unlocked the
cases for me and that was about it.

Lage: Did the sea part interest you more than the land part of this
book, do you remember?

Hedgpeth: I think it is accidental because it begins with the sea. By the
time you've gotten all the way through and read the Ancient
Mariner, there is nothing left of the day to go on. So you
start all over again. I got into some of this: the troubles of
Paul du Chaillu, a Belgian explorer in Africa in the 1860s who
was alleged to have carried on improperly with gorillas,
[laughter]

Lage: This is in this book too?

Hedgpeth: I don't think that is. I picked that up somewhere else. So
anyhow, I'm fond of the Ancient Mariner, to say the least.

Lage: Did your grandfather have a pretty extensive library?

Hedgpeth: He had a lot, because he had some personal experience, I think,
so it was the year 1876 that he had gone back to Detroit for
some purpose or another. Anyway, he had been pursued by Indians
and barely got to a boat in some river like the Platte or a fork
of the Missouri, or some place. So he had a lot of the
classical books about exploring the West.

He had some pretty rare stuff, I gather. [After he died,]
they called in the dealers. First came Paul Elder, the biggest
second-hand antiquarian- type dealer in the area. He picked out
what he wanted and then they moved on to Harold Holmes. My
mother decided she wanted the encyclopedia. She put her name in
the first volume so he took volumes 2-24. I argued with him
ever after, but never got anywhere.

[Holmes was a bookseller long before the store on 14th
Street in Oakland was built in 1924, and was called in to bid on
parts of Grandfather's library. In fact, my mother knew the

27a
Title Page, SEA and LAND. - R indicates lines printed in red.

SEA ^5 LAND:

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF

flic Wonderful and Canons Tilings of Nature Existing More and since the Deluge.

EMBODYING. DESCRIPTIONS OF THE MIGHTY WORLD OF WATERS. AND OF THE MARVEL
OUS CREATURES WHICH COMPRISE ITS INHABITANTS.

BEING

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SEA.R

Illmtratod by Stirring Ad»«ntur«t wHh Wk»Ui, De»il-F,th, Giant Polypi, Sharks, Sword-FitK, Dog-Fnh,

3tingi»tf-Fiih, Crocodile*, etc. ; to which are added D««criptioM of ill ttve PVeaonttuI Cr««tur«t

•-epd Thing* that «r» Found in tta D*ep 8««, tog«ther with • Full Account of the

RemarkabU Leg««dt and Sapontition* *o Pr»r»lent among S*ilor«.

INCLUDING

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD ASHORE. THE SURPRISES THAT ARE TO BE MET WITH

IN ALL THE REGIONS OF THE EARTH. IN THE KINGDOMS OF

ANIMAL. INSECT AND VEGETABLE CREATION.

ALSO,

A NATURAL HISTORY OF LAND-CREATURES R

Such M Lioni, Tigert, Elephant*, Rh!noe«ri, Hippopotami, Gorilla*, Cfiimpanzeet, Mandrill*, B««rt, W7W

Dogt, «ic. with Hundradi of Thrilling Ctcapade* illuttnting their Character and Oifpotition. •

•

TO WHICH IS APPENDED A DESCRIPTION OP

THE CANNIBALS AND WILD RACES OF THE WORLD, R

Their Customs, Habita, Ferocity and Curious Ways.

BY J. TAT. BXTEI-,

Author of "Th« World'* Wonders," "Heroes of the Plains," "Exfl* Life b 8rt>erla," etc., etc.

•

ILLUSTRATED WITH JOO EN<;RAVINGS, REPRESENTING THE WONDERFUL CREATURF.S OF THK
WORLD IN THEIR NATURAL CONDITION, AND

SUPERB EMBLEMATIC COLORED PLATES. R

SOLD BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY.

Printed on verso: Copyright, 1887, by J. \v. BUF.I-

PUBLISHED BY

HISTORICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY,

PHILADELPHIA.. PA-, AND ST. LOUIS. MO.

Original page size: 6.5 x 8.5 inches.

.SKA AMI I.ANU.

27 b

MYSTERIES OK THE DEEP SEA.

This ponderous book. ^
whose outer appearance jf
was that of a forgotten
law book, not only in
troduced me to the won
ders of the sea, but also
the beauties of poetry
by including as sort of
divider between the
creatures of sea and
land, the complete text
of The Ancient Mariner,
with the woodcuts by
Gustave Dore. When I
ventured to ask our
local ancient mariner
an opinion about the art
ist's acccuracy, he put
me properly in my place.

THE ANCIENT MARINER.

|T is an ancient mariner,
J. And he Ktoppfth one «!' three.
" By thy loiu; grey Ix-anl and glittering eye,
Now wherefore «ti>|i|i'sl (him me!1

•• The bridegroom's doors arc ..|K>iied wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guest* nrc met. the (east is «et :
ilnyst hear the merry ilin."

He hold* him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," <|imlh lit-.
Hold off! unhand me, gn-y-l>eard loon ! "
KllMMiiix his hand dmpl hr.

Ho holds him with his glittering eye —
The. wedding-guest S|<HM| slill.
And listens like n three-years' child :
The Mariner hath his will.

Tin' wedding-guest sal "ii » slnne;
He eanmit HHMWC l'«l hear;
And thus spake on that ani-ii-nl man,
The hriKht-i-yed Marim-r.

The ship was checivd, the hnrlmur cleared,

Merrily did we ilmp

Below the kirk, U-hiw the hill,

Below the light-house top.

The sun cnme up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he ;
And he shone bright, and mi the right
Went down into the sea.

THE WEDDING GUEST SAT ON A STONE:
HE CANNOT CHUSE BUT HEAR.

•THE &dN FRANCISCO
MARITIME. MUSEUM
FoatrfPfHStreet

St* Fraucita, Citifinria 94109
Karl Kortum, Do-tQor

4/23

Dear Jo«l —

It flung the blood into my head,
And I fell down in a swound.

Art, not accuracy

I hesitate to begin . .
planks, wrong angle catheads, rig:
too close to bows, <»««*y" *°° *
two jibs where there should be <
etc.

But it is still as good an illust
tion for those two lines as Is 1!
to co« along.

Best,

Dr Joel Bedgpeth

family, and evidently met Emily, Harold's sister, in Berkeley, 1
think when she was living there with me during my last two
undergraduate years. We wound up one summer at Emily's cottage
near Occidental. By that time, she was getting dotty and the
family was embarrassed by her, and trying to forget her.
Fortunately, she began to worry about all the rocks the
neighbors were throwing into her yard in Berkeley and left us to
spend most of two weeks undisturbed. It was just after the
narrow gauge railroad had been abandoned; most of the tracks
were still there and the trestles were sound enough to be walked
on safely, so we explored the countryside.

[Holmes Bookstore was for many years my favorite place to
go and with its sad demise earlier this year I no longer have
much to attract me in my native city any more. Harold C. Holmes
was an entertaining fellow, often quoted Marcus Aurelius, but he
died some years ago. For a while we impatiently waited for his
memoirs, but they turned out to be a bust. He just didn't know
how to write. But I found many good and interesting books
there, and the great store's demise is another part of my life
now forever gone. --JWH, October 1995]

Book Collecting, Book Critiquing, and Music

Lage: So you didn't get many of those books.

Hedgpeth: No. Some years later, I went in to the senior Holmes--. It's

still the same store right by the Hotel Oakland. He had a great
big German book, two volumes. There were a lot of textbooks
that benefit from its illustrations. I grabbed it, a gold mine
of nice pictures of animal gizzards and guts and also entire
critters. Two great big heavy volumes, labeled $3.00. I said,
"Haven't you made a mistake here?" It was in Fraktur type.
"Hell no. Nobody can read that stuff." The last catalog
listing I've seen, it was $250.

Lage: Did you buy it?

Hedgpeth: Of course I bought it. [laughter] I had an amazing experience
here a while ago. I'm not sure I should have done it but my son
Warren was asked into a big old house downtown by a client. It
belonged to one of the early families around here, related to
the Comstocks of Cornell University, great naturalists. He
wrote a famous butterfly book. Warren said there were a couple
of old books in there, so he arranged that I'd go look at them.

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Two branches of that family don't agree on anything. So I
looked at the books, and they had this autographed copy of
Comstock's Butterflies of North America. I said, "That's a
family heirloom sort of thing. You shouldn't get rid of that."
She said, "I've had a hysterectomy." "Sorry about that."
Anyhow, that ended that part of the conversation. Then there
was a two-volume--. Actually, different editions of the same
thing, of Perry's Opening of Japan, the book on the Pacific.
These are books that had a famous picture that caused so much of
a row that the government refused to pay for the publication of
some of them later on, namely the Japanese bathhouse scene. It
was considered very, very improper to even indicate that naked
men and women wandered around together in such a condition.
This was of course the 1840s. In some editions, these plates
had been torn out.

They had two copies?

They had one copy of the first edition and the second copy of
the library edition published a couple of years later, which has
more color plates and very fancy full leather binding, a heavy
processed thing. I said, "I don't know but I think these are
probably worth about $300. I'm not a specialist. Whatever you
do, don't go down and let that swindler around the corner get
his hooks into these things. He will tell you they are only
worth about $50 and offer you $20." When I was away, she
presented them via my son to me. She invited us to their
housewarming. They built a nice house out at Dillon Beach.
Warren designed and built the house for them, by which time I
had learned that the real value of the second book, the last
auction price, was $650. I said, "I'd better tell you this."
Oh, well... [laughter]

So you have them?

I have them . '

Do you have quite a book collection?

Fair. I have a fair collection of books on the oceans and this
[Sea and Land] was one of the starters of it; [unwraps it] this
particular copy is a wreck. I would like to get a good one but
I don't know, they're probably as scarce as hen's teeth now.

'Hawks, Francis L. Expedition of an American Squadron to China Seas
and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853 and 1854, Under the Command of
Commodore M. C. Perry. 1856, 1857 (second, library edition, larger page
and type size, with added illustrations).

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Have you ever had it looked for?

I'm scared of those guys. They find it for you for $100 and
they get really mad if you don't buy it.

It might be worth it.

I don't think it's worth that much. I don't think it will ever
sell for that much. There is so much rubbish in it. A lot of
it is pure fantasy.

But do you think that's what attracted you in a sense?
very romanticized view.

It's a

Of course, I didn't know how bad, how inaccurate, some of it
was, but somehow I didn't feel it was all quite up to snuff. I
don't want to say I was wise before my time.

I know that the late George Myers, an ichthyologist at
Stanford, said he had this book in his home too. It started him
out. In fact, I wrote a little essay on seashore books and
things like that, published in the American Scientist or
something, a long time ago now.

On early books like this?

Yes. This business of writing books about the sea as such came
along fairly late. There were all these books about cannibals
and how to cook a missionary and that sort of stuff. They had
been going for a long time.

Would Jules Verne have had some influence on popularizing it?

Yes. He had a great deal of influence. [holding copy of 20,000
Leagues] This is a new edition. I'm writing a review. I'm on
the editorial board of the Quarterly Review of Biology. Some
chairman of the French and Italian Department at Indiana has
translated it. He has no sense of humor and absolutely no
knowledge of biology. He warns us that Jules Verne was fond of
making puns and sly jokes. Then he gets completely suckered
into one of them. There is a statement about quadrupeds and
there are also quadrumanias. He gives a very solemn footnote
verifying this as mammals that have four hands.

You don't think he's trying to be funny?

He doesn't know anything about it, or he wouldn't have said it
that way. He said this is Latin for having four hands or

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage :
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

something. The only animals that behave as if they were four-
handed are sloths.

Sloths?

The great three-toed sloth. It hangs by all four feet which are
all more or less like this, a hook. In fact their rear feet are
so thoroughly adapted for hanging just like that it can't even
walk on them to flatten them out. They are obviously not hands.
They are all toes. But anyhow...

Hand -like.

There are some other things, more technical. He corrects Jules
Verne's statement of the longitude of a place "south of Japan"
to read 37 degrees west, when it should have been east. So he
states that the longitude of Tokyo is about 37 degrees west. He
does that to correct Verne. I would hate to go sailing with
this guy because I don't know where he would land us. I had to
point out in my review that this places Tokyo about halfway
between San Francisco and Honolulu. It has to say east
longitude.

I met some people from Indiana a couple of months ago and
asked about this guy. They said, "He's probably the most stupid
man on the whole Indiana faculty." Well, I didn't know about
that, but I'm not surprised.

He'll be waiting for your review, I'

m sure ,

I don't know. Most of the people who do these things don't even
know that the Quarterly Review of Biology exists.

He may never see it. You can send him a copy.

I may do that because another edition came out about five years
ago now, making some equally stupid mistakes. In both cases
these guys haven't hired biologists or sent it to anyone for
corrections or adjusting. Oh, well.

[looking at photo of grandfather's library] You see these
great big enormous bookcases. There were two big units like
that on this side. Then on the other side, this was the library
room.

In the scrapbook here, you say, "Here I read my grandfather's
books stretched out on the carpet."

I read at them. There is a piano here too, isn't there?

Lage: Not in the picture.

Hedgpeth: This was probably the most unmusical family in town.

Lage: They had a piano but it wasn't much used?

Hedgpeth: Nobody played it except my Aunt Edith played a little, but I
don't think she ever took it seriously. The thing is, they
would stand up for things like "Hail, Columbia" because they
thought it was the "Star-Spangled Banner." They admitted that.
They bought my grandfather a phonograph one year. This was the
time when they still all were mechanical. They got some records
to go with it. They got things like, "They gotta quit kicking
my dog around," and "Mickey the Pumpum Man." They were very
trashy black seal records. They turned it on, Grandfather
listened and said nothing. The next day he came back from the
city having bought half a dozen great big fancy red seal records
which cost about ten times the price of these black seal jobs.

In those days they sold things by sort of a rough scale.
So when you bought a copy of the recording of the sextet from
Lucia, you were paying for all six artists. It would cost six
dollars. If you bought a single Caruso record, it might be a
dollar. So he bought a lot of opera. They weren't much on
symphony in those days . It was mostly vocal things because
orchestras didn't record very well. And he kept on; there were
a lot of them. One of my idiotic cousins made static machines
out of some of them.

Lage: So your grandfather had more musical taste than the rest of
them?

Hedgpeth: More than suspected.

Lage: How did you develop an interest in music?

Hedgpeth: Well, my father was a singer. He had no musical training. He
couldn't sight read, and he couldn't sing parts. There is
nothing more irritating than to be in the middle of a tenor
section with some guy singing soprano.

Lage: I think we should wind up for today because we've talked for a
couple of hours now.

[Tape is turned off. Resumes with Mr. Hedgpeth singing in
German. ]

Lage: When did you get an interest in choral singing? Was that as a
young person?

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

No. My father always sang. I don't know where he learned some
of the things he sang. He knew "Bonny Bobby Shafto." Every
single trace of anybody from Northumberland in the family was
long forgotten. My great-uncle Joel thought we were of Welsh
descent; that probably came from memory about his grandmother
Ruth Jones from Anglesey, but not a single word of Welsh came
down to us .

How does "Bobby Shafto" go?
to my daughters.

I used to read that nursery rhyme

[Sings "Bonny Bobby Shafto"] The town of Shafto, or the place
of Shafto, is very close to the little village or farm of
Hudspeth [pronounced Hedgpeth] in Northumberland. That's where
my father's family came from some centuries before. It's very
curious that the McGraws, to whom I owe most of my background,
were the last that I know of to come to this country. They came
to New York in 1801. Two brothers came as indentured servants
from Ballylain, County Armagh in Ireland.

Your father's family came much sooner?

Well, the Hedgpeths were showing up in the 1690s in Virginia and
the Carolinas. They were in the Revolution and the War of 1812.
Of course, later some of the Hedgpeths wore gray uniforms. On
my maternal grandfather's side, his brother was a surgeon in the
Civil War.

On which side?

The Union. Michigan Volunteers. One of his McGraw cousins was
killed at Gaines Mill. That part of the history is also 199
percent U.S.A. Our names are plastered all over the place.

Has the spelling changed? You've pronounced it sort of Hudspeth
when talking about the older--.

That was for the sake of making it plain. It's pronounced
Hedgpeth. To this day it's spelled Hudspeth in Newcastle, and
the man whose name is Anderson who now lives in the place called
Hudspeth in Northumberland pronounces it Hedgpith. There are
thirty Hudspiths in the Newcastle phone book, and the American
spelling Hedgpeth is a phonetic spelling. In our family line my
great-grandfather Joel Hedgpeth married Jane Hudspeth.

Lage:

But the spelling is the same.

Boyhood Wanderings in the Sierra Foothills. 1920-1921'
[Interview 2: July 2, 1992] it

Lage: Last time, we talked about your wandering around in the deep
meadows, out of Oakland and up to the mountains.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And how that might have made you who you are. How much time
were you in the mountains and what part of the mountains and
what kinds of things did you do there?

Hedgpeth: That was after World War I. My father had gotten a job with the
city of San Francisco in Mather. He had gone up ahead of us.

Lage: That was related to the Hetch Hetchy project?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Mather was where they had the sawmill. The place was

originally "The Hog Ranch." They had to run the sawmill to cut
timbers. They did a lot of tunnel work and concrete pouring
requiring all kinds of timbers and so forth and planks, so they
had their own sawmill. There was another mill about a mile away
over the hill for the peach growers. That primarily was for
light duty stuff, namely for boxwood. In those days, wooden
boxes were the thing.

My mother and I started off. We traveled by train. San
Francisco had a railroad, going up from Oakdale through
Groveland ending at the damsite, so we changed cars. I remember
it was a very hot day.

Lage: Was this about 1921?

Hedgpeth: 1920-21; in that time frame. After Groveland, which was the

project headquarters and main division point of that railroad,
where they kept the roundhouses and the sidings and all that
sort of stuff, the route began to look very pretty. It was
right along the edge of the Tuolumne River gorge, so we were
going really into the mountains. Obviously, it was spring in

'See Appendix A, "A Boy's Life at Mather," for more memories of these

years,

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

the mountains, primarily nearer to summertime down in the
lowlands . '

Was that your first trip up to the mountains?

Well, it was my first trip to that area. I had been in the
mountains when I was very young, though. I have no clear memory
of it, except on Whisky Creek, when I was just a few years old,
several times. I have a dim memory of that, of my father
carrying me for miles through a snowstorm. I remember very
clearly, when we got into a warm house, how good that felt. He
had walked along ahead and left my mother to find her way. She
wandered into some farm house and spent the rest of the night
there, and waited until morning to find out what had happened to
me. That was one of the stories she used to tell with great
gusto.

You had gotten caught out in the snowstorm unexpectedly.

I must have been about three years old. Anyway, at Mather we
arrived in daylight. At first, there weren't any places for us
yet. So we stayed in tents in a couple of places. First at
Buck Meadows; you know where that is. That was a few days.
Then down in the deep low meadow below the tracks, which is the
loveliest place for mosquitoes; it's simply unbelievable.

You stayed there for a while?

Not very long.

There were dorms for the working crews, who were mostly
bachelors. There were not very many family units, probably only
a dozen or so. I was the only child of my age there.

Why did they need a blacksmith?
was he doing — ?

Were they still using horses or

That was still before the days when you had complete parts and
things, ordered from the factory. So when some of these big
machines broke down, parts had to be repaired by hand.
Sometimes it would be recast and it was stuck and you would have

'Ted Wurm's Hetch Hetchy and its Dam Railroad (Howell-North Books,
Berkeley, 1973) is a thorough, lavishly illustrated account of the entire
project.

to part with a lot of minor things. It had to be maintained
that way.

Lage: So it was machine works.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Finally, we had a house up there on a little crest

overlooking the mill, but you couldn't see very much because
there was a fair number of trees there at Mather. Of course,
the last time I was up there, they had let part of it go bad.
The meadow that I remember was all this thicket of second-growth
small pines and a horse corral. Because it was a national park,
they weren't supposed to do anything.

Lage: So is it part of Yosemite, this area?

Hedgpeth: Yes, it was part of Yosemite National Park. In fact, it was a
way stop for the excursions from down in Yosemite up to Hetch
Hetchy. You would stop there for lunch. These great big, open,
green touring buses — Pierce Arrows — there were probably twenty-
five or thirty people apiece. They were considered pretty big
things in those days.

Lage: Did you see those go through?

Hedgpeth: Oh yes. They stopped there for lunch. These box lunches were
very elegant things that they packed in those days, little bits
of candy, pieces of pie and all kinds of things. I began to
sing for the hors d'oeuvres.

Lage: Sing for your supper.

Hedgpeth: I did also that. If I knew a new dirty — or a new swear word,

why, the cook would give me a piece of pie. It wasn't really a
town, it was just a mill and the accompanying buildings. Most
of them were bachelors; they did run a mess. They came to the
mess hall, so they had a cook. He made a particular brand of
probably what I would now consider indigestible apple pies, that
he would give me a nice big piece of if I learned a new bad
word.

Lage: That's encouraging you in the right direction [laughter].

Hedgpeth: Yes, wasn't it? The tourists called me Sierra Bill.

Lage: What did the tourists like to hear?

Hedgpeth: They liked to hear me sing.

Lage: What kinds of songs?

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

I don't remember what I sang in those days. I stood on a tree
stump.

So that was what a boy did who didn't have any boys his age in
that area.

That's right. Actually, I think most of the kids—there were
not very many — were teenagers. Older children of families, you
see. There was this gal- -I never did learn her last name, but
never forgot her first name. It was Leafy Fern. She had a
suitor who kept carving her very nice heart-shaped boxes out of
yellow sugar pine bark. He was pretty good at it; I remember
that. After a while, they went down to the towns somewhere, and
I suppose they got married; I don't know.

Did your mother try to encourage you in different directions
from the cook? Did she know about your carryings-on?

I don't think she did too well. There was one day there where
this old character appeared on the scene with his two burros and
the saddlebags full of hymn books. There was kind of an arena
in a grove there, campfires and so forth, public functions. The
nearest thing to a meeting place the town had. A fireplace,
just some logs or planks to sit on. I started helping him
unpack the books. He wanted to know what my name was and I told
him. He said, "Oh. I know your mother. Please take me there."
He was one of her old missionary friends. His name was Hugh
Furneaux. In that thing you have about Mather and later in the
Tuolvmne County Magazine, he's there.

Right. With his two burros.

He had custody. One of them was called Bagpipes. I don't know
what the other was right now. Anyway, when he went down to the
city, he left them with us. At that time, we were staying at a
different place. We moved out for a while for some reason and
down near what was then the Oakland Municipal Camp, which was
about five or six miles south. He left his burros with us while
he went down into civilization for three or four weeks or
something like that. Time in those days gets confused. You
don't know which came before or after. Some people do. My
memory didn't keep the times too well separated.

I wouldn't think so, this far removed.

Anyway, I rode one of those burros around,
education.

It was quite an

Lage:

An education about burros?

Hedgpeth: Yes, about burros, donkeys. They have minds of their own.
Lage: That's what I've heard.

Hedgpeth: There was, I guess, a branch of the upper middle Tuolumne going
through there. It wasn't much of a river there; it was pretty
shallow but it had a big plank bridge across it. Trying to get
that donkey to go across that bridge! He stomped on it with his
feet. Because it wasn't nailed down tight, one of the planks
jiggled under foot. He backed off. He wouldn't go. He backed
off again. So I went down to where the river looked shallow
enough—it was — and we got out in the water. He decided he
didn't want to ford the river with me aboard, so he threw me off
into the river, walked across by himself, about a foot deep or
so, and he stood there and waited for me to wade the river,
[laughter]

Lage: So maybe you learned something about stubbornness from him.

Hedgpeth: Maybe. I don't know. But I learned something anyway.

Lage: What about the preacher friend? Was he a memorable character?

Hedgpeth: Well, he was a very nice man. He baptized me. That's about all
I remember of him clearly. He corresponded with my mother for a
while. He had this very fancy, heavy handwriting. I seem to
have lost or mislaid the gospel hymnbook he left with us. He
had written in it and put a date in it by the way too. The date
was '21.

Anyway, I led him back to our cabin. My mother had him
over for dinner and had him baptize me.

Lage: She had been waiting for someone to come along.

Hedgpeth: I don't know; I think she just had the idea that maybe it was
about time I had a middle name, I guess.

Lage: Now Mather, it became the San Francisco Family Camp?

Hedgpeth: It still is, I think. Amy—what is her name? She is a very
active environmental type.

Lage: Amy Meyer?

Hedgpeth: Yes. She was up there a few years ago.

But the tree they had cut down on a Sunday one day there,
some of the logging crews I guess, felling crews, this was the

biggest tree around there, right near our house. They cut it
down and cut it up in lengths of four or six feet. I went away,
and those pieces were still there the first time I went back
with Bill Boly, my daughter's brother-in-law, to show him the
ground and how to get from here to there and all that sort of
thing. We went all the way up to the dam at that time. Then Amy
wrote me a note saying that after that, those pieces had
disappeared. They were all weathered, an ash white color.
There a long time, forty years I guess.

Lage: Someone carted them off.

Hedgpeth: Finally. It was one way I could recognize the site of the
place. I have a very good memory for places.

Lage: Did you get up to see the dam being built?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Any memories about that?

Hedgpeth: They had an excursion for employees. It was on a Sunday, I

believe. Well, at that time, there may have been Sunday crews
working, they had to go down an incline, down on the cable tram
in a kind of crude conveyance lowered by cables on the track
down to about the level of where the tunnel comes out at the
dam. We went through that tunnel for several miles on a flat
car, on a little two- foot-wide train.

Lage: Through the tunnel?

Hedgpeth: Yes, we went through the tunnel. There were electric lights
along the roof. It came out at Early Intake and then they
turned us loose to walk back, to go back up the hill to Mather.
I didn't like it because it was kind of a scary thing, to go
down a steep cable tram like that and see all the fresh blasted
sides. They were still making the key ways. The key ways are
the part of cutting into the rock on either side and through all
the wires and timber supports. So you could see what they were
doing to the country; you could get a view of the valley.

Lage: But the valley itself was still intact then?
Hedgpeth: No, it was pretty well cut down by then.
Lage: Oh, they cut down the trees?

Hedgpeth: Oh yes. They would clear out all the trees. They would do this
any time they would build a dam. I think probably they were

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

going to use some of those logs, take them down to the sawmill
and chop them up.

Did that make an impression at that age?

It did indeed. I never cared for dams after that. I went back
there with a Boy Scout troop in 1924, and we went down inside
the dam. That's just kind of a scary business, too, because
whatever else you may think and how safe it may be, if you go
down in those tunnels, very far down, they are kind of drippy.

There is always the water leaking.

Yes, and when they are operating the turbines, it makes a noise
and gives you a sense of something going on, quivering within
something of the structure. It doesn't feel like it's a very
good place to stay. So you were very happy to get out of there
of course. I'll have to brush up. I don't know how to describe
the process anymore.

It will come to you.
reservoir was there.

So when you went back the second time, the

Yes, it was pretty well established.

The dam was finished and the valley was a reservoir. It's
interesting that at that age you were aware of the kind of
devastated landscape and all.

Yes, I always remembered that. I suppose the accident I had
didn't help either.

What kind of impact did your accident have on you, do you think?
This was the dynamite--.

Well, the immediate impact was extremely sensitive. Certain
things you couldn't do with your hands I still can't do, as a
matter of fact. They put a thing like this back together as
much as they can. They don't put nerve endings in anywhere.
Some tactile sense is gone and others are increased. When you
bump it against something it really hurts you--.

The pain is — .

It doesn't last long but it is very acute.

Even now?

Hedgpeth: Oh yes. Of course, copper pieces worked out of my hand for ten
years.

Lage: Again? I didn't--.

Hedgpeth: Well, this thing has a copper jacket, too.

Lage: Oh, the dynamite?

Hedgpeth: Pieces.

Lage: And they got imbedded in your hand?

Hedgpeth: Yes. They couldn't get them all out. One thing, they didn't
want to keep me under too long.

Lage: So the copper would work its way out?

Hedgpeth: Right.

Lage: Did it make you a more careful person?

Hedgpeth: I suppose.

Lage: It must have horrified your mother.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes; it was pretty hard on her.

Lage: Do you think it made her more protective?

Hedgpeth: Well, she was afraid of that, so what she did was send me off to
a military academy for a year and a half.

Lage: That was in response to your accident, do you think?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: To keep you out of trouble?

Hedgpeth: Also, the other thing was I had missed a year of school.

Lage: From your recovery time?

Hedgpeth: No. Because we lived up there through the winter.

Lage: Oh, so there really was no school.

Hedgpeth: There was no school. I think we went down the first year.

Let's see, 1921 was the year of my grandfather's death, so that

ended the big Christmases at home. One of my aunts married a
Nasburg, one of the old pioneer families in Marshfield, as they
still want to call it up there.

Lage: Up in Oregon?

Hedgpeth: Coos Bay. The Nasburgs were one of the founding settlers of
that part of Oregon.

Lage: Did your aunt marry after your grandfather died or before?

Hedgpeth: Before, because a picture of my grandfather's eightieth birthday
shows--. I guess we were all born by that time. Six of us.
The trouble is the youngest one, Bud, got hysterical and they
carted him away so I don't think he got into one of the
pictures. It was a very hot afternoon; everybody was dressed up
in their finery. It was worse than waiting to be mugged for the
county jail as far as I could see.

Lage: But look how much we enjoy those old pictures.
Hedgpeth: Yes, I know.

Father's Tenuous Tie to the IWW

Lage: One thing you mentioned in that article I wanted to ask you
about was something about finding your father's IWW
[International Workers of the World] card.

Hedgpeth: Oh, that was when we had the donkeys, yes.

Lage: Now, what was that all about and what does it show about your
father?

Hedgpeth: Well, my father was not very sophisticated and, of course, he
didn't know too much about the IWW. I don't think I ever saw
him reading a newspaper, come to think of it. He would read the
Bible or try Emerson or Thoreau once in a while. But
interestingly enough, he had as a teacher the man who became his
own brother-in-law. But heavens, how much older he was than my
Aunt Carrie I don't know. [Caroline Elizabeth Hedgpeth married
Aaron Frederick. — JWH] But he was a schoolteacher to a lot of
these people including my father's first cousin, George, who
remembered him very well.

Lage:

Would this have been in Whisky Creek?

Hedgpeth: No, that would be down in Academy and Clovis, that area. They
moved up, followed my grandfather up to the Whisky Creek area
later.

Lage: I see.

Hedgpeth: Anyway, this fellow was an old school master from Pennsylvania
and I think he was already about finished with his career when
he turned up here. He was one of the first teachers at Academy.
His name was Aaron W. Frederick.

Apparently, in his later years he went up to Oregon,
because they hired people in these mountain schools that were
long past age limits of any kind. He didn't do much but read
poetry to the kids when they were young, so my father may have
heard some of that sort of thing. I don't think he got beyond
the fifth grade.

Lage: He didn't necessarily keep up with current events?

Hedgpeth: No. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith. He called him a
blasphemous old Welshman.

Lage: The blacksmith was?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He obviously knew tricks of the trade that went way back
before our days, and he taught them to my father.

Anyway, the IWW card is a very heavy thing and kind of
shiny outside and red, white and blue with a screaming eagle on
it. It looked like something similar to the old passes they
used to give out to constituents in Washington when they were
attending a session of Congress.

Lage: That's ironic.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it's a very similar looking thing.

Lage: You discovered this and you said it created kind of a ruckus in
the family?

Hedgpeth: I asked my mother what it was, it looked so pretty. She knew

what it was. As soon as he got back, she laced him up and down
with, "You dangerous radical. You're contributing to that sort
of thing." So it disappeared from the scene.

Lage:

Was your father very committed to it?

Hedgpeth: No, I don't think he was very active. He just didn't know what
it was. It seemed like a good idea to him, that was all.

Lage: Maybe he thought it was a pretty card also.

Hedgpeth: He didn't read the papers. He didn't know about burning the hay
fields and all that kind of stuff they were doing. Of course,
down here in Petaluma, there was a banquet for the twenty- fifth
anniversary or twentieth, 1 guess it was, of the Bodega Head
fight; all the Berkeley radicals were there. I told them my
father had been a card-carrying member of the IWW. That brought
down the house. [laughter] Of course, that was stretching it a
little too, but I thought I might as well make something of it.

It wasn't that long after the PG&E tried to find out
anything about me .

Lage: They could have used that against you?

Hedgpeth: In fact, they tried that stuff on Dave Pesonen. His father was
a radical activist. I don't think he was a member of the
Communist Party or anything, but he and the Associated Farmers
didn't get along very well. Pesonen was active in the Unitarian
Church. He wrote a wonderful piece about all the other values
that should be observed in water, in our rivers and streams, for
the governor's 1945 water conference. It's published in the
back.

Lage: David's father wrote this?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I asked Dave, "Did your father write this kind of stuff?"
He said, "I didn't know about that particular one, but I
wouldn't put it past him." I found that thing very useful for
me because that's where Governor Warren said the same thing Joe
Stalin said, just about.

Lage: At this governor's conference?

Hedgpeth: This is 1945, the governor's conference on water.

Lage: And what did Earl Warren say?

Hedgpeth: Earl Warren said, "We should not rest until we put every drop of
water in California to work." Stalin said, "We must not allow
any water to reach the sea." I've used that several times.

Lage:

What did Dave Pesonen 's father say?

Hedgpeth: Well, they were libertarian and environmentally oriented sort of
things which were not very popular then. He was asking us not
to forget the fish.

Lage: And he worked for the Bureau of Reclamation, as I remember.

Hedgpeth: Yes. But he made these statements speaking in behalf of the

Unitarian Church. He wasn't on the official program. 1 think
he wrote a letter which was printed in the back of the report.

Solitary Time in Nature

Lage: Maybe I'm being too teleological here, but did the mountain

experience turn you into a scientist in any way, or a naturalist
or an environmentalist? How might it have?

Hedgpeth: Well, breathing the flowers like Ferdinand [the Bull]. I also

had many pleasant hours seated by lovely little springs they had
in the mountains. A lot of these springs are boxed to make them
easy to dip water out of them. They come from little small
rivulets or actually lowland places. They are all full of nice,
charming, interesting bugs paddling around in them. Beetles of
various sorts and that sort of thing.

Lage: Did you have a lot of solitary time?
Hedgpeth: Well, I was mostly by myself.
Lage: That probably had its impact.

Hedgpeth: Yes. There was a big oak tree with lovely acorns, great big fat
ones with a golden kind of powder on the cup. I don't know if
that was Quercus chrysolepis, or which one. I'm not a scholar
of oak trees, and we have quite a few in California, I know,
three of them in plain sight of this house. One there, one over
there. There's a scrub oak, a black oak and I don't know what.
I think there is another one down the road, a great big- leafed
one. Those are natives. This particular area has been planted
over with conifers by some fellow. One day we found our roof
leaking. A large limb had been broken off by the wind and
floated fifty to sixty feet like a falling feather, and punched
a hole in our roof.

Hedgpeth: The fir breaks off that way; it comes down like a feather. You
watch a feather fall; it sort of turns around on the nib. The
branch happened the same way. This guy next door is an
insurance broker and said, "That's one of your trees." I said,
"We have six species of conifer right here and the only Douglas
fir is the one on your side of the fence."

Well, anyway. Of course, he claimed it was an act of God.
Lage: So who won?
Hedgpeth: God. [Laughter] He cut down his fir tree a short time after.

II FORMAL EDUCATION, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY

Public Schools. Homes, and Family in Stockton and the Bay Area

Lage: Okay. We are going to get you into the educational system. We
are moving you right along. You went to Palo Alto Military
Academy.

Hedgpeth: Well, if you want to go back to the beginning. You see, I was

born on the 29th of September, so when I turned five years old I
was not eligible to go to first grade until I was nearly as old
as a second grader. We were living in this place called Clipper
Gap, about five miles north of Auburn on 1-80. It consisted of
about six family groups and the store and the school. I don't
think there was a church there. We boarded the school teacher- -
we lived right across the road. I remember the kids were all
older than me, talking about starting school, asked me what I
was going to do. I had never even thought of it; it had never
even been mentioned to me, as a matter of fact. About that time
I was reading funny papers with some idea of what they were all
about .

So I trotted off, more or less followed the teacher I
guess, presented myself in the lineup. She said I couldn't
attend. I would have to go and play by myself for a while. I
couldn't be in the school.

Years later, I talked to her. She had never lived very far
from Sacramento. I think she was born in Sacramento and I think
she died there. I lost track of her. She was pretty old when I
caught up with her.

Lage: You looked her up?

Hedgpeth: My mother corresponded with people and after her death, I found
all kinds of addresses of people I didn't even know she knew.

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

So I had to go around and tell them, wrote them letters, that
sort of thing. I looked up Miss Flower. Her name was Enola
Flower. I think it was her first school. I told her I still
remembered that. She said, well, she had made a lot of mistakes
in her life of teaching but she wasn't sure that was one of
them. She gave me a book, a history of California, she had
written for the lower grades. 1 didn't see her again. I was up
in Oregon at the time. She got quite a write-up in the paper
once about her career as a teacher, so she was fairly well
known. The schoolhouse is still there. Our house burned down
and there's nothing else left of Clipper Gap. Highway 80 wiped
it out, including my father's shop.

Anyhow, we came down from the hills to Stockton. My
father's blacksmith business hadn't panned out so he sold it out
or just abandoned it; I don't know which. He got a job at the
Holt Manufacturing Company. That was probably 1917 or early
1918. My first school was the big red house, a brick school
that is still standing in Stockton—Lincoln School. Holt had a
contract with the British Army to make tanks. That was a big
event in the history of the Holt factory.1

My father was working at a big steam hammer bending sheets
of heavy steel.

Not quite the same as his blacksmith work.
Well, he made pretty good money at it, I guess.
How long were you there in Stockton?

We were there through Armistice Day. I remember the armistice
parade very well, dragging Kaiser Bill's effigy behind the car.
One of them was tied to the front of the car, and another was
dragged behind.

So they really personalized it.
Oh yes. Kaiser Bill and all that.

I remember also the influenza plague. We all had to wear
white masks.

That came right after the war.

'Benjamin Holt. The Story of the Caterpillar Tractor. General Editor
Walter A. Payne. University of the Pacific, Stockton, 1982.

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Yes. Then, coming on to late 1919-1920, we moved back to the
big house for a while.

You went to school in Oakland.

Yes. My father worked in the Alameda shipyards, also finishing
off a war contract. They were building cargo ships there in the
Moore Shipyards. The Moores were old family friends of my
mother's and the McGraws in general. The Moores and the Rolfs
in San Francisco in the old days. Right after that, we went to
Hetch Hetchy where my father disappeared from the scene for a
while. We lived in Berkeley for a while and I attended second
grade there.

The big house in Oakland was built about 1886, I think it
was. My [grand] father got a relatively new house, built by Dr.
Cole. My grandfather bought it in 1889. That kind of
information I got out of the Oakland library's Oakland history
room. In fact, I submitted a dossier on the house and the
family to Bill Sturm there.

Did you mention that it had been lifted up and turned 180
degrees?

I think so.

That's a fascinating thought.

My aunts always delighted in telling me that. You can tell it
from the address in the city directories. The first address of
the house is on Adeline Street. I think it turns out that the
address then becomes Chestnut at the time my [grand] father

bought it, so he probably had the house turned around,
why my aunts remembered so well.

That's

You say you lived in Berkeley,
were in Berkeley?

Yes.

Did you go to school when you

Which school did you go to there?

It was Lincoln.

Did you live in the south end or the north end of Berkeley?

I lived down there in the south end where Adeline, Ashby, and
Grove all come together there. And Shattuck. The house I think
is still there. We lived on Fairview, which is a funny little

street which didn't come through. We found an Indian burial
site in the back yard. We were digging around, as kids. A
skull... we kept the skull for years. It finally fell down. We
used to carry it around on Halloween. It broke. The Indians
would have lynched me if they knew all that stuff. And a whole
lot of arrow points and other things that we didn't know the
significance of. I don't think any of the arrow points I have
now are part of that at all. I think those all got lost.

My cousin, who lived in Lafayette, found a great big
ceremonial point about seven inches long. He gave me all that
stuff; he had no interest in that. They had a beautiful dragoon
pistol of 1840 vintage which they ruined by trying to fire it
and putting too much powder in it. They blasted off the cap
holder and all that stuff. It was a lovely, big pistol.

Lage: Which cousin was this?

Hedgpeth: Ed Rowland, my oldest cousin on my mother's side. He was the

first born of our generation. He was about six years older than
me.

Lage: So you became the repository of these kind of family things,
because of your interest?

Hedgpeth: Well, no, not really. What happened was that his mother, one of
our aunts, built an antique house out nexL to the garage and put
in it all the heirlooms, including the appointment of my great
grandfather as postmaster of Port Orford signed by Abraham
Lincoln and all that kind of stuff. It all went up in smoke.

Lage: It all burned down.

Hedgpeth: My dear cousin came home one evening, not in complete command of
his faculties, and tossed a cigarette or something. Anyway, it
all burned down. Whatever was left was in the attic, just
shards and things. A couple of pieces here characteristic of
the kind of stuff that gets kicked around. [Goes off to get
something] This came from his attic.

Lage: What are they?

Hedgpeth: Fids.

Lage: Fids? F-I-D?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Fids are for working ropes, working out knots and for

splicing. These are Eskimo, of course. That's fossil ivory;
the new ivory one was probably made by a white man. It's been

turned on a lathe to make that symmetrical a head. This is
probably Indian work. This is so-called recently dead walrus.

Lage: What is this that I'm playing with here?

Hedgpeth: That is one of my mother's souvenirs. That is a purse, an
Indian purse. This is deerhorn, antler horn, and it was
designed to hold those things. Those are Dentalium which is a
scaphopod mollusk shell, and they used that as money.

Lage: This is the money and this was the way they kept it.

Hedgpeth: And they wrapped a piece of sinew around to keep things in
there.

Lage: What a treasure that is. So this was something your mother--.

Hedgpeth: Yes. It comes from the Hoopa Valley. One of my aunts went up
to southeast Alaska who taught Indians, the Haidu.

Lage: Then you had another aunt interested in teaching Indians?
Hedgpeth: Well, several of them tried to teach in missionary work.
Lage: Look at this. Is that abalone?

Hedgpeth: Yes. The very interesting thing about that is it has been in
the family for about eighty or ninety years now. I guess my
Aunt Edna had it there. That's what she brought back. She
brought back some other carving that went to her nieces. This
was left in the house. It got split some time.

But you notice that abalone? I got a strange letter from
the museum of Victoria, British Columbia, wanting to know if I
knew why the abalone in the Indian carvings was turning white
and if there was any way to stop it. The lady was writing to me
because she knew I was a director of a marine laboratory and
wanted to know, since one of the authorities on the mollusk
shell was a man named Alex Comfort, whether he was still in this
business. I wrote back, "The problem is, I have been up to
Victoria, and you have these in air-conditioned, permanently
controlled protective cages and boxes. You are taking the water
out of the shell, and it is the water in this shell that does
that . "

Lage:

The water gives it its color?

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

"So preserving them in those air-conditioned boxes is ruining
them," I said. "We had this one in the family for eighty years,
and the abalone eyes are unchanged . "

Did you know that quality about the shell, that the color came
from the moisture?

Yes. A lot of it does, the iridescence. Of course, as for her
question about Alex Comfort, I couldn't resist pointing out that
he had gone into another business—writing do-it-yourself
manuals for the bedroom, [laughter]

This is the same Alex Comfort?

Yes, of course it is.

How interesting. Did you know him in his former life?

I didn't know him, but I think in one of those books, there is a
little prefatory statement, or maybe it was on the flyleaf
somewhere, it said this.

Now, we had you living in Berkeley; then we were going on to
your next — .

Berkeley, yes. Then the next school I went to, I guess, was in
Alameda.

Did this have an effect?
another?

Changing so rapidly from one school to

Well, I never knew any teacher very well. None that helped too
much. In Alameda, I guess Dad was still working in a shipyard.
He moved over to Alameda to get away from 929. It was a little
further away, I guess.

Do you think your father was restless in the old home?

I don't know. Maybe my mother was restless. That was 1919.

[I should have remembered something that has always been
with me: one evening around 1920 when my father was jobless, he
had set up a crude drafting table in a remote back room in the
attic, and I asked him what he was doing. He said he was
designing a pump system to deliver gasoline to automobiles that
would register the amount of gas involved. It sounded practical
to me (gas stations were in their beginning then). They were
nice looking drawings. Then I went down the stairs from the
attic room to the warm fireside of the upstairs sitting room.

My mother and several aunts and George Wightman, my aunt Spud's
adopted son (an orphan from her first school assignment, the
orphanage at Tiburon) were there. They had been talking about
my father being out of work and what he was going to do (it must
have been just after the shipyards had closed--! was going on
towards nine). One of my aunts asked where he was and what he
was doing, and 1 said he was designing a measuring pump for
gasoline. George Wightman immediately remarked that that had
already been done. 1 was ordered by one of my aunts (my mother
did not say anything that I remember) to go back upstairs to
tell him not to waste his time. It was a long slow way up those
stairs. All my father said when I told him was, "Is that so?"
By morning the plans had disappeared and the matter was never
mentioned again. I did not remember it again until only about
ten years ago, until it came back to me and I realized it was a
cruel thing to ask a boy to tell his father.

It was to be many years, indeed to his last illness in the
Ring ' s Daughters Home on Broadway in Oakland that was founded by
the order where my mother was an active member, that my aunts
who were left began to visit him. Aunt Spud took it upon
herself to visit him regularly and he died there. George
Wightman had died long before—he never worked out as an adopted
son.

The last time I saw my father was at a nursing home in
Walnut Creek. He asked me to take his tools to the shop. (He
had borrowed a 200-pound anvil from Machado--the last blacksmith
in Walnut Creek.) I knew I would not see him again (I was at
Scripps in La Jolla then) .

My mother was at home with a companion to care for her.
She insisted on walking out to my car and watch me drive away,
and she died not long after.

After they were gone, the world belonged to me.]1

[In Alameda] I remember a silly little episode; we were
standing in a vacant lot, and all the kids began to scream and
run away. What were they doing? I should get out of there,
because there was a dragonfly that would sew up my mouth if I
kept standing around there.

Lage: This is what they said?

lMr. Hedgpeth added the preceding bracketed material during his review
of the draft transcript, and included a poem In Memoriam to his father.
See following page.

53a

In Memoriam (Joel Hedgpeth, 1875-1956)

A rusted wagon tire,

relic of some forgotten smithy,

half-buried and tilted from the ground

to mark a neighbor's entrance way

reminds me to remember seventy years ago

my father's ancient single-handed skill

as men came to stand around and watch:

he brought the red-hot circle

of shrinking iron against the felloes

and tightened it by turning in the tub

with the quickness that was the essence of the task

From hundreds of years before
this art of Celtic smiths
had been handed down to him
by a blasphemous old Welsh blacksmith,
my father said his name was Morgan.
I was there that day it ended,
as the watchers came in motor cars
on rubber tires at the time beginning
of our age of motor poisoned air.

My mother never wanted me
to put it down on the forms from school
that he was a blacksmith
but instead to write "machinist."
I would not do it - I never could forget
Mow his hammer shaped white to red hot iron
on his sounding anvil.

It would not be until long after and he was gone,
that I learned he had been known in his time
as the best man with iron in the valley.

Joel w. Hedgpeth

53b

POETRY WALES

Cylchgrtwn CcncdUclhol o FarddonUcth Ncwydd

Editor Meic Stephens
VOLUME FOUR SPRING 1969 NUMBER THREE county, California.

Poem by Joel Hedgpeth,

inspired by his

Welsh heritage and the

cemetery of the

Welsh mining town of

Somersville , now

part of a regional park in

Contra Costa

Epitaph at Somersville

Mt H*I btdd o dan gudd-mewn arch o goed
Mian nis gttlir Jy nganfod.
Na dyn bywjy mvyj adnabod,
AW cau Jy medd ond coffy mod.

Boxed in boards, buried here below,
From where I can no longer see,
No living one may learn my woe:
Come, close my grave, remember me.

(Transl J -H.,1994)

A hundred years now gone

John Williams of Llanfabon

Lived and worked here in the mines.

Praised the fine Welsh spoken here

And wrote of thai arid year

In his letter home to Wales:

How they welcomed with their smiles

EThe rain that ended the drought
In this valley far from home.
How they lived their hours out
On Sunday with their sermons
. First in English, then in Welsh.
And how they learned their lessons.
~For if a man has nothing
To raise him he will seek out
The things that arc degrading."

So John Williams wrote back home
From this forgotten valley
Where no houses stand today
In these hills above the mine.
Where no voices speak the tongue
Once alive and cherished here.

The living grass grows lightly green
Beyond the high and barren hill
In this time abandoned- place
Where the battered headstones
Plead for paradise and peace
In a language long unheard
For lives now unremcmbercd.

Anguish faded from these graves
Quietly as growing leaves
On the young stems of the year.

Our green remembrance holds
A wingbeat stance of startled bird.
Time's sequence reconciled
Within an interval now heard
By innerness of mind:
Our moody sunlit presence
Lost in quietcness whence
Grass and flowers of the year
And ourselves may end.

JOEL HEDGPETH

John Williams' letter of November 29, 1864
is published (in English) in The Welsh in
America-Letters from the Immigrants), edited
by Alan Conway, University of Minnesota Pres:
1961, pp. 266-267

The names on the headstone above the epitaph
are:

In Memory of

JOHN RICHARDS
Born in South Wales
Died Aug. 4, 1874
Aged 30 years

WILLIAM TIMOTHY
son of

John and Mary Richards
Died June 2, 1874
AgeJ 17 months.

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Yes. I didn't believe that. There were a lot of dragonflies
flitting around; they never came close enough to do anything.
So 1 just stood my ground and they all disappeared. Why 1
should remember such a silly little episode as that?

Anyhow, the chief thing there, that was the last time I saw
my father's father. He stayed overnight with us, he and my
grandmother. My grandmother was blind. That's on the Hedgpeth
side, of course. They had brought me a lizard in one of these
big, old house match boxes.

That was a big gift for a boy your age.

I reached for it. Grandma grabbed it because she was afraid I
would let the thing loose, and she killed it in the process.
Which was too bad, very sad. Anyway, the next morning, before I
woke up, my grandfather had gone on to Oregon. I never saw him
again.

1 never saw my grandmother again either. She came from a
very distinguished line, which I didn't know about at that time.
She was a Brearley. She was descended from the signer of the
Constitution from New Jersey, I think. Or was it that that was
her great-great uncle. One of the Brearleys, or both of them,
were officers in the Revolution, in the Continental Army.
That's a fairly old family, a fairly rare name. It's a very
strange thing that happened in Oregon, which was that there was
both a Tichenor and a Brearley on the faculty at Oregon State,
but neither of them were closely related.

When you went to Oregon State there was a Brearley and a
Tichenor?

Hedgpeth: Well, the Brearley turned up later. I immediately phoned him,
to know who he was. He came from a Canadian branch of the
family, had nothing to do — .

Lage: And the Tichenor wasn't related either?

Hedgpeth: Wasn't related either. Those Tichenors were all over Oregon.

[interruption for phone call]

Hedgpeth: Well, the city of Santa Rosa wants to build a pathway along the
Santa Rosa Creek. Back about 1964, the city of Santa Rosa, the
[Luther] Burbank House—do you know this town well enough to
know where the Burbank House is? Burbank' s place used to border
on the creek. They put all that underground--.

Lage: They moved the creek underground?

Hedgpeth: Yes. They put in a big culvert, and they built city hall on top
of the culvert. I publicly stated that I was not anxious to
promote this business, at least until they blow up the city hall
and get rid of the culvert, because that was a site locality of
what is now the endangered shrimp, Syncar±s pacifica. Somebody
else a while ago said they ought to blow up the city hall too,
but I think he had architectural objections. It doesn't look
very good. I have characterized it as having been poured into
forms made out of old piano boxes.

Lage: So you are advocating IWW tactics here?

Hedgpeth: I fear so. I am not the only one apparently who doesn't like
city hall architecturally.

Lage: Or environmentally, it sounds like.

Hedgpeth: Yes. The contents of the city hall especially [laughter]. This
guy said they want to condemn a big hunk of his land, take about
twenty-five acres. He's got a piece of property, and I guess it
straddles a creek somewhere out west in the pastureland.

Lage: They want to take it to build a path?

Hedgpeth: Yes. They've got to do something. They want to spend something
like $50 million dollars or some crazy sum of money. I don't
know where that money will come from or what it will be spent
for. One of the things they've got to do to rehabilitate that
creek — . One of the main branches, Brush Creek, runs along this
road. One mile of it is a straight line. Nature abhors
straight lines in streams.

Lage: That isn't a natural stream.

Hedgpeth: All you've got is a culvert. Well, anyway, that's what that was
all about. I'll go out to see what his problem is.

Lage: Let's see if we can get your education taken care of to feel
like we've really accomplished something here. We were in
Alameda. You were there a short time, it sounds like.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And then, the mountains in 1921.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Then we went back to the mountains, to Mather, Tuolumne
County .

Joel W. Hedgpeth, ca. 1922.

Photograph courtesy of Joel W. Hedgpeth

Lage:

Where you really didn't go to school.

Palo Alto Military Academy. 1922

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Right. Then I went back to the [Palo Alto] Military Academy [in
1922]. I did very well there, I gather. Of course, you have to
weigh these things a bit because military academies are
commercial enterprises and they want to have us little dears as
long as we can be paid for. I'm not aware that they ever
flunked anybody out. But I was bemused because I found this
letter to my mother from the headmaster, who called himself
"colonel" of course; I don't know what his real army rank was.
He might really have been a colonel for all I know, but
everybody had a military title there. He wrote this letter to
my mother saying what a nice influence I had been on the other
little boys.

What do you think he was referring to there?

I don't know, because I remember one time I had been
accidentally pushed into the swimming pool. No great harm about
that, but I had an old dollar watch and it got wet, so it
wouldn't run. This other kid had this cigar box of postage
stamps. Of course, we were all collecting in those days. We
arranged a trade. He got back to his room, and he found the
watch wouldn't run. I got back to my room and found that there
were no triangles that I had seen at the top of the heap in this
collection of stamps.

You both cheated each other. [laughter]

So there were mutual recriminations, and an order went out that
trading was not to be conducted except on Saturday afternoons in
the presence of one of the presiding teachers or officers.

Anything academically from that experience?
very young. Eleven years old?

You must have been

We had to memorize "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and so on.
Of course, the other thing I did was bop a kid over the head
with a sack of marbles I had won from him- -he claimed I had
cheated him—so we were not allowed to play marbles for keeps.
I had to walk track for that one. Instead of being free on a
Saturday afternoon to go to the five and dime movie downtown, I
had to walk around the racetrack with a wooden gun for hours .

Lage: Holding a wooden gun?

Hedgpeth: Yes. In the military, as punishment you got so many demerits
for this sort of thing — if your hands weren't washed in the
morning or if your necktie wasn't straight, among other such
things .

Lage: That was a long way from Mather.

Hedgpeth: Yes. This was when I really lost interest in organizations. It
was a ghastly Sunday afternoon and I wasn't feeling too well.
They served creamed cauliflower, a dish I wasn't too fond of. I
asked to be excused. Major So-and-so was presiding over us.
"Eat up your cauliflower." So I ate up my cauliflower. "Here,
eat up some more." He gave me a great big plateful of the damn
stuff. "Eat all that." I got it all down. Fortunately there
was a thicket of bamboo just outside the door. I headed for
that and managed to get rid of most of that cauliflower. I've
never been able to eat cauliflower since.

Lage: It sounds a little sadistic.

Hedgpeth: I think it was, but anyhow. Also, I've never remade my bed so
that I could bounce a nickel off of it since.

Lage: Then your mother took you out of that academy.

Hedgpeth: I think she ran out of money.

Lage: It wasn't because you didn't like it.

Hedgpeth: Well, I didn't have much to say about that. They wanted to make
a little man of me. That's what they told her it was doing.
So, back in the public school, I discovered I was now back in
step with my age class.

Junior High and High School in Oakland

Lage: That's when you went to San Leandro.

Hedgpeth: We were there through high school, so we were there for about
six or seven years.

Lage:

That was the most stable.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth: Well, my father took to working away in other parts of the

state. He worked for quite a while in Pleasanton, out there in
the sticks.

Lage: Did your mother have a little business, did you say?

Hedgpeth: Yes, she ran a little dry goods store for a while. It didn't do
very well. It wasn't a very good neighborhood for it for one
thing .

You said you went to Fremont High School. Was that in Oakland
or San Leandro?

First I went to junior high, Lockwood. San Leandro at that time
had no junior highs or high schools. When it came time, we had
the option of going to either Fremont in Oakland or Hayward.
Hayward seemed a long way out. Fremont was fairly close, about
twenty minutes. You see, the big, red train ended right near
where we lived in San Leandro. It went all the way down to the
ferry landing, big Southern Pacific red train. They ran right
on Seventh Street in Oakland, clear to the ferry landing. They
would stop a block from Fremont. That was pretty easy.

For the first year, I had to go to Lockwood. I had about a
mile and a quarter to walk from where we were. We were in the
Broadmoor district of San Leandro. We would go down to East
14th to get the street car to go to Lockwood.

That was in Oakland too?

Yes. The only thing I remember about Lockwood was that I had an
interview with the administration for having drawn up a cartoon
of a cigarette oozing smoke, shaped like a skull and crossbones.
I labeled it "The Curse of the Nation" and stuck it on the
bulletin board. I was told this was an unauthorized thing. I
hadn't gotten permission and they didn't like this kind of
conduct, so forth and so on.

Lage: What made you think it was the curse of the nation at that
point?

Hedgpeth: I don't know why I did that or anything. All I remember was

having done it and then being reprimanded by the principal and
the vice principal.

Lage: But you don't remember where your feelings about cigarettes came
from?

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

No.

Surely there wasn't the health concern there is now?

No. Of course, up in the mountains I had smoked coffee.

Coffee!

Well, I made a pipe. There's a picture of me, with a piece of
plumbing, a small-diameter elbow and the nozzle from a big oil
can.

And you put coffee in it. Ground coffee?

Yes. My mother was an inveterate coffee--. She couldn't
survive without her morning coffee. Anyhow, that was Lockwood.
Then I went to Fremont for three years [graduated 1929].

Were you thinking about going to a university after that? Was
this a goal?

I wasn't thinking about that. It was expected that I would do
that.

I see.
least.

That was the goal in the family, or your mother, at

My eldest cousin, he was sent to a military academy too when he
was young. He was sent over to San Rafael; 1 don't know why,
except they lived out in Orinda in the Walnut Creek area and
there wasn't as much in schools in those days out in that part
of the woods. I think he got through high school but I'm not
sure. My other male cousin, Jack, pulled out after a year or
two. He was a Bigelow so he was rushed for a frat. He wanted
to be a chemist but he wasn't cutting the mustard, I don't
think, so he pulled out.

Pulled out of college?

Yes. So my other two cousins, the girls, I guess they both went
through college. One of them was what you would call legally
blind most of her life. Both of her parents were devout
Christian Scientists. After they died, she had an operation so
she can read a little now. That impressed me, a rather sad
affair. So I'm the only one who made anything out of an
education.

Lage: Of all your mother's relatives. What kind of a school was

Fremont? Were there any teachers there that made an impact on
you or any scientific studies that helped direct your interests?

Hedgpeth: Fremont was a big, city high school. By that time, I don't know
how it had happened, I obviously knew more biology than the
biology teacher.

Lage: Just from learning on your own.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Then my English teachers encouraged me to read things like
Vanity Fair. [I was also writing for the school paper; in my
senior year I was associate editor of the school paper, the
"Green and Gold." I wrote editorials and a column.

Perhaps the greatest influence on my writing was the letter
I got from my aunt Edna in Oregon. She wrote: "I hear you are
writing for the school paper. Whatever you do, don't become
another Ambrose Bierce." She underlined the last words three
times. My immediate reaction was to look up Ambrose Bierce in
the library.

After my aunt's advice about Ambrose Bierce, I gobbled up
things like "Black Beetles in Amber," and made a left-handed
acknowledgement to his influence by the remark about my alter
ego Jerome being possibly "a natural son of Ambrose Bierce." As
for writing verse, that is a gift from my mother — she was the
poet of the family.]1

My mathematics experience wasn't very good. You see, I've
always had hearing out of one ear only. So I didn't hear too
well in a lot of classes. Anyway, I never did very well in
math. In Fremont, they had a very interesting math teacher
named Albrecht who was actually a professional engineer. Very
early on, he was greatly distressed about the lack of competence
in mathematics he was seeing in the young people around him. He
turned himself into a high school math teacher, and he was very
good at it. But the counselors always reserved for him the kids
that were doing good at math and steered us others away.

Lage: So he just got the top-notch kids.

Hedgpeth: Yes. He had them into calculus before they had graduated high
school.

'Mr. Hedgpeth added the preceding bracketed material during his review
of the draft transcript.

Lage:

Did you not get to study with him?

Hedgpeth: No. The counselor never thought of sending me to Mr. Albrecht,
but ordered me to drop the chess club instead.

A Summer Idyll

Hedgpeth: The summer after graduation from high school left many of us
with nothing much to do until the university required us to
appear on the scene. Somehow, in a manner I cannot remember,
DeWitt Briley and I started correspondence. I lived in San
Leandro near the end of the big red SP [Southern Pacific]
commuting cars that connected with the bay ferry to San
Francisco, and he lived in a hillside house above the cemetery
just south of Mills College some several miles distant. In a
brief time there somehow became eight of us, gathering for hikes
or visiting around, although De's house was our regular meeting
place. De was the brightest of us, reading Thus Spake
Zarathustra [Fredrich Nietzsche] and Schopenhauer, but he was
not a member of the graduating class but of the next semester,
out of phase. We had philosophical conversations and called
ourselves the Sophists. Several times we were all invited to
dinner by Mrs. Briley, a lovely red-headed Irish woman, who
obviously enjoyed all of us--De was her only child.

De got a job after he graduated in December, and did not
enter the university until the fall of 1930, so he was a member
of UC '34. We had hardly realized that we were on the same
campus again when he contracted appendicitis. They waited too
long, and his appendix burst, his lungs became infected, and
after a sad illness he died. He wanted my blood, because he
knew I did not get easily infected, but it was the wrong type.

I suppose it was Mrs. Briley who asked us to be
pallbearers, and I remember looking up from the grave toward
their house on the hillside. His mother took sick and died soon
after, and his abandoned father, an operator of a locomotive in
the railroad yards, mourned himself to death as well. A
neighbor went to see him and found him lying on the floor,
crying.

The Sophists went their way, and I never heard of most of
them again, although I remained friends of one of them all his
life. One of us, Reno Cole, majored in physics, and I did not
hear about him again until I read his obituary in the University
of California Chronicle and learned that he had become a popular
and devoted professor of Engineering at UCLA.

De had suggested that we adopt as our motto: "If you have
but two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily." He was the
brightest of all of us, and it saddens me even to think of his
loss after sixty-three years. I still have his copy of Thus
Spake Zarathustra. ] ["A Summer Idyll" was added by JWH in
October, 1995.]

San Mateo Junior College. 1929-1931

Hedgpeth: This teacher I had in high school would never explain why I just
got the wrong answers. So I went on to junior college (I was
not recommended for college because I was making torpedoes to
put on tracks that would blow up--my accident hadn't really
cured me of fooling around, I guess).

Lage: It didn't cure you?

Hedgpeth: Anyway, I was making explosive objects.

Lage: It was your behavior that got you not recommended?

Hedgpeth: Well, they didn't recommend me for college, so I had to go to
junior college [San Mateo Junior College, 1929-1931], and
transfer.

Lage: How difficult was it to get into the university from high
school?

Hedgpeth: Not very. All you had to have was a recommendation and your
transcript.

Lage: Your principal had to recommend you.

Hedgpeth: He would recommend you, and all you had to do was take Subject
A, which was simply an examination. Subject A, writing five
hundred words of drivel. As long as it was grammatically
correct, they passed you. I did take that exam.

I was reading all kinds of stuff. My grandfather had given
me books about bugs and things. At least, my aunts told me he
had. I'm not sure he did because he was getting blind toward
the time I knew him. He couldn't read very much any more.

Lage: Where did you learn all your biology, when you said you knew
more biology than the biology teacher?

Hedgpeth: That was a way of saying she didn't know very much.

Lage: She didn't know much. You're not saying how much you knew.

Hedgpeth: No. I guess it was from the books and wandering alone in the

mountains. So anyway, when I got down to junior college, when I
was supposed to take trig, after the first problem paper... He
came down the aisle and said to me in the presence of all, "What
kind of math instruction have you had, anyhow?" "Why?" "You
are a born transposer. Any competent math teacher could have
told that in five minutes."

Lage: What? You transpose figures?

Hedgpeth: Yes, I do. I never try to remember phone numbers. I didn't

know that. But after he told me that, I spotted it and I did a
little better.

Lage: Did he help you overcome that or just pointed it out?

Hedgpeth: He just pointed it out to me and let me sink or swim with that.
I got along with him all right; he passed me but that was that.
That didn't give me too much faith in counseling, to say the
least. The person who I got up there--! had a major advisor at
Berkeley. I had a run-in with him too.

Lage: You spent two years at the junior college and then you went to
Berkeley?

Hedgpeth: Then I transferred to Berkeley [class of 1933] and I went there
for three years really. I had a graduate year.

Lage: When did you decide on your course of study?

Hedgpeth: I had started with the idea of becoming a journalist, but the
instructor was not very bright, so I changed. While I was at
junior college, I was working for the biology department. It
was very easy to get grades in that subject, for me anyway.

Lage: Which subject is this?

Hedgpeth: Zoology, biology, all that sort of stuff. So for the second

year, the instructor, who had a Ph.D. --he was a very good guy--
had me hired as the flunky for the biology department. I would
collect things for the class exercises and arrange stuff.

There was this gal who had gotten her Ph.D. from C. A.
Kofoid. I don't know what she ever did. I looked her thesis up
years later and found out it was absolutely practically nothing;

it was a little twenty-page, flimsy affair, "some stages in the
life of a soil amoeba." But anyhow, she and I had run-ins. She
had her niece in the class; that's bad business. Her niece
wanted me to show her the gonads in the subject that they were
dissecting, and I said, "You know where those are as well as 1
do." So the class was guffawing.

As I left there was Charlie Woodruff Wilson at the swinging
doors of the lab, of all things, like a saloon, who said,
"Creating a disturbance in my class!" She had glassy, watery
eyes like something dead, and glared at me. I said, "No, just
leaving in one." [laughter]

So anyway, that didn't matter, except to show the way
things went in that place.

Lage: Was this at San Mateo Junior College?

Hedgpeth: Yes, sure. I think they were quite a refuge in those days for
frustrated Ph.D.s, and maybe still are, I don't know.

Lage: Who didn't get positions that they might have preferred?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Of course, in the depression years, which were just

starting then, it was pretty bad. If you got a good job in a
junior college, you stayed with it, because you'd lost time
anyway, and you'd have to--.

Lage: You went to San Mateo Junior College in '29, so this was right
at the onset of the Depression.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, there were pretty good people there. We had a very
good history teacher. He was one of these amateur cartoonists,
and he liked to illustrate things like the Diet of Worms with
literal bits of worms and things.

Lage: A history teacher, you say?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He was teaching European history.

Lage: Well, what was he doing with the Diet of Worms?

Hedgpeth: The Diet of Worms is one of the great conferences — [laughter] --
Diet is a council, Worms is a town in Germany. I can't remember
what it was all about.

Lage: I can't jump between your biology and your history.

Hedgpeth: Oh, I agree. You have to take all these things at once in

school, so you get mixed up at times, you know. So I got to
Berkeley where I ran into the counseling ritual again, which
there, of course, had a pretty rigorous set of requirements of
certain courses. And then, the worst thing is the number of
units. I wish they'd abolish that.

Lage: Did you get credit for all your San Mateo work?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. I took German from a nice old guy at San Mateo. He
did pretty well. I think he was an old Swabian type. He
certainly was Bavarian, at any rate. He told us a sad story
about how he left Germany when he was a very small boy, his
schoolmates serenaded him in the morning of his departure,
singing, "Muss i denn." Strangely enough, one of the very first
things I heard in Germany was that song. The train had stopped
about 4 a.m. at a railroad station, and here was this guy
getting on with two suitcases, and here were his friends and the
school band serenading him with "Muss i denn, zum stadtele
naus." That was 1953. ["Must I go, away from this little
town..."] [laughs] So I sent Professor Koehler a postcard and
said, "You were right; they're still doing it." [laughter]

Lage: He was probably quite flattered that you remembered.

Hedgpeth: I remember him pretty well. He and I got along in a friendly
way. Except one time when I had a cold and was deaf and
couldn't quite hear him, and I flubbed up, and he said, "I
expected better things of you, Hedgpeth." I never did tell him
that I had a bad cold and couldn't hear him that day.
[laughter]

Lage: The memories of these things come back so vividly.
Hedgpeth: Don't they?

Studies at UC Berkeley. Class of 1933

Hedgpeth: So when I got to the university, I had as advisor for a major in
zoology a character lovingly known as J. Dogfish Daniel to the
graduate students behind his back. He'd written a manual on the
dissection of sharks, "The Elasmobranch Fishes," which was our
dissection guide. We were given small sharks, about two feet
long, but one day a basking shark about thirty feet long was
brought into the LSB [Life Science Building] court and dumped
onto a flower bed. Old Dogfish gave us an al fresco lecture on

the fine points of this fellow, ignoring the botany professor,
who was bemoaning the destruction of his flower bed.

Professor Daniel's book was actually pretty good, but
according to general rumors, if somebody brought in a shark and
he couldn't identify it offhand, he had to go back to his own
book and look it up and see which one it was. Those stories,
you know, get around.

But I got tired of his suggestions that I take anthropology
for another three units, and I had to fill out — you work out
courses you absolutely had to have, were required and all this,
and that you wanted. "Now, you have two more units this term.
How about this course over in forestry? I understand it's not a
very difficult course." So he put me down for fire control in
the Department of Forestry, which was a crashing bore. We had
to read government pamphlets on how to sight fire-finders and
smell the air, and this kind of rubbish.

Lage: Didn't seem to have much connection with what you were studying,
either.

Hedgpeth: No, it didn't. One fall I had to take another course in

forestry which was useful, however; that was forest ecology.
That was a very good course.

Lage: Who taught that?

Hedgpeth: Arthur W. Sampson. He was one of their great professors. We

went out on excursions. I remember one we took on the slopes of
Tamalpais in a freshly burned area. That guy used to be a two-
miler when he was young, so he'd walk up the hill lecturing at
us, and we were all winded by the time we got to the top, and
then he'd start asking us questions about whether we'd noticed
anything, and this or that —

Lage: [laughter] You were trying to get up the hill.

Hedgpeth: Yes, right. So anyway, he was a very good guy and a good

lecturer. But this other thing was terrible, it was an absolute
bore.

Then anthro--some of them were pretty good. I took a
course in American Indians because of my mother's missionary
experience and all the Indian artifacts we had around the house.
About all this guy did was itemize which tribe used which kind
of arrowhead, and which kind of baskets.

Lage:

Do you remember who that was?

Hedgpeth: Yes, E. W. [Edward] Gifford. In fact, I thought he was an

Indian. He looked like an Indian; I was told he wasn't. He
didn't have any Indian blood, but he was of stocky build. The
other part about anthro, that was before they had the great
museum, and it was in an old corrugated tin building up there
just below the Faculty Club. And in spring afternoons, that was
a deadly place to take anything, because —

Lage: That's where they gave the courses?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So I came along; I wanted to sign up for English 106E, and
my advisor said, "What's that?" I said, "It's a course in
advanced composition, admission by instructor's approval, which
you gain by submitting something you've written."

Lage: Dogfish didn't approve?

Hedgpeth: He didn't. He said, "I don't know what you want that course

for." I said, "Well, the instructor has admitted me. I want to
learn more about writing English." "I don't think that's
necessary. Well--" so he grabbed a big stub pen and he scrawled
his name on the approval card, without which you couldn't live
then. So I took the course.

I didn't do too well; my best friend died that semester,
and I was upset about that [see page 61]. I didn't produce
quite enough — I'm not a rapid writer. I can't just gush out
bushels of prose for people anyway.

English from George Stewart

Lage: Who taught that course?

Hedgpeth: George [R. ] Stewart. I saw him years later. I had gotten on a
first-name basis by then, and he was in the Bancroft Library
with a collection of maps, poring over them. We got to talking.
I said, "What happened to the other people in that course
anyway?" He said, "I don't know; you're the only one I ever
hear anything about, and I gave you the lowest grade."
[laughter] I said, "Well, English wasn't my major." He wrote a
book on garbage.

Lage: One of the others wrote a book on garbage?
Hedgpeth: No, Stewart.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

I hadn't heard of that. Fire, and Storm, and —

Yes, he wrote one, called Not So Rich as You Think, and it was
about the problems of garbage and disposal, and how it was
really going to do us all in if we didn't do something about it.
And of course, 1 had written about Bodega Head and other things
by then, so I went and got a copy of this book on garbage, and I
said, "I think you should sign this book." He had made a
comment once that he could always count on me taking a dim view
of things, when I'd written about the passing of the salmon or
something like that —

He had said that?

Yes, he wrote a note acknowledging it. It was very well
written. "I could always count on you to take a dim view of
things." So anyway, [laughs] so he wrote, "A long time ago
student and good fighter," on this one, and signed it, and
that's the last time I saw him. Except I went to his memorial
service, and I always kick myself for not getting up and saying
something. He had retired twenty years before, and there wasn't
anybody there who remembered him as a teacher. They were
talking about his amateur theatricals, some of his later books--

What do you remember about him as a teacher?
impact on you?

Did he make an

Well, he was very good in his ways of correcting you or helping
you out if you'd done something wrong. He wouldn't just say,
"You stupid idiot," you know. But also, he taught us how to use
sources and evaluate them. That was a very useful course for
that purpose.

Did it help you with your writing?

Yes. And then he said my sentences already moved along in an
easy fashion anyway.

I didn't realize it at the time, not until I picked up my
daughter's eighth grade reader and I went through the ceiling.
It was called Adventures in Reading, and it excerpts — it had all
of "Hiawatha" and two sonnets from Shakespeare in it as poetry,
and pieces from Mark Twain. I started reading, and it was "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I said, "There's something funny;
this isn't right." So I grabbed--! have a set of Washington
Irving — pulled it down, looked at it; they had deleted all his
longer words, and skipped sentences and so forth.

Then I turned to Mark Twain, and they had spliced in parts
of Life on the Mississippi, jumped about sixteen pages, spliced
it in. It took me quite a while, of course, to find this out.
And they'd even spliced one sentence from one page and the
second part of it from another page.

Lage: They thought they could improve on it?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And the other thing that got me is in Tom Sawyer. It

started out by, "Tom, get outen that bed afore you're too late
for breakfast," or something. My father's people came from
Missouri, and I think my father spoke with quite an accent
before my mother rubbed most of it out of him, but he still had
some of it. I said, "Nobody from Missouri ever spoke like
that," and I looked it up, and I found it was a transcription of
a radio script written by some fellow with a Semitic name from
the East Side, if you'll pardon my anti-Semitic comments. But
anyway, it was obvious it was somebody who had never heard
anybody from Missouri speak.

So at that time, they had a Methodist bishop who was on the
state board of education, and I was on the faculty of the
University of the Pacific. So of course, they'd given him an
honorary D.D., so I grabbed Pacific letterhead and wrote him a
comment. I said, "You're on the state board of education; you
should do something." I prepared parallel passages, and I think
that book got retired for a while. That was terrible, to do
things like that.

Lage: It really is outlandish.

Hedgpeth: That's when I realized that part of my writing style is
inherited or acquired from Washington Irving. I've read
practically all of his books.

Lage: You read that as a young person?

Hedgpeth: My mother had a set of him. It's one of the things she kept
from Grandfather's library. He was always giving all his
daughters books, most of them bought second-hand and so forth.
They complained now and then that all he gave for Christmas was
old books. It wasn't quite that bad.

Lage: Well, they had their effect on you, it sounds like.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, a great effect, because I read all these other
things, or looked at them.

Zoology Studies

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Any other professors that you remember?
many in biology or zoology.

You haven't mentioned

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

Well, of course, my major professor was [Sol Felty] Light. He
was a pretty good teacher. And one of the most influential
teachers we had there was a visitor for a while. He was put
into biology because he was basically a biologist, and that was
Charles Singer. He was on sabbatical from England for a year.
He gave us a bit of the English flavor. Of course, the
procedures are so very different in British universities, they
don't fix you up with all these various units and so on.

A little freer. Did he teach in the English style?

Yes. All he asked of us was to write a short paper, graded us
on that. He didn't give us exams every midterm and all that
stuff.

Did he bring a different approach to biology?

I think so. Though I must say once I pulled one on Dr. Alden
Miller, which is kind of amusing. I don't know why I had it in
my pocket, but I had a mangrove oyster. The mangrove oyster is
a very ordinary oyster. He's a tropical oyster that lives on
mangroves; instead of settling flat on a rock and cementing
itself, it develops little hook-like structures.

--anyway, these little hooks attach to the plant. I had this
thing in my pocket, and we were waiting for a seminar to begin,
and so I pulled it out. Of course, Miller was a professor of
comparative anatomy, and evolution, and that sort of stuff. I
showed this to him, and I said, "Well, was Lamarck right after
all?" He looked at this very carefully and he said, "Well, I
sometimes wonder." [laughter]

The other time, though, I really cut pretty close to the
bone. This fellow worked on- -he actually was an anthropologist.
He was working on what it took to come down out of the trees,
the different kinds of musculature that the apes have to cling
to branches and things. We get sore when we strap-hang from
crowded streetcars. He made the point that he got most of his
information on musculature of the human shoulder from military
physicians who had to patch up damaged soldiers so much.

Voice:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

After he got through with this, there was dear old
Professor Miller who said, "Well, how did you like that
lecture?" I said, "You know, I think that's the best lecture on
comparative anatomy I've ever heard." He looked at me sort of
funny, and then I realized, of course, I'd taken his course on
comparative anatomy — [laughs]. I said, "Oh, since your course."
[laughter]

Who was that?

That was Alden Miller. He was called Aldy Baldy by the
students. I don't know whether you get this kind of stuff from
these people, names for professors —

Not so much; every now and then, but not quite as fully--! like
J. Dogfish Daniel.

Choosing Marine Biology, and Sea Spiders

Lage: Your memories of undergraduate and at least getting your
master's degree must be kind of intertwined.

Hedgpeth: Well, I just hung around for another year, and then I did get a
degree, a master's degree, at that time. I went off --see, there
were no jobs, you know. I got a job in Washington [D.C.] for a
couple of years or a year. About '35 or so, I got on a civil
service exam, and listed general clerical--! don't know why I
was stupid enough to take that. So I was back in Washington for
a little over a year.

Lage: At the National Museum?

Hedgpeth: I wasn't at the National Museum; I was working for the Treasury
Department just counting bonds and stuff like that, but on swing
shift. For some reason, they were working people on an around-
the-clock basis there for a while. So in the late morning and
afternoons, I would go down to the museum, and Waldo Schmitt put
me to a few routine tasks they needed volunteer workers for, so
that's where I got to know Waldo pretty well.

Lage: I see. And were you already interested in marine biology?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: When did you decide on that as a specialty?

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Oh, I don't know; it was partly through S. F. Light, the
teacher, primarily marine animals.

Was he a dynamic teacher, a teacher that — ?

He was a very good teacher; I don't know especially dynamic.
Then 1 did some WPA work for him at the time, drawing maps and
pictures of termite heads and similar things. [laughs] 1
gathered I drove the entomology T.A. [teaching assistant] up the
wall, because--

This was at Berkeley?

Berkeley, yes. See, I took entomology, I took a lot of
entomology. Old Stanley Freeborn--he was one of the best
teachers I think I've had, best lecturers anyway.

Was he in entomology?

Yes. That's him. But anyway, he insisted that we ink in our
drawings, and he kept on jabbering German at us, an old German
proverb, said, "If you haven't drawn it, you haven't seen it,"
something like that. But anyhow, we'd be handed these
specimens, mostly common stuff that had been illustrated. I
didn't bother, I just scratched them in rather loosely. Then
every once in a while, he'd come up with some weird tropical
outlandish bug you'd never seen before, so I'd draw a very
finished picture of it, for my own amusement.

Years later, I was talking to the T.A. and she said, "You
know, you made me spend an awful lot of time. I kept looking
through books to see where you'd copied those things before I
realized what you were doing." [laughter]

Can you remember or recall or guess why it was marine biology
that you--?

Well, there was the house next door —

The sea shells, you told me about the sea shells.

Yes. They were all collected by Henry Hemphill, who was well
known in his day, had a number of things, including one of our
common hermit crabs, named after him. He went all over the
world collecting shells for the market and the collectors '
cabinets, as well as--he was interested, more, though, in what
he was doing, what the relationships of these things were, and
he set up plaques of related species and how their differences
stacked up in the diagrams. Actually, he had blue card placards

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

which he glued these things on when they weren't too big. He
didn't work with great big things doing this anyway, showing how
the lines of relationship were and one thing or another. Some
of them, I guess, weren't very good, because the real
relationships are in the inner gizzards more than in the shells.
But he had all kinds of other stuff, sea fans and palms or
whatever kind of ocrocorals.

So that sort of caught your imagination.

Yes. Well, as I say, like looking into Captain Nemo's salon on
the Nautilus.

So by the time you went to Berkeley, did you know this was what
you wanted to pursue? It wasn't something that happened that
led you into marine biology.

Yes. You see, of course, I went to Berkeley out of junior
college, so I was already committed to the major there.

I see, so you were already in marine biology by the time you got
here. But there weren't jobs at that time?

No. So then I got this job in the Treasury which I quit and
came home after a year. I thought I had a bad case of

bronchitis or whatever, and spent Christmas holidays alone in

the boardinghouse room, didn't enjoy that at all.

Back in Washington?

Yes.

How did getting to know Waldo Schmitt affect your future?

He made available to me specimens for study. As I went on, he
got interested in little sea spiders.

Is that when you got interested in the sea spiders?

I got interested in them in junior college, actually,
one wandering around in the collecting pan.

I found

During the next break in jobs, when I got back, I got
offered a job in "38 to study salmon in the streams in
connection with the proposals to build dams. We worked on the
American River, Yuba River, and Shasta Dam in the Sacramento
River, as part of a team to figure out what we could do about
the fact that Shasta Dam would cut off the river. Of course, we
made recommendations which were never followed. The people are

still complaining about it now, and one of them, of course, is
the matter of getting cold water in the streams in the
summertime. Of course, the agribusiness world doesn't want to
put up with it at all. [See page 114a.]

Lage: So is there nothing new under the sun? Were the concerns and
the knowledge in 1938-39 similar to now, or how would you
contrast it?

Hedgpeth: I wrote up that stuff independently after we were disbanded;
these were temporary Jobs, we knew that. In 1945 I wrote an
article called "The Passing of the Salmon," pointing out that if
things kept on going, we might not have any fish left in the
river.

Lage: Where did it get published?

Hedgpeth: Scientific Monthly.

Lage: Now, was that a maverick view at the time?

Hedgpeth: Well, I started out with an epigraph of Livington Stone back in
the 1870s, who was the first person to develop fish hatcheries
on this coast. So it wasn't exactly new. He said there was no
hope for the survival of salmon in the long run.

Lage: But your report didn't get followed?

Hedgpeth: Right. One of those jobs, however, was very influential in

1938, because in the scratch team compiled from the exam list,
they included a fellow from Louisiana and Texas, Gordon Gunter.
He was with the field, with us for the summer, and then he went
back, and then I went on to Shasta Dam. I spent a couple of
years there, as a matter of fact. We were based at Stanford
University, writing up the report at the end of the field
studies, so we didn't get that done until 1941 or so.

Lage: And that one was particularly influential, did you say?

Hedgpeth: Well, meeting Gordon was. Later on, he invited me down to

Texas. During the war, they had a shortage of people to work in
the--do oysters and things, so I went down there to work with
oysters.

Lage: So that's how you got the Texas connection?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Were you all the time concentrating on your sea spider also?

Hedgpeth: Some. I was writing papers. I had written—somewhere in there,
there's a break of a year or two--I wrote a big monograph on the
Atlantic species, and then went on from there out. Of course,
there's a lag in publication between completion of a paper and
when they publish it. See this?

Lage: Sea spiders.

Hedgpeth: That's my bibliography of papers on these beasts. Fairly
complete, because I haven't done very much since then.

Lage: We'll include that in the appendix to this oral history.

Hedgpeth: See, it's under my name here, in sequence. [looking through

paper] You can get this in the library. An awful lot of people
have written papers about these beasts.

Lage: Oh my goodness, look at that. More than a page worth of
citations. Oh, yes, two pages worth.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Bill Fry was a student of mine who died early, he died
just a little while after that.

Lage: So he put this together?

Hedgpeth: Yes. This was a fest book affair. There's most of us. No

Russians could come, unfortunately. He used the Oxford Book of
Quotations, because both of these quotes are practically on the
same page. I just Xeroxed this thing and pasted it there for
those who don't know much Latin.

Lage: Let me see the title page here. That's the meeting held in
honor of Joel Hedgpeth, in London, 1976.'

Hedgpeth: So he wrote a little introduction about me in there. Actually
what this is, is a zoological journal of the Linnean Society of
London.

Lage: Okay, I'll get that, and we can Xerox those references. Then

we'll have a good bibliography [see appendix]. Now, what was it
about the sea spider that got you so interested?

'"Sea Spiders (Pycnogonida) , Proceedings of a meeting held in honour
of Joel W. Hedgpeth on 7 October 1976 in the Rooms of the Linnean Society
of London," edited by W. G. Fry, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society,
Vol. 63, Nos. 1 and 2 (1978), pp. 197-238. See Appendix B for introduction
and bibliography.

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

They're just strange little creatures. They interest everybody,
really, who gets a good look at them: "What the heck are these
things, and why are they?" We don't know why they are.

Were there a lot of unknowns about them, more than — ?

Yes. For one genus--or family—we have no knowledge of how they
reproduce, how they manage to keep going. I once claimed they
haven't reproduced since the Pleistocene, but that hasn't been
followed up by anybody.

No one accepts that answer?

Yes. So anyway, there's much more in here,
friends. I wrote one of them, of course.

Papers by various

Why haven't they been able to figure out how they reproduce?

They live in the deep sea, and they've never caught any of them
in the act. Most of them we know anything about, when the eggs
are produced, the male gathers them in clumps and carries them
around until they hatch. But in this whole deep sea group,

So it's kind

we've never found any fertilized eggs or embryos,
of a mystery to what the heck goes on there.

And you have studied sea spiders in the Antarctic?

Yes, I've been down to the Antarctic three times, twice on
studying these beasts, third on drafting up an environmental
impact study of the activities of science in the Antarctic.

You mean, how the scientific activities have impacted on the
environment?

Yes, only I never finished that,
wanted somebody else to do it.

They paid me off because they

They didn't want to hear what you had to say, or — ?

Well, that was part of it. That's the funny part about it.
They took my rough draft and turned it over to the next
contractor, who was slightly embarrassed since he knew me
anyway. So that was quite amusing.

When did that happen?

Oh, some years ago now. The Antarctic business especially had
certain feature to it which had problems, namely, we were
infested with double dippers. A lot of the administrators and

people — some of the navy flyboys had become administrators in
the Antarctic research program by virtue of their flight
experience in Antarctica, the so-called Devron 6 people, meaning
developmental unit so forth and so on. So they'd throw their
weight around as ex-officers. One of them got out there with a
rank of commander.

Lage: How was their scientific background?

Hedgpeth: Oh, they didn't know anything about science. There's a famous
story about how one of them was on a big research vessel in the
middle of the sea, and he heard this talk around the mess table
about the difficulty this fellow was having because some big
piece of apparatus was in his way, wished somebody would move
it. So this guy went out, picked it up off the bench, and
carried it over to the rail and dropped it into the ocean.
Clunk, there goes five thousand dollars. [laughter] [See
chapters IV and V for more on pycnogonid research and
Antarctica. ]

Professors S. F. Light and Joseph Grinnell at Berkeley

Lage: Any other thoughts about the university and your experiences
there and professors? You really haven't told me much about
Professor Light, or the kind of thinking, the biological
thinking, that was dominant.

Hedgpeth: Well, actually, Light was teaching two things. In fact, the
course he gave has since been divided into three. He was
interested in the ecology of animals- -field trips in the summer
session courses always asking the kinds of questions, "What are
these animals doing, or are any of them affecting the other?"
and so forth, which are essentially ecological questions, which
we were supposed to keep our eyes out for. He also wasn't
particularly confined to saltwater; we went through freshwater
ponds and streams too.

Lage: In something I read that you wrote, you talked about how he was
always dressed not necessarily to splash through the tidepools.

Hedgpeth: Right.

Lage: Was he a pretty formal individual?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was. We didn't have any nickname for him, but his given
names were enough that he never liked them apparently. I for

one never learned how his wife addressed him, what she called
him.

Lage: What were his given names?

Hedgpeth: Sol Felty.

Lage: So he just used S. F. most of the time?

Hedgpeth: Always signed himself S. F. Light, or S. F. L. He obviously
didn't care much for what his parents had done for him.
[laughter] So sometimes, we use those terms, being overfamiliar
in our behind-his-back sort of references.

Lage: Was the ecological thinking a fairly common approach at that
time?

Hedgpeth: No, it wasn't, except of course we had [Joseph] Grinnell, and
Grinnell was one of the great teachers they had there.

Lage: Now, he wasn't in marine biology, he was a zoologist?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was in furs and feathers. In fact, I noticed this

peculiar aversion he had to aquatic birds. The only aquatic
bird he ever looked at was the water ouzel that lives along
mountain streams .

Lage: But he did have the ecological--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I think I even refer to him possibly having some
hydrophobia, you know.

Lage: [laughs] Did you really believe that, or--?

Hedgpeth: No.

Lage: Was he kind of a dynamic teacher?

Hedgpeth:

Well, he was. He had kind of prissy mannerisms, but then--,
liked to come in to the labs and get you into discussion with
him, and then he would start weaseling around and drag you off
base, and then he'd turn right up sharp and say, "Now, I've
gotten you to agree to the wrong thing." See what he was doing?
[laughter]

Lage:

So you had to keep your thought processes working.

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Yes. That was the whole purpose of that, of course. You got
used to it, but he could be pretty persuasive at that approach
to the unwary.

Were there any fellow students that you had then that you've
continued to work with?

Some of them have gone now, of course, like Don Abbott, who was
one of the best we produced there. The place was so large that
you made friendships, of course, with people you spent a little
time with immediately, but not necessarily ones that were right
in your own bailiwick.

Did you meet your wife at Berkeley as an undergraduate?

No.

Later, when you came back for the masters?

Yes, back from Texas.

Okay, I think this might be a good time to kind of wind up,
unless there are other university comments.

No, when I graduated, my degree experiences,
degree from Light under--.

Masters degree under Light in '40, 1940. '

I got a masters

Yes, with freshwater copepods. The project, you see, that comes
with a masters, they don't take that too seriously, so it was a
little project he had in mind and that he wanted to see somebody
do. I was trying to figure out the relationship of different
common ions to the distribution of several species of these
animals, which is an ecological question. I think the main
result of the study was tracking out all the good permanent
ponds in the area, most of which are now in the middle of
subdivisions.

What animal was it that you were working with?

Copepods, the freshwater ones, of the genus Diaptomus . At any
rate, I did that for about a year right after I got out of the
Shasta Dam business.

'Hedgpeth, "Factors Limiting the Distribution of Diaptomid Copepods"
[Berkeley, 1939].

The Controversial Professor Lund at the University of Texas

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

After that Gunter was responsible for getting me a job in Texas,
or asking me to come and take it. He was fairly high up in the
hierarchy down there, and the Texas coast was pretty far from
everybody at that time. When he got down there, he didn't have
very many people coming around to find out what you're doing or
much caring what you did.

Did that suit you fine?

Oh, that's fine, yes.
like that.

We worked on planting oysters and things

Who were you working for?

Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission [now Game and Fish
Commission] . This was considered a defense-related activity
during the war, dealing with food, you know.

So in the course of this, the University of Texas built a
laboratory out on the outer shore, and offered me a job there to
be their first resident staff member and satisfy the requirement
for occupancy to validate the insurance for the laboratory that
had just been completed. Gordon Gunter was supposed to be in
charge, but he was visiting staff member at the University of
Miami for a year. In addition to the watchdog duty, I also
signed up under Dr. E. J. Lund, a biophysicist and the campus
director of the lab, to work toward a Ph.D. which would be
mainly on the work I was doing there, collecting and cataloguing
the faunal beasties, which subsequently was my doctoral thesis.
Anyway, I took it back to Berkeley with me.

Now, what happened with the Texas experience? You didn't stay
there too long.

They got into a big fight with my major professor.
Who did?

The administration. There was something going on there for
possibly thirty years. They came into hearings with three-by-
five cards and would read off a date, "Back about November so-
and-so, about twenty- five years ago, when I was away for a few
days, an unscheduled meeting was held and I was denied two
teaching assistants."

Lage: Oh, my goodness.

Hedgpeth: Well, this stuff. And they had big stacks of these grievance
cards or something —

Lage: Was this all common knowledge?

Hedgpeth: I don't know how common it was. A lot of it got into the papers
after it blew up.

Lage: Did it conflict with his work at the university?

Hedgpeth: No. What happened was that he got annoyed, they got annoyed,
and so one semester, he refused to teach his course in
biophysics because the biologists didn't know enough physics and
the physics people didn't know enough biology, and he couldn't
find anybody really qualified to take the course, so he said.
So they wanted to throw him out and deny his tenure and all this
kind of stuff. He's an old-style Scandinavian, been to a pretty
rigorous institution, he knew a lot more of zoology than most of
those people, including the chairman, who was notorious for
having counted the human chromosomes in man but making a mistake
doing it. His name is Theophilus S. Painter.

Lage: Well, he has a good name.

Hedgpeth: Yes. In fact, Dr. Lund used to address him in memos as

Theophilus Schikelgruber Painter. His secretary said, "Is that
the way you want to do that?" And he said, "Yes."

Lage: How old a man was Dr. Lund?

Hedgpeth: He was in his sixties, heading toward his seventies, I think.

Lage: So he'd been there quite a while- -

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes; as I say, this had been brewing for years. So they
were having it out, and I asked the dean, "What's going to
happen to us?" He said, "Well, we can't do anything with your
problems until we decide what we're going to do with Dr. Lund."
One of the things they were trying him for was abusing the
university mailing privileges. He had sent a bill of
particulars in his complaints about what was going on there to
the entire membership list of the American Society of Zoologists
on the university mailing privilege. These things were big
bulky objects; I guess it ran into several bucks each.

Lage:

So that was one of their complaints about him?

Hedgpeth: Fortunately, that's what saved me, because I wrote back to
Berkeley and I said, "I've got to come back. Kind of late
notice, but is there anything to be done?" Dr. Kirby, who was
chairman at that time, wrote a little note and said, "We've Just
received Dr. Lund's very interesting document. We are arranging
for a teaching assistantship for you next term." [laughter] So
I came back to Berkeley, finished off there.

Lage: So that's where you got your Ph.D., and did you continue the
same study?

Hedgpeth: Yes. See, they don't like people to get all three degrees at

the same place. That's why I was trying to finish off at Texas,
but they sort of waived that in this connection. I possibly had
gotten enough experience of how another institution was like
anyway. [One unexpected dividend was my acquaintance with
Professor Carl Sauer (Geography) . Starker Leopold suggested I
audit his course 103; when I requested permission, Professor
Sauer said fine, but he would like me to take over a couple of
his lectures when he had to go East, so I talked to his class
about the biology of the sea. Ever after when I visited
Berkeley I would drop in and chat with him. A marvelously
inspiring man. --JWH, October 1995]

I don't think things have been quite that bad at Texas
lately. First place, all those old war horses have gone on
their way now.

Lage: Well, I should hope so, by now.

Hedgpeth: Yes. There were some strange ones there. William Morton
Wheeler, who went to Harvard, started his career at Texas.

Lage: Was it a good department overall, aside from--?

Hedgpeth: Well, I gather it was pretty bad even back then. They didn't
have anything much for him to do, so he took to studying ants.
So that's that.

Lage: Well, I think we've probably talked enough today, and we've come
to a good stopping spot. [tape interruption] As we turned off
the tape, I said, "Well, we got you educated." You had a snarly
response to that.

Hedgpeth: Sort of. Most of my education was outside the halls of academe.
Lage: Now, that's what we want to cover next time.
Hedgpeth: Oh, you do?

Lage: Yes, the part that's not written down and doesn't have a
diploma.

A Boyhood Interest in Shells and Sea Creatures
[Session 3: September 2, 1992] it

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

This is our third session with Joel Hedgpeth.
today is "the making of a marine biologist."

Our topic for

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Well, this all begins with the big house, of course. My
grandfather's library, stuff in the attic, plus the house next
door, which was inhabited by the descendants of Henry Hemphill,
who was a very eminent shell collector in his day. He traveled
all over the world collecting shells for the market and for
himself. He arranged some of them in nice patterns of
variation, not very strongly Darwinian, of course, but very
pretty.

More for the looks than the scientific qualities?

Yes. But he kept pretty good information, and he was very well
known in his day. In those days, the zoologist at Mills College
was a mollusk specialist, Josiah Keep. His daughter Rosalind
became interested in fancy printing. She was on the Mills
faculty afterwards.

Where was he affiliated?

Mills College. So the house next door was full of shells and
everything else. It was sort of like wandering into Captain
Nemo's salon in the Nautilus. Things were a bit crowded. Of
course, he died before I was born, so I never saw him. But this
was his granddaughter, or grand-niece, I don't know which
relation she really was. She was fairly well-to-do. This
family, the Hosmers, had made their fortune in granite quarrying
over near Raymond, over east of Fresno or east of Merced, and
she helped me through college. She gave me $100 every once in a
while, and that was a great help in those days. So I always
like to say that the Campanile sent me through college, since
the family had the contract for supplying a lot of that granite
you see around the campus.

Lage:

Oh, I see; that's a good connection! [laughter]

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Yes, it was a very definite connection,
raised--

But anyhow, I was

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

So that was really a direct connection, the shells inspired you,
and she helped you go to school.

Yes. I used to go over- -yes, well, that of course came later.
But I often came around to look at the shells. They moved
several places after they left west Oakland. One of them was up
there right in the middle of where that main freeway from
Lakeside goes up over the hill. There used to be a lot of
streets in there that are gone now. One time, I met a young
lady who was studying their shells. I reminded her of that; she
had forgotten about it. It was Myra Keen, who was chief shell
specialist, conchologist they call them, in this part of the
world. She was at Stanford, and she wrote one of the definitive
monographs on the mollusks, at least the shelled mollusks, of
tropical America mostly, this side, of course, and down into the
Gulf of California.

And there was this book which I — some of it I read, and
some of it I never did read. [pulls out book]

This was from your grandfather's library; I think you showed me
this before.

Well, yes, I showed it to you before, but this is not the
identical copy from my grandfather's library.

Sea and Land.

Yes. It was one of those things they sold as subscriptions,
full of all kinds of mistakes.

Well, do you think at the time—you didn't know these things
weren't true at the time?

No, I didn't know.

But this must have appealed to the young boy.

Oh, sure.

I mean, just the titles here: "Horrible monsters of the deep,"
and "Mysteries of the deep sea."

Oh, yes. And maybe the reason I didn't get too far on in the
second half was, of course, it was all about things on land,
mostly Africa. And you saw too many of these scenes, people get

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

eaten up and so forth. There were parts of my grandfather's
library I never even got to; they were in big locked cases. Not
locked to keep people out, but to keep the doors closed. I've
got to keep that bookcase locked.

Just to keep the door closed?

Yes, the weight of the books warped the bookcase so that the
door doesn't quite match the frame.

Well, lucky this book was in one that you could get to.
Oh, yes. It was down in the lower shelf.

But it is interesting to think that the land portion didn't
interest you as much.

Yes.

And what would it have been, I wonder, that — ?

I don't know. I always liked to look at ants.

What do we have here, A Naturalist at the Seashore?
Crowder (1928: The Century Company)]

[by William

Well, this is a book I picked up in a drugstore, they had a
little rack of books for a dollar apiece. This was back in 1930
or so, or 1929. It is written in a rather charming style. The
guy was a pretty good illustrator, but he described these
animals, sea spiders, in great detail and came to a conclusion
that's never yet been proven. In fact, ic's not possible
because the young have no way of penetrating to the integument
of the parent. So it's not possible for the young to be
nurtured by being able to be fed somehow by the fathers, as
Crowder suggested. Well, there's no way. These things don't
have teats.

[laughs] Treating them as mammals?

Yes. Well, he suggested- -because they all died at once. Well,
they probably all died at once because his aquarium probably
went sour.

Was this when you were already into your study of the sea
spider?

No, I didn't see sea spiders until after I read this. The first
one I saw was in 1930 there in the San Mateo beach actually

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

near — well, practically right at Pebble Beach,
where that is, down south of Pescadero?

Yes.

Do you know

My grandmother used to spend hours there. She stayed at a San
Francisco neighbor's summer house up Pescadero Creek a ways, and
would go down there in the morning. The old ladies who lived
around there or lived in a hotel nearby would gather at Pebble
Beach, each on their own blanket, and search for carnelians.

Along the beach?

There are not very many there even to this day. I was
suspicious when Don Kelley wrote a nice book on the Pacific
seacoast that he had a picture taken at Fort Cronkite showing
about six glowing carnelians; I accused him of salting his
picture. He didn't deny it. [laughter] But I wouldn't be
surprised.

Why were they searching for carnelians?

Because they are clear. They are quartz, of course, mostly
yellow. They are very similar to the cairngorm which is found
in Scotland, where it is used as a semi-precious stone in
brooches, you know those great big brooches that hold the kilt
at the shoulder.

Were they in fashion at that time?

I don't know. It's kind of hard to find them, but they're just
a variety of quartz.

Did this book have something to do with your interest in sea
spiders?

Yes. I read it, and I remembered it, and then I first saw one
in a collecting pan at Pescadero. I was taking biology in San
Mateo Junior College at the time and a classmate and I drove
there on a private field trip. So it reminded me of what 1 read
about them, and I got interested in looking at them a little
more closely.

Well, it's interesting. Most people can't point to books or
something specific that first caught their interest.

Oh, I learned lots from books, papers,
fairly early.

I think I was reading

More on College Studies in Zoology and Biology

Lage: In 1930 — is that the date you gave me when you first saw sea
spiders?

Hedgpeth: I think so.

Lage: And where were you in school at that point?

Hedgpeth: I was in junior college. I took biology there. I didn't take
any high school biology for the simple reason that I couldn't
schedule it, and the other reason was that I knew more than the
teacher anyhow. Not that that was knowing too much, to say the
least. But I went on a field trip with the class one day, and
found out most of the kids had to prompt her on what she was
looking at, poor thing.

Lage: Was the instructor in junior college better?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was very good. He was a recent Ph.D. graduate in the

Depression, and he had to take a junior college post. Now, that
caught a lot of people, that period, coming out, like Fred Tarp,
who now lives at Sea Ranch. He was very good at fishes, but
when he got his degree, there wasn't any job for people like
that, so he had to take one as an instructor in zoology.

Lage: So the people going to community colleges benefitted.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, they paid better salaries at the lower level before
--see, you get a salary after you've been there a couple of
years better than a beginning assistant prof at the university.
You can't pull out very easily. It caught a lot of them that
way, I know. There were several good grads at Berkeley who got
stuck that way.

Lage: I remember interviewing Lincoln Constance, in botany, and Sandy
Elberg, in bacteriology.

Hedgpeth: Lincoln Constance, did you do him?

Lage: Yes. After he got his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1934, he went up to
Washington State College, and I think Sandy Elberg went to San
Francisco Community College for a time, before he got hired by
UC.

Hedgpeth: I remember old Lincoln for his trick of going around pulling the
labels off the campus shrubbery.

Lage: [laughs] Didn't believe in--?

Hedgpeth: Well, usually it was just before he would stage his practical
exam in botany and so forth, and then he would rail at people
who couldn't identify some large tree on the campus. He'd say,
"I think it's been labeled for years, why didn't you read the
label?"

Lage: Do you remember him as a professor?

Hedgpeth: Oh, I didn't have him. The only botany I took at Berkeley was
[William A.] Setchell's course in the history of botany. I was
a zoology major, but my friend Dan Axelrod suggested I take the
course. Dan and I were high school classmates. He's up at
Davis now. He got to specializing in fossil plants which
carried him out into desert areas where there wasn't an
available can of beer for 100 miles, you know, and that kind of
stuff. Kind of hard on paleontologists.

Lage: The hard life. So by the time you went to Berkeley, were you
focusing on marine biology?

Hedgpeth: Not strictly, just zoology. About the only thing I knew about
it was trips to the seashore, conducted by Dr. Light.

Lage: You mentioned somewhere that Dr. Light never quite approved of
you. What did you mean by that?

Hedgpeth: Well, I had that feeling. 1 guess I was a little too erratic in
my behavior in those days, made too much noise perhaps. But I
wrote a poem about pycnogonids, and he said, "You must be
severely depressed." I hadn't thought of it that way at all.

Lage: 1 wonder what he was reading into it.

Hedgpeth: I don't know. If you read Bullock's account of Dr. Light — I
guess it's in the front of Light's manual- -you will get some
idea of his personality. It has become a standard guide for the
local marine invertebrate fauna. In fact, I suggested the
running title that they're using now. They've got Ralph Smith
editing the second edition, came up with this intertitle,
Invertebrates, by S. F. Light, by R. I. Smith, and two or three
others. There were too many authors involved. I said, "Well,
just call it Light's Manual, that's what we always called it
anyway . "

Lage:

So that's what it's come down as?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I also drew a couple of the designs for it. That one
showing a mussel eating a starfish, and so on.

III ECOLOGICAL THINKING, ED RICKETTS, AND PROGRESS

The Concept of Ecological Communities in Marine Biology

Lage: As I've been reading various things you've written, and others,
the topic comes up of ecological thinking in marine biology. Is
that something that developed in your lifetime, or has there
always been ecological thinking in marine biology?

Hedgpeth: Actually, that point of view goes back to the 1870s, when Carl
Moebius from Kiel wrote a little book on the oyster, oyster
culture, Die Auster und Austernw±rtschaft. That thing had never
been really properly translated. It was translated by the
Bureau of Fisheries by somebody who was reasonably facile at
literary German, but I remember I tried to translate that
section on the definition of the natural community which he
called a biocoenosis at that time.

Was that a new approach at that time?

Oh, yes, that was the origination of the term, and the whole
idea that groups of animals had some interrelationship of some
sort. But he was a bit mystic on it, of course. I thought
maybe I didn't know as much German as I thought I did when I got
balled up in a sentence, so I sent it to Karl Banse in Seattle,
an old friend of mine from here and there. He was born in
Konigsberg. He came back with the comment, "That sentence is
far from clear." [laughter]

Lage: So it wasn't your German.

Hedgpeth: No, it wasn't that. I haven't got around--! was going to write
this whole business up, and I gave an introductory paper about
three or four years ago at the congress on the history of
oceanography.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage: When you say "this whole business," what do you mean?

Hedgpeth: The origin and the concept of the community and how it drifted
away from the original. I pointed out I was glad to see the
Danes had taken on Carl Georg Johannes Peterson's theory that
the eel grass was the foundation of the community in Danish
seas. That is, it depended on the detritus of the eel grass.
Well, they had die-off s or mortalities of the eel grass for
several years in the twenties and thirties, and nothing happened
to the rest of the animals, so eel grass obviously wasn't it.
What they had left out was the plankton, and oddly enough, the
geese, the black brant. They live on eel grass. When the eel
grass disease killed off great beds of it in Europe and eastern
America—not from this side, though—the black brant decreased.
Of course, since they are a game species in Europe, you had
lousy records even among the conscientious Danes, who also would
fib on their bag.

So I got through with all this, and somebody in the
audience said, "In that case, why did you let Thorson get by
with that paper he wrote for the treatise?" I said, "Well,
frankly, fellows, I didn't know enough then."

Lage: You'll have to fill me in on the paper you're —

Hedgpeth: Well, that's the one I mentioned. Thorson wrote a whole idea

about communities, carrying on from Peterson, who was his great
master and gospel giver. He got off on the deep end making too
many generalizations based on inadequate data and so forth. But
he had a lot of us mesmerized, and he could rattle off so much
in such a short time. In fact, some of the students down at
Scripps when he was there as a visiting investigator, called him
"machine-gunnar" Thorson.

Lage: And he taught at Scripps?

Hedgpeth: He was doing research at Scripps. He was there as a visiting

investigator. I suppose he gave a lot of lectures, but anyhow,
I don't think he was a visiting faculty member as such.

Lage: What was the level of ecological thinking when you were a

student of marine biology? Did Light take that approach, or any
of the others?

Hedgpeth: No, he wasn't interested in that sort of ecology. He was

interested in observing what the individuals did, and observing
how they were arranged on the seashore, tidal level or wave
shock. That sort of thing. But he was primarily interested in
morphology. He was always somewhat skeptical of some of these

wild ideas about phylogenies. Somebody said, I don't know who
it was, maybe it was Libbie Hyman, that phylogenies are best
grown on an eclectic diet.

Lage: [laughs] That's a great statement.

Hedgpeth: Yes, isn't it. They're still at it.

Lage: What kind of wild ideas are we talking about?

Hedgpeth: Oh, which group of animals originated from the other, or
something of that sort.

Lage: A lot of effort goes into this kind of discussion.
Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, still does.

Lage: Is your approach an ecological one, would you say? Or has this
been a trend in biology?

Hedgpeth: Well, it's been more lately than- -because I've put quite a bit
of it in Between Pacific Tides from time to time. It's
interesting that Ed [Ricketts] spotted one of the fundamental
things that almost everybody else overlooked. In fact, he saw
this in the abstract of an obscure paleontological paper by a
man named Cabrera in Argentina.' And that is, you can't have
two closely related species similar in food habits or structures
and needs within the same group or community of animals. That's
called now the law of competitive exclusion, and great reams
have been written about that, too.

Lage: Now it's a law. Not an observation, but a law.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. The laws. Lately they've been called paradigms.

Lage: I think that's a better word, perhaps. Somehow "law" has such
finality about it.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

1932. "La incompatibilidad ecologica. Una ley
An. Soc. Cient. Argentina 114(5/6): 2A3-260.

Ricketts saw only the short summary statement in the 1935 volume of
Biological Abstracts. --JWH.

'Cabrera, Angel,
biologica interesante "

Ed Ricketts. a Marine Biologist and Steinbeck Character

Lage: Is this a good time to talk about Ed Ricketts, and what his

contribution was to marine biology, and then also how you knew
him and how he might have affected you? That's a lot of
questions together.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it is a lot of questions together. Of course, by the time
I met Ed, I think I was senior or maybe graduate, I don't know,
at this point. I'm trying to think, because it involves another
aspect of family history, namely that one of my mother's dearest
friends lived in Pacific Grove, and as soon as I learned to
drive and had a car to run around, I'd take her down there every
once in a while. These two old ladies would tell stories,
unfortunately before the period of handy tape recorders, so we
don't have much taken down what they said. She was Constance
Bigelow Mainwaring. One of her granddaughters lives down in
Petaluma right now.

They had uncanny memories. They remembered everything.
Never forgot anything.

Lage: Did you enjoy listening to them at that point, or did you go off
to the beach?

Hedgpeth: Oh, I went out to the beach. Since we were using Ricketts'

book, I went out there to see what he was like. We were about
the same--

Lage: You were using his book in school?

Hedgpeth: Yes, Between Pacific Tides. See, now that would have to be
after the first edition, '38.

Lage: My notes show that you met Ricketts when he was working on
Between Pacific Tides. I have '38 or '39.

Hedgpeth: Yes. It was after I did this tour of duty, the salmon study in
Shasta Dam. That was '38 or '39. In the forties, I was doing
graduate work on a master's degree, working on some little
project Dr. Light thought would be suitable, namely distribution
of copepods in various ponds. Most of those ponds have now been
built over, ain't there any more.

Lage: So you went off to meet Ricketts because of your interest in his
book.

Hedgpeth: Yes, I was out there. My mother and Con would talk about things
before my time. [laughs] They're all gone now, except the one
who's named for my mother, and she doesn't remember anything any
more at all, which is kind of sad.

Lage: So you wish — it would have been nice to have had a tape recorder
and--.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Now, I'm going to move you back to marine biology.

Hedgpeth: Right, and get back on the track. Well, that's why I often went
down to Pacific Grove and got into the habit of going down
there. One thing led to another. Ed had very little ability at
drawing anything.

Lage: Did he get others to draw for him?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So I offered to draw some maps for him, which I did. Then
after the war began, I went down to Texas, and sometimes
supplied him with animals he needed, had a market for. I was
working for the Texas Game Fish and Oyster Commission, and we
did a lot of collecting and trawling out in the Gulf of Mexico,
so we gathered stuff like sea pansies that are not easy to find
around here, since they are tropical animals.

Lage: The picture we have of Ed Ricketts is based mostly on [John]

Steinbeck's works. Is that an accurate picture from your point
of view?

Hedgpeth: In some ways, yes.
Lage: Comment on that, now.

Hedgpeth: Well, I think he's a little overimpressed by Ed's sexual

activities. He'd prefer to talk more about them. That's what
John used to talk about. I saw Carol some years later when I
was putting the Outer Shores1 things together. All she said
about that matter was, "Well, Ed was goaty."

Lage: Now Carol is--?

The Outer Shores, edited by Joel Hedgpeth (Eureka:
1978).

Mad River Press,

Hedgpeth: Carol was Steinbeck's first wife. She was divorced by then.
She was apt to tell you about anything straight between the
eyes.

Lage: Was Steinbeck's depiction of Ricketts as a marine biologist one
that you would agree with?

Hedgpeth: Well, he made it sound too easy. I gave a little lecture, 1
don't know, did I give you a copy of it? First memorial
Ricketts lecture, started that down at the Monterey Aquarium,
and I was the--

Lage: No, I don't think you gave me that.

Hedgpeth: It would be a lot better to dig out a copy. I try to set the

balance right, because it got written up the way Steinbeck would
have written it about how Ed used to collect at La Jolla, and
get enough money for beer for his ricketty lab. Of course, I am
annoyed by the pun to begin with. It wasn't quite that rickety.
And this was published in the New Scientist magazine. So I
protested to them. I said, "That's pretty exaggerated.
Besides, you didn't explain that La Jolla and Pacific Grove are
about 400 miles apart," or maybe 500, I guess, "by road, and the
impression you give is that they're right next door. Besides,
no biologist collects on other people's collecting or study
grounds. You could lose your license for doing that." He had
grounds to sue them for libel. I scared the wits out of the
poor woman.1 [She phoned Steve Webster, education director of
the Monterey Aquarium, to ask if I had said anything actionable
in my presentation. --JWH, October 1995]

Lage: Were you saying that Ricketts didn't collect down in La Jolla,
or that--?

Hedgpeth: No, he bypassed La Jolla. He went right down to Ensenada, into
Mexico. His favorite spot was the Bahia de Todos Santos, right
south of Ensenada, for a lot of the material subtropical in
nature. That was one of the southernmost locations that he
included in Between Pacific Tides, mentioning things occurring
that far south. So anyway, he read quite a lecture, I think, on
that, and he went some distance from Monterey so as not to
collect things too near — . See, this place in Cannery Row was
only a couple of blocks away from Hopkins Marine Station.

'The original text was never distributed. A simplified version was
published as, "Ed Ricketts (1897-1948) Marine Biologist." The Steinbeck
Newsletter (San Jose State University), Fall 1995, Vol. 9, No. 1: 17-18.
[See Appendix C.] --JWH, October 1995.

Lage: Was that a problem of intruding on other — ?

Hedgpeth: Well, it would have been. They don't want collecting on their
grounds. They're celebrating their hundredth anniversary, or
did this past week.

Lage: Why did it not become a problem?

Hedgpeth: Because he didn't make it a problem. He collected elsewhere,
down the great tidepools south of town, and so on. Further
down, or all the way up to Sitka. He had a run, one of his
regular trips was up here to somewhere along Point Reyes,
Duxbury Reef and then further north. Duxbury is now a reserve
status. The problem with Duxbury, it's soft rock, and you can
knock it to pieces easily.

An Ecologist and Systematist

Hedgpeth: So I became a zoologist simply by majoring in zoology.
Lage: Now, you're making it so simple here.
Hedgpeth: Well, I guess not.

Lage: How did you become a zoologist with your particular point of
view, your way of approaching problems? Or, what is your
particular way of approaching them?

Hedgpeth: At the present time, just trying to understand the

interrelationships of these groups, what eats what, and what is
just around for the fun of it, so to speak.

So you do have that ecological approach.

Lage:
Hedgpeth: Yes.
Lage:
Hedgpeth

Is that a more accepted or more dominant approach now?

I worked

Oh, I don't know. Of course, I'm also a systematist.
in two groups of animals, freshwater shrimp and these
pycnogonids. I've worked in the Gulf of Mexico species of big
freshwater shrimp. Some of those are used now in aquaculture,
great big palaemonids about this big—small lobsters, so to
speak. Anyway, I did a little monograph on them. I was down in
Texas because they had about four of the five known species in

North America in Texas waters. Some of them will live in
brackish water, but they're primarily fresh.

One of the amusing things is that the most common one is
named kadiakensis or something like that, and it must have been
a mix-up in labels, because it's never been found in Alaska or
the Aleutians or anyplace like that. Those errors are caused by
mixing up labels and bottles.

Lage: I'm never going to get the spelling of that one.

Hedgpeth: I forget now whether that's exact--! haven't done anything with
that group for years, but it was a name more closely associated
to Alaska.

Lage: And the shrimp itself was--?

Hedgpeth: It was easy to happen; some guy has whole lot of these little
bottles of things and labels stuck in them, and dropped the
wrong label in once in a while. Sometimes the bad locality is
simply the address of where the fellow was working.

Lage: At the time?
Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: [laughs] Well, that throws the future into a little detective
game, doesn't it?

Hedgpeth: Well, yes, we're always trying to straighten things like that

out. Of course, we can't change the name, even if it was wrong.

Revising Between Pacific Tides'

Lage: Let's go back with a little bit more on Ricketts, since you seem
to have spent a fair amount of time doing work about his work
and his life, in your Outer Shores, for instance, and revising
Between Pacific Tides.

'Between Pacific Tides: An Account of the Habits and Habitats of Some
Five Hundred of the Common, Conspicuous Seashore Invertebrates of the
Pacific Coast between Sitka, Alaska, and Northern Mexico, by Edward F.
Ricketts and Jack Calvin, revised by Joel Hedgpeth (Stanford University
Press, latest edition 1968). (Revised 1985 by David Phillips, with Joel
Hedgpeth as coauthor.)

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

That was after he died.

Right. Was there a reason you got involved with this?

Yes. Well, the main thing is because I was down in Texas at the
time that he had his accident, so I'd drawn these maps for him,
was making suggestions about the pycnogonid fauna, and some
things ought to be where he hadn't got them or something like
that, and he had started a new edition. So when Stanford
[University] Press was stuck with this, I was the first person
they thought of looking up.

So I agreed to do the job. It was rather painful, the
first edition. They didn't want a single thing changed unless --

Hadn't Ricketts finished his second edition when he died, or do
I have that wrong?

I guess it was, yes.

And it came out just shortly after he died.

Right. So they wanted a new one, because they didn't want to
risk too great a publication. At that time, they didn't know
whether it was going to fly or not. So I took it on from there.

You took on the new edition?

Yes.

And tell me about that, working on that,
change anything, you said?

They didn't want to

Well, for the first time, they didn't want to change anything
unless a new word would require the space of the old one. They
were niggardly in their printing bills and hated to have to
change anything, even a name.

What's the point of doing a new edition then?

That's it. So anyway, things got better through the years, and
they allowed me to make more and more changes.

What kind of changes did you need to make?

Sometimes statements of fact or observation that we'd learned a
little more about since. And lots of times names of these
things are changing as people work on them and decide mistakes
had been made in identification, if they showed they belonged to

another species, or something like that. Then I added sections
to it. But the main thing is keeping up that annotated
bibliography. They wanted to throw that out in the first
edition, and Light urged them not to.

Lage: So that was something that Ricketts had started?
Hedgpeth: Yes. That was kind of fun to keep it up.

Lage: I did look at your annotated bibliography and found myself
chuckling quite a bit at some of your annotations.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: I also was interested that you included children's books in the
bibliography. Was that something Ricketts had started?

Hedgpeth: No, not really, but people ask for references to children's

books, and they seem a little less pretentious in this book for
grade school use or children. So I wound up writing that little
paperback job1 which I am now going to try to bring up to date.
In fact, I've got some of it started.

Lage: Is that for young people?

Hedgpeth: That's for everybody. It describes the localities between Point
Arena and Ano Nuevo.

Lage: And what's that called?

Hedgpeth: Well, let's see. Seashore Life of the Central California Coast,
and/or San Francisco Bay. I'm trying to get an easier title.
I'm going to include more about the bay, especially this •
business of introduced species changing whole faunal patterns.

Lage: And this is a book for the layman?

Hedgpeth: Yes. It's been very successful, sold 45,000 copies, though

sometimes I wonder about that, because I was out in the seashore
one winter afternoon on a Sunday, fairly nice; tides are low in
the middle of the afternoon that time of year. I saw people
with buckets of snails and things and one man with a copy of my
book sticking out of his pocket. First thing I said in it is,
"Don't take all this stuff home. It dies and starts to stink on
you anyway." [laughs]

'Joel Hedgpeth, Introduction to Seashore Life of the San Francisco Bay
Region (University of California Press, 1962).

100

Lage: They didn't read that part.

Hedgpeth: Well, I didn't say anything about it, but obviously they hadn't
read that part. Or if they had, they hadn't really taken it to
heart.

Lage: That must be disconcerting to you.

Hedgpeth: I think there's more consciousness now about that sort of thing,
except in Mr. Dan Quayle's [then vice president] opinion.

Lage: [laughs] I knew we could get Dan Quayle into this discussion
somehow.

Hedgpeth: Reminds me of the time that President Bush was being chided for
his fondness for hunting quail out in the big ranch in Texas,
you know. He said, "That's not unkindness to animals. After
all, quail aren't animals, they're birds." [laughter] Well,
you know, that's what you call a non sequitur, aside from a lack
of knowledge of the English language. Appalling in anybody.
Theodore Roosevelt would have blown a gasket at that.

Then we have had only one president who was a competent
naturalist.

Lage: We have had only one?

Hedgpeth: That's right.

Lage: And who was that?

Hedgpeth: Theodore Roosevelt.

Lage: That's a long way back.

Hedgpeth: I remember his book used to be in the parlor on every library
table, African Game Trails, mostly pictures of Teddy with his
foot on the neck of some poor recently deceased wildebeest or
lion or something, all the way through the book. "Great animals
I have shot."1

'Later I looked this detail up. On pp. 532-533 of African Game
Trails, there is a tabulation of "Game Shot with Rifle" that lists 296
beasts and large birds, including nine lions, eight elephants, thirteen
rhinoceros, fifteen zebra, six buffalo, and all sorts of other "game" shot
by Theodore Roosevelt, and another bag of 216 by his son, Kermit. TR
states on page 534 "we did not kill a tenth, nor a hundredth part of what
we might have killed had we been willing." Most of the killed were

101

Lage:

[laughs] Well, that's a particular kind of naturalist.

Hedgpeth: Yes. But he also took a part in this great nature-faking

controversy at the turn of the century. They were after William
J. Long for writing exaggerated things about what animals did or
could do. Problem was that he had never- -the real critical
observations of animal behavior are fairly recent, people like
Tinbergen and Lorenz. Tinbergen was a genius at thinking the
right questions to ask and how to ask them.

Lage:

Who was Tinbergen?

Hedgpeth: Tinbergen, he was the Dutchman. He went to Oxford, had a whole
group. He and Lorenz complemented each other. Lorenz didn't
quite ask questions. Then there, of course, was von Frisch and

Lage:

his bees.

This is taking us far afield.

Ethology; A Recent Development in Ecology

Hedgpeth: Yes. But that's one of the recent developments in ecology, as
it's called, ethology. The actual study of why birds and
mammals do the things they do.

Lage: The study of animal behavior?
Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And that is tied into ecology, or a part of ecology, or another
field?

Hedgpeth: Well, it has something to do with it. Grinnell was a pretty
good ecologist. He saw some of the problems right away. He
considered the influence of vertebrates on dispersals of seeds
and that sort of thing.

Lage: He was at Cal, wasn't he?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was one of my professors. I took his course.

Lage: Did he have an influence on your outlook?

destined for an immortal life as stuffed museum exhibits: finis curonat
opus indeed! — JWH.

102

Hedgpeth: In some ways. One of his assignments, he sent us out to study
something or another (I studied a group of ground squirrels).
That reminds me, of course, that when I took invertebrate
zoology, we each had to do a project, so I did a project on the
pycnogonid fauna of Moss Beach--the beginnings of my first paper
on the beasties. That was where I noticed that from one year to
the next, the gross abundance of two species more or less
alternated.

Lage: One would rise and the other fall?

Hedgpeth: Yes, one would be more numerous one year than the other, yes.
But it was very subjective at the time; I only realized it in
observation. To do the job right, you've got to run counting in
squares and so on, to see what the relative populations are.

Lage: Have you followed up on that, then, or has somebody?

Hedgpeth: Not really, no.

Lage: It's still an observation.

Hedgpeth: And Moss Beach has been so trampled-over now that it isn't what
it used to be. It used to be a great collecting spot. Light
held one of his intersession courses there. They don't do those
any more, do they?

Lage: I don't believe so.

Hedgpeth: They used to have about a week called intersession, they'd cram
up to get a couple of units.

Lage: Would this be in the winter, January?

Hedgpeth: Spring, I think. It had to be a time when these critters are
easily available. But anyhow, something long gone and
forgotten.

Lage: They have it at other schools, I've noticed, in college

catalogues. They have a lot of intersession. But I don't think
Berkeley does.

Hedgpeth: Incidentally, the remainders of the Hemphill collection are now
at Stanford, and Dennis Murphy is a member of that family, a
descendent. In fact, his uncle, Al Murphy, runs the Hopland
Reserve. You've been up there probably and seen it.

Lage:

I haven't been there, but I've heard of it.

103

Hedgpeth: Yes. I happened up there to — I had drawn a big picture for Bee
once, of a carpenter bee, and she had promised to have it sent
back to me when she died. So word came to me that Al had it up
there, of course. I went up there, and Hopland is off the road
a little, in the hills. Secretary says, "Shall I--who are you?
Shall I explain to Dr. Murphy?" I said, "Just tell him I knew
him when he wasn't as high as the top of this desk." [laughter]
About ten minutes later he came trotting back with the picture.
He said, "You're the only person that could have ever said
that." [laughter]

Lage: And Dennis Murphy is at Stanford?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he's Paul Ehrlich's lesser. He works on butterflies too.

Lage: And he's descended from the Hemphill —

Hedgpeth: The Hosmer-Hemphill line. They had asked me if I could find a
place for the shells in the Oakland Museum. They wouldn't even
give me the time of day there. I was suggesting something
rather different, because I know the museums now have little
interest in just cabinets of seashells. 1 was suggesting a
standing glass pillar display cabinet to the theme of education
in Oakland back in the nineties with old-styles microscopes,
Josiah Keep memorabilia, and some of those nice exhibits put in
there, and they could move them around, and change them from
time to time. I went around to find out what they thought of
it, I was told that person wasn't in, go away.

I have had two strange encounters with the Oakland Museum,
never quite figured out. One of them was when they had an
article about their interest in the existence of old quilts in
the neighborhood, or in California, central California. They
wanted a roster of all of them. So I wrote and I said I had my
great-grandmother's engagement quilt made in the 1830s in which
her maiden initials were sewed, and the initials of each
person's different kind of stitch, and this obviously made it an
unusual quilt — I think it was a tulip quilt. I've still got it.
But I never even got a reply. Funny, they requested it. I said
I'd be glad to bring it down and have it photographed if they
liked. It was in reasonably perfect condition- -except the usual
thing that happens to these old quilts. The magenta goes bad
and starts to rust out in some of them. The blues stay fast
because they're indigo. But not even an answer. So I said,
"Well, it's going to go to Oregon, then." My daughter will get
it when I get through with it.

104

Ricketts and the Influence of Between Pacific Tides

Lage: I want to get more, if we have more to say, on Ricketts. You've
done so much work on him, and I know you can't repeat what
you've done there, but I'd like to get some observations.

Hedgpeth: Well, we used to discuss where certain things were found when we
knew about them, and that kind of thing. One time he told me he
had never been to see a tropical coral reef. He had never
gotten around to it. He wanted to, but it's funny. I think he
never gave up hoping.

Lage: Did you see him as a more serious worker in the field than maybe
Steinbeck would portray, or--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He liked the literature pretty well. He knew good and bad
literature when he saw it. As I say, I wrote this piece
explaining some of that, what it took to do what he did. See,
he was working before computers, and to do that tidal study that
he'd done on the different levels and all of that, he had to go
up to the San Francisco office of the Coast and Geodetic Survey
and copy the raw data sheets. I had to do the same thing in
Texas, actually, in the 1940s or so. What they had were the
tabulations of the times and heights of tide. They didn't even
have a graph. They just took them off on the hour, somebody had
to do it diligently by longhand. Then you could work out the
curves from that data and so forth. It was a tedious thing to
do.

Now, of course, a computer simply spits out a piece of
paper at the end and the job's all done for you. Different
world, you know.

Lage: So the work he did in preparing Between Pacific Tides was not
all romantic and--

Hedgpeth: No, he conducted a lot of correspondence between specialists,

especially in Washington, D.C., and various groups. He had some
knack or a way of getting them to do more or less what he
needed — well, of course, after Between Pacific Tides had been
published, it was quick to see you were dealing with someone
more serious than just somebody who wanted some of Grandma's
pretty shells named for their convenience (the bane of the
existence of the mollusk division of the National Museum) .

Lage: Did that book, Between Pacific Tides, have a deciding influence
on marine biology on the West Coast?

105

Hedgpeth: It had a very strong influence, because most everybody used it.
It influenced Gene Kozloff into writing his own books on Puget
Sound area. He was a Berkeley student. He's an interesting
character, too. He might be worth looking at, except he's way
up there. He's now retired to Friday Harbor.

Lage: So it influenced how other people approached marine biology?

Hedgpeth: Well, and getting their own books out, too. See, Gene was born
in Teheran after World War I. His father was an officer in the
diplomatic service. I remember the last time I saw him, I guess
I was at the University of Washington, and they have these great
big sky-high footbridges over the highway that goes right
through the middle of the campus. I asked where he was, and
somebody said, "Well, he's about the third level down, 100 yards
away," and I couldn't think of anything else to do. I yelled
his name at him in Russian, "Yevgenny Nikolayevich." He spun
right around, and came right up to me. [laughing] He knew
nobody else would do that to him, I guess.

Lage: Probably nobody else could do that.
Hedgpeth: Well, I don't know. Some people.

Lage: When others were inspired to do their own treatments, did they
use the same organization as Ricketts? I noticed that he
organized by areas.

Hedgpeth: Yes, or by levels, tides. Yes, not quite.

Lage: Were there troubles with that kind of organization?

Hedgpeth: Not necessarily. Depends on where you are. See, in Puget
Sound, the tides are at much greater levels, much greater
zonation, so it's easier to use the whole bay.

Lage: You didn't organize that way in your book on San Francisco Bay.

Hedgpeth: No, not too much. There wasn't much about the bay. The book
was supposed to be short, and that time they just wanted small
books. Now, they say I can spin that up to 400 pages. The
latest one I heard from Art Smith was that they were going to be
about 700 pages. That's going to be about all the environments,
Bay Area, or maybe northern California, I don't know.

Lage: In your research on the Between Pacific Tides and Ricketts and
all, what was Jack Calvin's role in the early edition?

106

Hedgpeth: He did some of the illustration, he did some of the photography,
and I think he rewrote quite a bit. He had written two or three
children's books on seafaring, and he was a pretty good writer.
Ricketts had a peculiar way of writing at times, used words in
his own sense and that sort of thing.

Lage: Was he aware of that?

Hedgpeth: I don't think he really cared very much. He felt it was the way
to express himself, using some words in a slightly different
context. Steinbeck complained about that. What Steinbeck did
was to change those things. Ed said, "Well, he wrote much
better than I ever could."

Lage: So Calvin did some rewriting?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: But Calvin wasn't a marine biologist himself, was he?

Hedgpeth: No, he wasn't. Well, he knew a fair amount, and he picked up a
bit of it from osmosis. He wound up with a charter service out
of Sitka for people who wanted to see some of the rarer spots,
Sierra Club types who had full purses and that sort of thing.
He was an irascible sort of fellow, and "everything you might
have referred to may be true, but you didn't have to say that"
kind of attitude toward- -

Lage: You say he was an irascible sort?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. The last I heard of him I think was when I met Xenia
Kashevarov in New York City, and Joe Campbell had kept up with
these people all this time, since the 1930s. Xen ran a--may
still do; I hear she's still living—she was curator of a
textile museum in New York City. She's a small person, but she
was one of the famous daughters of Father Rashevarov, the
Russian Orthodox Priest in Sitka. Of course, I think he was a
native Alaskan, too. But he was a great source of information
on Russian history, and he had access to all of that.

He had about six daughters, and one son who was killed in
an accident. The daughters were- -one of them was Calvin's wife,
Sasha. Tal was Ritchie Love joy's wife.

Lage:

Now, Ritchie Love joy: who was he?

107

Hedgpeth: Well, he was part of the crowd. He did some of the drawings for
Ed, he didn't do any of the writing. But he was an advertising
writer, and things like that.

Lage: And lived near Cannery Row, or on Cannery Row?
Hedgpeth: Tes, he was part of the gang.
Lage: Did you know him?

Hedgpeth: I met him two or three times, yes. Didn't really know him.
There were a couple more of these gals, and they all had the
Russian proclivity for strong liquor. I don't know whether Xen
seduced Ed- -of course, that wouldn't take much doing. She was a
teenager sent down to go to high school, and she wanted to find
out what this was all about. She did.

And anyway, at this meeting in New York City, she was a
little annoyed. She'd just got a Christmas card, it was toward
the Christmas season, from Jack Calvin. The first thing he said
is, "I have to tell you, your sister Sasha died a few months
ago. I remarried and had a vasectomy." And she says, "This is
a hell of a way to be told you're the last of your family, isn't
it?" I have to agree to that. [laughter] She said, "The nerve
of the guy at his age having a vasectomy!" [laughter] That's
the way they always talked. But that's a very mild version of
the way they talked.

"Philosophy on Cannery Row" — Ricketts. Steinbeck. Joseph
Campbell

Lage: I notice there's a great deal of literature about the influence
of Ricketts on Steinbeck.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Were you in at the beginning of people starting to wonder about
that?

Hedgpeth: No. 1 don't know; I met Steinbeck at Ed's place. 1 don't know
what he was doing at that time. But shortly after that, he had
produced The Grapes of Wrath, and the next time I came down
there, Ed had the galley proofs. Stuck them in front of me and
I read peripherally through them a bit. He thought the ending
was great, and — .

108

Lage: And what?

Hedgpeth: I wasn't too sure about the ending. A lot of people haven't
been since either. But he said right then when it was in
galleys, he said, "It's going to win the Pulitzer Prize."

Lage: Did Steinbeck leave a strong impression on you when you saw him?

Hedgpeth: Well, by the time I had any really serious conversations with
him it was after Ed's death. I was pretty well insulated from
being impressed by people like that.

Lage: I read that Steinbeck had destroyed a lot of the correspondence
between Ed and himself. Why do you suppose he did that?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he did that with a lot of people, apparently. There was

one friend that he called on, a man who he had written a lot of
letters to, and Steinbeck asked to look at them and dropped them
one by one in the fireplace and said, "I don't think this one
should be left around."

Lage: Do you have any theory about why?

Hedgpeth: No, I don't know why, except that he--. Perhaps they were
franker than he wanted them to see in print.

Lage: What about Joseph Campbell? He was part of that circle for a
while. Did you get to know him?

Hedgpeth: Not then. I didn't meet Joe until I went up to Oregon State.
It was about '83, I guess, no, '73. Richard Astro was a
professor of English then, or assistant prof, had gotten his
thesis on Steinbeck. He wanted to--

Lage: And he was at Oregon State?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He'd gotten funding for a meeting on Steinbeck. Of

course, he found out about me sitting out there at the beach, so
he got me in on it .

Lage: How did he find out about you sitting out at the beach?

Hedgpeth: Well, I don't know, probably Between Pacific Tides or something
like that. Anyhow, I tried to get Dan Mainwaring in on it,
because Mainwaring and Steinbeck had met in Los Angeles at a
course given by my old friend near St. Helena, W. W. Lyman, who
had been born at the house Just this side of the Bale Mill, and
the creek there is known as Lyman Creek, and actually that
should be Lyman Mill, as a matter of fact. But anyway, he was

109

always called Jack. He used to teach Celtic languages at
Berkeley, and then UCLA, but anyway, he was a professor down at
one of the junior colleges or state ones there. He had a
meeting staged between Steinbeck and Mainwaring. Dan had
written this novel about a farm workers' strike, same thing.
His book was titled One Against Che Earth.

Lyman introduced them as the two promising young authors
who would make their mark in the state. Dan later said, "Well,
he was 50 percent correct."

Lage: When was that meeting?

Hedgpeth: I don't know exactly [1933]. ' Anyway, we finally had Dan

agreeing to come up with him, but he backed out at the last
minute. He just didn't feel up to it. He had been away from
all of this stuff so long. See, he wound up writing movie
scripts and detective stories.

So anyway, we got a pretty good group together. A book on
that conference is now out of print.2

Lage: Is that when you gave your talk on philosophy on Cannery Row?

Hedgpeth: Yes, right.

Lage: Was that before you had done Outer Shores?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And when you gave this talk, "Philosophy on Cannery Row," is

that what interested Richard Astro in looking more carefully at
Ed Ricketts and his influence on Steinbeck?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, he wanted to figure out what influence he had.
Lage: Or had he already had an interest in that?

Hedgpeth: I don't think he really knew much about it until I started

giving him information on the stuff. See, what I did was get
Ed's notebooks. They were down at Pacific Grove. So I had them
there, about five of them, great big ledger-type books. They

'See Richard Astro, "Steinbeck and Mainwaring," Steinbeck Quarterly,
vol. Ill, number 1, Winter 1970.

2Steinbeck and the Sea, Richard Astro, editor (Newport, OR: Oregon
State University Sea Grant Program, 1975).

110

were in terrible scrawl, soft pencil, things he'd write in the
middle of the night, you know.

Lage: And where were they?

Hedgpeth: They were in custody of Hopkins Marine Station. They have now
been put in the Steinbeck Library at Stanford, which is kind of
odd, because Stanford's faculty and the Stanford Press didn't
think very much of Ricketts. They rejected Outer Shores because
they said all those philosophical essays weren't good Ricketts.
I tried to explain to them there ain't such thing as good
Ricketts; there's just Ricketts, that's all. But they didn't
like them because they were not—didn't show any real
philosophic discipline behind them. That Stanford Press is--.
Their only real good selling book was Between Pacific Tides
through the years, so it's kind of funny that way, but anyhow.

After leading me on to write the book, they finally just
dumped me, so I put it up there with the Mad River Press. Now
it's out of print, and I am holding the copyright and trying to
solicit tender letters of endorsement so I can approach—and
just for the hell of it, I'll approach Stanford Press again,
because now for a while they have had a managing editor, Grant
Barnes, who was formerly the real book bringer from UC Press.
He was senior editor for Stanford Press at that time. Things
may have improved down on the farm. He seems to have brought
them into the real world.

Lage: So maybe the timing is better.

Hedgpeth: Their inventory is definitely improving. Grant said, of course,
that a lot of friends sent him titles for possible books to be
published by Stanford Press, like Fiscal Problems in the Reign
of Genghis Khan and such things, [laughter] the kind of stuff
they were printing in those days.

Lage: "Philosophy on Cannery Row" seems kind of a seminal thing, at
least if you're interested in Steinbeck and Ricketts.

Hedgpeth: Yes. It was about all I knew about the subject.

Lage: And what did you use as the basis of your research there? Did
you get into his journals then?

Hedgpeth: Not really the journals, because they were more or less personal
comments or little notes about what they did when, and
complaints about some other things. Things he wrote about in
the middle of the night. I think he had more or less permanent
insomnia or something. He worked until late.

Ill

Lage: Was any of the Cannery Row philosophy influenced by Joseph
Campbell, do you think?

Hedgpeth: I don't know. Campbell has always been a great talker. Of
course, that was all back in the thirties. Ed did write a
letter about "The King and the Corpse," which Campbell had
obviously improved from the German version. Strange, he wrote
so much about the Celtic aspect in mythology in that book, which
was essentially based on Zimmer's manuscript. The last thing he
wrote, one of the most recent ones, was an introduction to a big
meeting on the Celtic temperament held in Canada, and he spent
most of his time talking about Indian philosophy and dragging
the Celts into that by the scruff of the neck. He said of
course he had very good claims for Celtic background, since I
don't know whether his grandfather or his uncle quite often led
the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York on horseback — that sort
of stuff. Of course, he was raised Roman Catholic, too.

Lage: When you did meet him, did he throw any light on Ricketts as far
as you were concerned?

Hedgpeth: Not too much, no. I just met him several times in New York;

after that meeting, I'd go by. He lived in Greenwich Village.
Finally decided he was going to have to retire and move from
there, asked about housing down near Esalen. "Well," I said,
"for starters, you've got to have about $750K to get a decent
place down there." He allowed as how he'd heard that,
[laughter]

I had written a very vituperous letter to Stanford Press,
after they wrote me a nice little note saying they'd decided,
since I didn't have much more time to live, to count on for
future editions, they were going to find a new editor, and so
forth. I wrote a letter ending that I would hope to read the
writer's tombstone by the light of Halley's comet. Well
unfortunately, the comet wasn't brilliant enough to read a
tombstone by anyway. He's still living. But that
correspondence got posted between San Diego and Bamfield, which
is way out in the wilds of Vancouver Island, by my various
colleagues. [laughter]

Lage: After that conference on Steinbeck, there have been a couple of
other "Steinbeck and the Sea" conferences that you've taken part
in?

112

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

There was one in San Jose. I don't know whether I gave a paper
at that one or not. There was one in May 1992 in Nantucket.1 I
was invited to be the keynote speaker and talk about Steinbeck
as an environmentalist.

What was your thesis there?

My thesis was based on the last book he had published, which
nobody has ever read.

Which one was that?

It was called America and Americans.

It was sort of a picture, photo book?

Yes. And had a series of short essays by Steinbeck scattered
here and there through it. He had been asked to write an
introduction. He thought it would take him two weeks; it took
him several months. He wrote these little vignette chapters,
and some of them are essentially an environmental statement on
how we're going to the dogs, wrecking the environment, and all
this kind of stuff, as well as some other things about morals.

I don't know what he would say to what I read this morning
in the paper that the California schools' record for censorship
is getting pretty bad. I think it's Benicia that has forbidden

any book by John Steinbeck to be in a school library,
them.

None of Steinbeck's books in the library?

any one of

Yes. All books by Steinbeck forbidden. I don't know what the
heck to say about The Long Valley and Pastures of Heaven. I
don't know what Wallace Stegner would say about that, too.

I'm sure he'd have something to say.
Yes, no doubt.2

"See supplementary papers to the oral history, The Bancroft Library.
Proceedings in press with University of Alabama Press, to be published
1997.

2Alas, Wallace Stegner is no longer with us.--JWH, October 1995.

113

The Society for the Prevention of Progress

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage :

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

I don't know if this relates to Ricketts, although it seems to
relate to some of his beliefs, but tell me about your Society
for the Prevention of Progress. When did you found that
society?

About 1944.

That seems ahead of its time, somehow.

Well, I showed a friend of mine who was in divinity school a
statement I had cooked up about how the increase of material
progress violates the lease granted to mankind by nature, or
something, and he said, "Well, that's a very orthodox
statement." [laughter]

How did it come about, and were there other people involved in
the society?

Oh, people have asked to be members from time to time. There
was a strange meeting in 1953 in Copenhagen. I was seated next
to Erwin Stresemann, who was considered one of the world's great
ornithologists. He had the general bearing of a Prussian field
mar shall, complete with monocle. We were discussing the
business of nomenclature and how to control the names and
prevent duplications and all that kind of stuff. It's really
not the field of biology; it's a branch of Philadelphia lawyers
or something.

Anyway, toward the end of the meeting, he leaned over, his
monocle slipped off as usual, and he had to go around groping
for it on the floor. He said, (in English), "What must I do to
join the Society for the Prevention of Progress?" I said,
"Sitting through this meeting for a week qualifies you for
membership . " [ laughter ]

Well, tell me what you experienced or observed that led you at
that tender young age to start the Society for the Prevention of
Progress?

Well, I wasn't so tender and young.
1911.

After all, I was born in

Well, you weren't an old man.
thirty-three?

I was born in 1911.

That would make you, what,

114

Lage: Didn't you say you started it in '44?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, thirty-three. I'm eleven years behind the century;
easy way to figure that out. Well, partly out of my experience
in Shasta Dam and the debris dams.

Lage: What was that experience, with the debris dams?

Hedgpeth: See, the first assignment we had began in '38 working with the
Corps of Engineers. They wanted to build a debris dam on the
American River so hydraulic mining could be reopened. They'd
selected a site north of the main fork of the American River
about two or three miles above where the site of the now-unbuilt
Auburn Dam is. One fine winter night, the site of the keyway
(the excavation in the sides of the canyon for the dam)
collapsed. They hadn't even started digging. The whole thing
was unstable ground, where the engineers figured that it was a
good dam site. And of course, at Shasta Dam the next year, we
realized that that would be the end of the salmon.

Back then, 1939, we recommended that they increase the flow
of cold water from Shasta to lower levels of the reservoir,
which they have never done. And to add insult to injury, they
built a dam on the Trinity and punched a hole through to the
Sacramento drainage. That water comes into the Sacramento now.
The Trinity is mostly dry. That's just a tributary to the
Rlamath.

[After the field work on Shasta Dam and the salmon runs, I
worked at Stanford during the winter and spring working on the
final report which became Special Scientific Report Number 10 of
the Bureau of Fisheries [see following page). We recommended
that cold water be drawn from lower depths of the reservoir to
help the salmon that could not pass the dam, but that has never
been done. After completion of the report in 1941, the
remainder of the team disbanded and I was unemployed. I was in
an interregnum. I worked for a while at a menial job in a state
veterinary lab in Sacramento that serviced farmers with herds.
One day a tame billy goat was brought in, and I was asked to
hold it by the horns while the examiner smashed its head until
it died. There was quite a flap about that because it was a
family pet, and the people did not realize the lab took samples
for herd animals. I dimly remember that someone was called on
the carpet for that.

I resigned from that place soon after Pearl Harbor and
retreated home to Walnut Creek and became self-employed. I
obtained several large collections of pycnogonids from the
National Museum in Washington and other museums, and prepared
two major monographs and several small reports on the material.

HAa

1940 Shasta Dam Salmon Study

Page 2 Bay on Trial

The Bay Institute

<>l: SAN I R A N T I SCO

VOLUME 1

/ NUMBER 3 / FALL 1989

Fifty-year-old
report on

saving salmon

Even before the completion of Shasta Dam.
a Department of Interior Scientific Report' included
recommendations to save salmon from releases of the
Dam's stored water of lethally high temperatures.
Fifty years later Interior Department's Bureau of
Reclamation, which operates Shasta, is still refusing
to provide the salmon protection. The Bureau
ignored the report, shelving the recommendations and
limiting its circulation, according to a member of the
scientific team that wrote it. The fiftieth anniversary
of Sfifiiti/ii- Report \nmhrr 10. ironically coincides
with the revoking of temperature protections from
Shasta releases by the Regional Water Qu.ilii>
Control Board after pressure from the Slate Water
Resources Control Board and the Bureau

Construction of Shasta Dam began in the
Repression and was completed during WW II
Saving salmon, the jobs that went with ilu-m or ilu-
river was not a legislative priority. Due in large p.in
n> Tyce Club agitation, eight men from the Bureau nf
Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (the predecessor >l the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) begun an cigl teen-
month-long study to investigate the possihiln of
saving salmon populations doomed by ilic (la i The
construction of the 5«l-looi-high kingpin lor he
Central Vallev Project tCVPi would cvvniuallv Wink
IN- fm-Kiious tjfint."' ii -. ol <!.<• *-.<•• • si't? * n •

f lnn\ltni; ,i .»V/./i,
i'lHHuniml ltl\tnn>n m
CtMjrtcsy JAV HcJcpcih

i,/ \nlmtm ill .\mli-i~
Ki-Miny in IV'V PhiH.i:

Ironi the streams in which Ihcv spawned. The report
gave options lor possibly saving ihc runs, and
outlined ways to ma\iiin/e the "siimvjhihiv" ol the
fish

Dr Joel W Hedgpeth was then a junior
aquatic biologist assisting Harry Hanson. Osgood
Smith, and Paul Needham. the leaders of the study.
Knowing the needs of salmon, the scientists had little
hope that much natural spawning on the river would
be preserved The group completed field studies
detailing the upper reaches of the McCloud. Pit. and
Little Sacramento Rivers that would be submerged.
as well as the number of fish and their total spawning
area. Hedgpeth recalls the cold and the beauty along
the upper reaches of the rivers that merged to form
the Sacramento. "We identified the spawning beds.
looking for golf-ball-size gravel, and roughly
measured areas. Where we could, we crossed the
stream, pacing off its width. Most of (what we
identified) was destroyed when the dam backed the
water up. | We| saw the spawning for the last time.
as river flow was soon diverted for construction."

The second half of the report discussed
options for saving the fish after the dam was
completed. The options consisted of transplanting
the fish to one of the creeks that feed into the river
below Shasta Dam. building hatcheries, or improving
conditions below the dam to allow for spawning
between Keswick and the mouth of Battle Creek. In
addition the report roughly estimated the value of the
lish slocks In a sense. Hcdgpelh notes, it was one ol
the hrsi em ironmcimil impact reports ever done.

The report didn't anticipate Red Bluff
Diversion Dam. which kills thousands of young
salmon, or the failure of Colcman National Fish
hatcherv on Battle Creek lo make up any of the losses
from Shasta In ihc fitly years since the Dam blocked

Cononwood Creek C«*ri«y Jnel W Wr</»/vv/i

hundreds of thousands of fish, the runs in the uppe
Sacramento River have dropped more than 75r,
whole river has changed "The Dam changed the
natural cyck of the stream. It flattened out the
natural variation of the stream." Hedgpeth sav s Ii
the past, he says, the spring run made up most ol t!
population, because of the abundant river (lo» ji t
time of year. Now ihe fall run makes up the large?
share of ihe loul population. (The winter run v.as
classified endangered by the State Fish and Game
Commission due to the precipitous drop in
population, which went from a high in this century
1 30.000 fish to just 550 in the spring of '89.)

"We submitted the report and disbanded."
Hedgoeth says. "We knew [the resource] would gc
to hell " Few of the crew followed development c
ihe river afterwards, although most had successtul
careers as fishery biologists. The report did mil
predict that the Bureau of Reclamation would ignoi
science lor X) years. (Sec Shasta story on page I I

' •s.|Mii;1|\, irnlifu- Mrpiirl \o III. \n ln>rs|ie:iti"n ,
l-ish-s.il* age Problems in Kelalion lu Shasta ICiin . Ii.
Harrv A. Hanson. Osicoud H. Smith, and I'aul K

115

I did some book reviewing for the San Francisco Chronicle and
other papers on progress and the history of oceanography, and so
on. I was, of course, unfit for military service (4-F) . In
February of 19A5 I was called by Gordon Gunter to assume
employment at Rockport, Texas, with the Texas Game Fish and
Oyster Commission (as it was called then) and set back on the
trail to becoming a marine biologist. We conducted studies of
the fauna (Gordon was an ichthyologist at the time) of the near
shore of the Gulf of Mexico. We also experimented with oyster
planting in the coastal bay as far south as the southern Laguna
Madre of Port Isabel. It was a completely new world to me. I
left Texas in June 1949. ]'

Lage: Did becoming a marine biologist have anything to do with the
founding of the Society for the Prevention of Progress? I
noticed that Ed Ricketts also seemed to have a sense that
civilization was perhaps contrary to real progress.

Hedgpeth: Yes, but I doubt that it is peculiar to marine biologists.

After all, you've got a game biologist like Leopold who, while
he didn't ask to be a member, simply encouraged me on to it. I
don't know whether I showed you that letter from Aldo Leopold.

Lage: No, you told me you've got a letter from him, but that wasn't
recorded on the tape, if you--

Hedgpeth: It was virtually a letter of marque; I'll get you a copy. [See
Appendix D. ]

Lage: Now, this was 1947, a letter from Aldo Leopold, "Man Against the
Land" was the article you wrote —

Hedgpeth: That was in the old magazine called The Land, which was run by
Louis Bromfield and others who were gentleman back-to-the-land
types. I contributed several articles to them.2

But anyhow, Luna [Leopold] looked at that, and he said he
never knew his father had written a letter like that to anybody.
[ laughs ]

Lage: That's an interesting reaction to it.

'Mr. Hedgpeth added the preceding bracketed material during his review
of the draft transcript.

2Reprinted in Forever the Land; A Country Chronicle and Anthology,
edited by Russell and Kate Lord (New York: Harper, 1950).

116

Lage: What was the article in American Scientist? You came out

against progress in the American Scientist (vol. 35 (3) 1947],
he said.

Hedgpeth: Called "Progress—The Flower of the Poppy." [See Appendix E.]
Lage: Did you get a lot of reaction on that?

Hedgpeth: I got some reaction. I got some letter chiding me by one

Florence Moog from Washington University, St. Louis. There was
a big ad in the Sigma Xi magazine by the Moog Piston Company of
St. Louis, so I asked her if she was related. She took off like
a skyrocket and said, "How dare you insinuate 1 should be
related to such people?" Well, good heavens, I just thought I
had asked a routine question, natural. 1 was told later she was
considered one of the queer ones on the faculty there, rather
difficult.

Lage: Did you see yourself in this attack on progress as being part of
a movement or a group, or just this was an idiosyncratic you?

Hedgpeth: No, just my own little idea.

Lage: Because it does seem- -you have Aldo Leopold and others who are
beginning to question progress around the same time.

Hedgpeth: Yes. He unfortunately died soon after that.

Lage: I know. He said, "I am pleased this is the forerunner of a
book."

Hedgpeth: Well, I had a book started, but what happened was, 1 never got
around to finishing it, and Ray Dasmann was writing The
Destruction of California, and I sent him the rough draft, and
he used some of the ideas. In fact, 1 think he says so in his
preface.

Lage: Was that the thrust of the book you were going to do?

Hedgpeth: Probably something like that. Of course, Ray was a bit more

ambitious than 1 was to get something out. He did a pretty good
Job. I'll have to go dig that other thing out for you.

Lage: So your society was a society without members, without official
membership .

Hedgpeth: I wrote letters recommending people for membership. I had a
lovely letter from C. S. Lewis.

117

Lage: Did you recommend him for membership?

Hedgpeth: I also got a note from his brother saying that thirty years'

service in the British Army entitled him to membership. Where
the devil is it here? I thought it was right in here.

Lage: Do all these letters of yours exist in your files?

Hedgpeth: I had those by Lewis in the back of a book about him, in a

pocket I had built in it, and that book has disappeared. In
fact, I had a letter from Richard Llewellyn in How Green Was My
Valley and that's disappeared. I don't know why books with
envelopes in them with letters--. I didn't think I had so many
untrustworthy people coming in my doorway. Of course, it may be
accidental. People have a way of borrowing books and never
returning them.

Various Articles and Papers Noted II

[looking at bound reprints of Hedgpeth articles]

Hedgpeth: Toward the end of my career at Corvallis John Byrne, now

president of Oregon State (I think he was a dean at the time)
said he thought it would be a good idea to publish a volume of
my selected writings with the Oregon State Press, so I made a
selection and turned it over to the person he considered a
suitable editor. She was a faculty wife of Chinese origin,
probably American born, but did not understand that some of the
published selections should not be changed. She had several
items retyped after substantial changes in style and substance.
She also, with another person, wrote an introduction which was
embarrassingly gushy (I had already asked Garret Hardin to write
a brief preface). The Press did not have the funds for the job
that year, and I took the project along with me when I left
Oregon State. A while later I showed the project to Grant
Barnes of the UC Press, and he wanted to accept it, but no funds
there. He urged me to discard the girlish introduction as
inappropriate, off key. Since then I have published several
more suitable items, but have let the matter rest.

But here is the third volume, volume three of five volumes
of my articles. You were asking me about the one on "Taxonomy,

118

man's oldest profession."1 That was 1961. Of course, this book
includes all the chapters from the treatise that I stuck in here
too.

Lage: From the big red book [A Treatise on Marine Ecology]?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And various other things.

Lage: You have five volumes of these collected works?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Some are very scientifically oriented, and some are more
philosophical, it seems.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And how does the philosophical view affect the scientific
approach, or does it?

Hedgpeth: It doesn't really.

Lage: Does it affect the kind of problems you choose to look at?

Hedgpeth: No, not when you try to read Wittgenstein's junk. You can't
figure out what he's driving at.

Lage: But your own outlook, I'm trying to get at how your own view of
the world affected how you've gone about your scientific career.

Hedgpeth: No, not really.

This one was considered a very profound piece by one
commentator who reviewed the whole book.

Lage: What was that?
Hedgpeth: Oh, this little thing.

Lage: "The Evolution of Community Structure?" [as yet unpublished;
reviewed in manuscript]

Hedgpeth: Yes. That was a set topic, so I — .

'Eleventh Annual University of the Pacific Faculty Research Lecture,
May 22, 1961. See papers supplementary to this oral history, The Bancroft
Library.

119

Lage: On approaches to paleoecology?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes.

Lage: Paleoecology. Tell me what that is exactly?

Hedgpeth: You work with fossils.

Lage: So you're studying the ecology of past — ?

Hedgpeth: Yes, you're trying to guess things with about 90 percent of your
information missing.

Lage: Is that an approach that interests you, or--?

Hedgpeth: Well, I was asked to contribute to this book by friends of mine.
Here's a couple of pieces of congressional testimony, this is.
Here's a—somebody asked that this be included in the
congressional record, lectures I made.

Lage: "Man and the Sea."

Hedgpeth: Yes. I recorded them mostly in Olema down from Dillon Beach.

Lage: Delivered over KPFA in 1964.

Hedgpeth: Yes, Steve Charter was a regular commentator for KPFA, and he
asked me to work up a few lectures on the subject.

Lage: What were the themes here? Was this an environmental theme?

Hedgpeth: Well, no, it was mainly about the study of the sea, how it's
done and who did it and that sort of thing. I also wrote
articles for reference books.

Lage: What was this in? The World Book Encyclopedia?
Hedgpeth: Yes, they pester me every once in a while for updating.
Lage: You've written on the ocean for them?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I was paid extravagant sums of money for doing these
things .

Lage: They do pay extravagant sums?

Hedgpeth: Yes, a couple hundred bucks for something that's just boiler
plate. I'm trying to think where--Scripps--I wrote this very
sassy note on population structure.

Lage: When you were at Scripps, did you say?

120

Hedgpeth: Yes. I wrote this as a Christmas greeting. I guess this is in
volume two. Yes, my Scripps years were 1951 to '57 — that was
•54. I still get a request for a copy every once in a while.
[See following page.]

Jinglebollix

Lage: While we are talking about Ricketts and all that, who was
Jinglebollix?

Hedgpeth: [laughs] Well, I think he was a composite. The general

demeanor is a description of Rolf Bolin, rotund, jolly face, and
always smiling. Bolin was a professor of fisheries at Hopkins
Marine Station for years. Ed Ricketts always called people he
disliked or considered incompetent Jinglebollix.

Lage: Sort of a generic term.

Hedgpeth: His favorite victim of that term was William A. Hilton.

Lage: Now, who was William A. Hilton?

Hedgpeth: He was professor at Pomona for years. He was a horrible duffer.
He printed papers which make no sense. He would describe an
animal as, "The head is six centimeters and the body three
millimeters long," stuff like that. He'd garble up complicated
station numbers, latitude and longitude, so he got them in the
wrong ocean, and that kind of thing. His specialty was writing
about critters that live in damp logs , and his papers have
driven entomologists to desperation and tears. We had to re-
examine all his pycnogonids to be sure which they were. I
corrected some of them, and Al Child at the National Museum
finished the job. Because you had to do it. These were things
that were in the literature with names, more or less with
qualifications of legitimately described species.

Lage: But Ed had run across them too?

Hedgpeth: Yes, in the same kind of amateurish way. Hilton was a very

enthusiastic teacher and his students loved him. He went out on
field trips fully dressed with a necktie on, and he would lead
off the collecting into the tide pool. The tide pool turned out
to be deeper than he thought it was going to be. Presently all
you could see was his head and his necktie floating above water.
I owe that description to Ted Bullock, of whom you may have
heard.

120a

An Example of Hedgpethian Humor
*• published in Systematic Zoology, Vol. 8, No. 4, Deo.. 1064

Reports on the Dredging Results of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Trans-Pacific Expedition, July-December, 1953

I. The Pycnogonida

by
Joel W. Hedgpeth.

Int roduct ion. On October 23, 1953, the MV S. F. Baird, engaged in marine-biolog
ical and other scientific investigations in the waters of the North Pacific under the
direction of Dr. Warren S. Wooster, executed a successful dredge haul in 710 fathoms.
Among the material brought to the surface was one large pycnogonid. It is the pur
pose of this report to discuss this interesting capture and its significance to science
and the welfare of mankind.

Systematic discussion:

Family Ammotheidae Dohrn, 1881

Genus Ascorhynchus Sars, 1877

Ascorhynchus japonicus Ives

Ascorhynchus japonicus Ives, 1892; Loman, 1911; Ohshima and Kishida, 1947;
Hedgpeth, 1949.

Material collected: TransPac Station 4, 33 degrees N, 134 degrees 55' E, 710
fathoms, muddy bottom, 1 male; October 23, 1953.

This fine specimen extends the range of this species some 40" south and 3 or 4
degrees west of previous records, but well within the bathymetric range for this
characteristic Japanese species.

General remarks: It is of particular interest to compare this dredging result of
the Trans-Pacific Expedition with that of another recent expedition, the Swedish
Deep-Sea Expedition (Fage, 1951). Although not the same species, both expeditions
agree in having caught the same number of specimens, to wit, one (1). It must be
pointed out, however, that here the similarity ends, as indicated by the results of a
detailed statistical analysis (Table I).

TABLE I

SWEDISH S I O

DEEP-SEA EXP. TRANS-PAC EXP.

No. successful dredge hauls 9

Total no. of pycnogonids collected '. 1 1

No. pycs. per haul 0.11 0.33

Months at sea 14 5

No. pycs. per month 0.07 0.20

As can be seen from this table, our expedition was three times as successful as
the Swedish Expedition, both in terms of catch per unit of effort (as time away from
port) and catch per unit of gear. It must not be thought, however, that this means
that our fishing methods are so vastly superior to those of the Swedes. The only justi
fiable conclusion, and one that cannot offend any national sensibilities, is that the
total pycnogonid population of the overall world ocean has increased threefold since
1948. At this rate of increase (Le., about 60% per annum) it is estimated that the
pycnogonids may support a major fishery sometime in the next millenium.

PERTINENT LITERATURE

FACE, Louis. 1951. Sur un pycnogonlde de HEDCPETH, JOEL W. 1949. Report on the Pyc-

1'expMltion Suedoise des grands fonds, nogonlda collected by the Albatross in Japa-

1947-48. Reportt Swedith Deep-Sea Exp.. nese waters In 1900 and 1906. Proc. U. S.

2, Zoology no. 7. Nat. Mia., 98:233-321, figs. 18-51.

— 4
I

121

Lage: And Bullock had the occasion to be on one of these field trips?

Hedgpeth: He was a student at Pomona. Pomona, of course, is a pretty good
private school, or it has been.

Lage: So those two together you think were the Jinglebollix?

Hedgpeth: Well, I think the name — the first time he used it that I know of
was in reference to Hilton, but he used it in reference to two
or three other people. I think Steinbeck made a composite
character out of several. So it was after Ed was gone that
Jinglebollix really appeared in Sweet Thursday [John Steinbeck,
1954], and not exactly in Ricketts1 sense as an irritating
duffer.

Lage: Not too many scientific professions have had the sort of

romantic popular account of themselves as marine biologists did
in Cannery Row. Did this do anything for the field?

Hedgpeth: No.

Lage: Did it encourage young people to think this is a great field to
get into?

Hedgpeth: I had a weird letter from somebody saying he was writing a paper
on water problems, seemed to be a mixture of Ed Ricketts, Luna
Leopold, and this mad Swede who described properties of water
that were more mystic than actual, but also some things which
were very good. Unfortunately, his book was translated into
German, or maybe it was into Swedish, and then into English, so
two steps in translation, leaving you to wonder what he really
tried to say, especially when he gets kind of squishy anyway.

Lage: And he was going to write a book that was a mix of all these
things?

Hedgpeth: He was going to write an essay for an op-ed piece, so he wrote
to me. I haven't heard from him since.

Lage: Well, that didn't develop into anything.

Hedgpeth: These are all characters around P.G. [Pacific Grove], always

going to do great things and leave great new paths and all that
stuff, and never materialized. So you get to where you don't
trust them too much to deliver.

I remember one fellow up in Oregon, somebody living out in
the woods, sent me about forty pages of philosophy, wanted me to
appraise it and thought it was ready for publishing. I looked

122

Lage:

at it, and I wrote a note saying, "It shows a lack of
appreciation of what has been thought of in philosophy,
especially pertaining to where you're trying to go. Enclosed, a
spare copy of John Stuart Mills' collected essays which may help
you." I got an indignant letter back saying, "How you insult
me, asking me to read some old ancient book like that!" And
what the belli It was not a very thick book. But a reaction
like that indicated such a completely closed mind; it didn't
seem worth carrying on any more. So I pocketed his return
postage. [laughter]

All right. I think we have run out of steam for today.

Ed Ricketts* Innovative Work
[Session 4: October 1, 1992] ft

Lage: Last time we started this topic about your professional career,
the making of a marine biologist. One of our topics was Ed
Ricketts and Between Pacific Tides. I wonder if we got, or if
we could get, a general statement of your assessment of the
influence of Ricketts and this wonderful book on Pacific Coast
marine biology.

Hedgpeth: I think I gave you a copy of that lecture I gave about him,
didn't I? First Ricketts Memorial Lecture [see Appendix C].

Lage: And you've made some remarks in your forewords to the revised
editions of Between Pacific Tides?

Hedgpeth: Yes, and Phillips [the new editor] is doing some remarks in the
last edition of Between Pacific Tides. He reviews the whole
history of the book. You see, the interesting, curious thing
about Ed is that he was always perusing the recent acquisition
department of the library, looking at all the new journals and
books. He did that quite regularly. He spotted this
interesting discussion by a man named Cabrera, an Argentine
paleontologist, who made the more or less flat outright remark
that two species with a closely related ecology will not occupy
the same place. They become competitors for their ecological
niche. It is called competitive exclusion, or something like
that, and that became what is often known as Cause's principle,
and that's been one of the major doctrines, so to speak, of
ecology, at least of community studies and things.

123

Ricketts commented on that principle of competitive
exclusion and other ecological matters in a preface to Between
Pacific Tides, but it was deleted at the suggestion of Walter K.
Fisher, who said it was a lot of junk. Old Fisher was an old-
style systematic biologist. He described species very well. He
worked on curious little worms. Toward the end of his career,
he became quite a devoted amateur painter, and painted a lot of
portraits.

But the main thing about Between Pacific Tides was a
discussion by more or less ecological occurrence in relation to
the relative tide levels in which they were most abundant.

Lage: So he organized it by ecological group, rather than by —

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, primarily by environmental groups.

Lage: Was that a departure from the usual way of organizing it?

Hedgpeth: It was the first time that was done. It wasn't exactly a
departure.

Lage: Well, it sounds like a departure, if it was the first time it
was done.

Hedgpeth: Yes, well, it was an innovation. Because most sea shell books
would discuss things — well, by rocky and sandy shores, and
things, but he got more specific. What level of the shores that
some things occurred and didn't occur in other places. So there
was a lot of original observation in his collecting. He was
always careful to note where he got things, and his field notes,
by the way, are in Stanford library now, and you can get an idea
from that if you want to pursue the Ricketts matter, how he
conducted his business. Except most of his business records are
in the University of Florida.

Lage: Too bad these things are divided.

Hedgpeth: Well, what happened was that I was in Texas when Ed had his

accident, and I didn't come back until the following summer. In
the meanwhile, Peter Lisca appeared at Hopkins Marine Station
and looked through this stuff, and asked permission to borrow
it. So they let him take a lot of stuff, and I feel he's gone
nuts now. He's gone through three wives and —

Lage:

He's still around?

124

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

He's still around. He sort of sits around on the lawn waiting
for the crocodiles to eat him. Or alligators. Anyhow- -they 're
different animals, by the way.

And Lisca took those papers to Florida?

Yes, he took them to Florida. We tried to get hold of them. In
fact, he offered to give them to me one time, and then changed
his mind when the people started reviving or stirring up
Steinbeck, which was partly the result of what had happened at
Oregon State, that held the first Steinbeck conferences. So I
was down at Tallahassee giving a series of lectures, and I went
over to Gainesville. A colleague of mine drove me over there.
I stayed overnight, spent all day Sunday in his office. I went
through his files and I itemized them. I noted what was in them
and what was not in them. Of course, you realize that Ricketts1
way of doing things was to run several carbons of letters and
send them around to people, and anything he thought was worthy
ideas, he would rattle off on his typewriter several copies. So
there were a lot of files of Ricketts around. I don't know
where some of them are now; probably gone.

But anyway, I sent Lisca copies of two of the essays which
were most interesting, and his dizzy graduate student, I don't
know where she is now, probably working for some fast-food
joint, McDonalds or something, but I don't think she really got
a decent job—there was correspondence, it was Ricketts' copies,
indicating he had received some kind of an account from Joseph
Campbell, and he'd known him in the old days. They found out
when they looked in the recent biographies of Campbell. And I
asked for a copy of Campbell's letter, with Ricketts1 comments
on it. She said, "You can't have those, because they're central
to my thesis."

My reaction to this was to send a copy of the letter to Joe
[Campbell], and I said, "Did you give this gal permission?" He
wrote an indignant letter to her pointing out it's a very
serious matter to deal with a person's correspondence that way,
and so forth. Sent me a copy of his letter.

Did you ever get the letters, though, from the graduate student?

Yes--no, not from her. Joe sent them to me. I knew Joe
Campbell; she didn't know that, see. She found that out the
hard way.

You mentioned Cause's principle, and I remember you made the
remark in one of your papers that the failure to include that
section of Ed's work set back marine biology.

125

Hedgpeth: It did, because once that came out in explanations and somebody
had tried to demonstrate it by raising pairs of species in
similar situations, so that there was experimental proof of
this, everybody got excited and started looking at these things
in a slightly different way. So if Ricketts had been able to do
that in the book, it would have made the thing much more of a
classic than it was.

Lage: But it certainly has had a long life. How many times did you
revise it?

Hedgpeth: Four times.

Lage: Was that a major enterprise?

Hedgpeth: It wasn't much, too much. Just going through and fixing it up
here and there, and adding new illustrations and a new section
in the back- -two eventually.

Lage: Many new animals that were discovered along the way?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Things change names all the time, too. So anyway, a few
years ago, they wrote me a sweet little letter saying that they
wanted to find a new editor who at least would show promise of
surviving a few more years than I probably would. Anyway, it
was not very tactfully put.

Lage: [laughs] It implied your imminent demise?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So I wrote the guy back a letter and said I hope to read
his epitaph by the light of Halley's comet. Unfortunately, the
comet was a fizzle this year, this time, so he's still alive
anyhow.

Lage: Well, maybe next time it comes back.

Hedgpeth: I don't know if I'm going to make it next time. What is it, a
hundred — ninety years or something?

Lage: You'd be pretty ancient.

Hedgpeth: Well, the physician says I've got—the cardiologist thinks I'll
make ten. The surgeon is a little more careful.

Lage: He doesn't like to make bets on people?

Hedgpeth: Well, he told me that I had probably a 75 percent chance of

surviving. I thought about that, but I didn't tell him that, I

126

figured it out. The casualty rate of Picketts' Charge is 54
percent, so that's a little better odds. [laughter]

So anyway, the last time I saw him--I had given him a copy
of Poems in Contempt of Progress before the operation. He told
us that he told his wife, "By god, this guy is going to
survive!" [laughter] I don't know really how to take that.
Except I ought to drop by this afternoon and give him a copy of
the latest edition of Between Pacific Tides. He's got his
waiting room adorned with sharks and porpoises and —

Lage: Oh, you went to the right man!

127

IV BEGINNING A CAREER AS A PROFESSIONAL BIOLOGIST

An Introduction to Pycnogonid Studies

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Let's go on, if you're ready for this, to your study of the sea
spider. I read that you were an acknowledged expert in this
animal by the 1930s. Is that true? That seems early in your
career. When did you become an acknowledged expert?

Yes, "Man's Oldest Profession." That includes at the end a
bibliography of my writings on the subject.

Well, the first one's
pycnogonids?

'39. How did you get involved in studying

It was kind of silly. I was a T.A. in junior college. The lady
who was teaching zoology was a rather strange person. She'd
gotten her degree from [Charles A.] Rofoid on a very slim
thesis. I looked it up; it was about an eighth of an inch
thick, Some Events in the Life of a Soil Amoeba, or some such
funny title. Naturally, one suspects when a female gets a Ph.D.
with such a flimsy thesis that something else might have been
going on. But we won't go into that, because that would be
scandalous and libelous anyway.

But anyhow, I was the teaching assistant —
She was a professor at the junior college?

Tes, San Mateo. A number of us in our neighborhood in San
Leandro were attending there, so we went over together for a
while during the first year. Then my mother moved over there
and rented an apartment for us.

Anyhow, she said she wanted twenty-five starfish by next
Monday or Tuesday. Nominally, I was more or less under the

128

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

other guy, Dr. Klyver. He said, "Did she say anything about
paying you?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, we've got a budget,
get transportation and cost of those things from her for her
course." She was kind of annoyed when we figured out that
seventy-five cents apiece was a good price for twenty-five
starfish, to say nothing of traveling over the hills and far
away.

Actually, what we- -there was a great big rock that at high
tide was completely separated from the shore about twenty yards
from the bluff. One of my friends who wasn't taking the course
and I went out there — it was his car; I didn't have one then.
At low tide we saw all these starfish plastered on the side of
the rock, so we just leaped out with great joy and grabbed them,
and then we started looking around a bit, seeing what else we
could see in the seashore. Grabbed bunches of hydroids and
things, put them out in a pan. A spider- like creature shambled
off; it was a pycnogonid.

I had already read something about them in a book by a man
named Crowder, who was a New York advertising man. His book had
been for sale for a dollar in the local drugstore, of all
things .

In this drugstore?

Yes. I don't know why. So I got interested in them.

What are they like, and what is it that interested you?

They don't look like anything else on earth. They don't have
any body; they're just legs, and walking around. I have
pictures of them someplace, [looking through papers, notes]

And how large? There's a great variety of them.

Oh, yes. Some of them get this big —

Now, when you say that big, that's about nine inches across?

Yes.

Well, those are two pictures. Is there a particular fascination
about them, aside from these leggy — ?

The young fed somehow through the tegument of the father,
the male carries the eggs around until they hatch. That
apparently is not so.

See,

129

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

What did Crowder say about them?

He said that's what he thought happened, because they all died
at once. I think they died once his aquarium went bad.

Well, that was one thing. Of course, my professional
career didn't begin until 1938. See, I was born during the
Depression. In '33, you couldn't get a job. I spent a year in
graduate school, more or less aimless. That's when I started to
write the first paper about them, I guess. But anyhow, so then
about '35 or '36, I was taking this federal civil service exam,
had a job for a year in Washington as a clerk in the Treasury
Department, which was about as boring as Walt Whitman found it,
I think. Not that that was any great historical precedence.

So after trying to winter in Washington alone with a bad
case of bronchitis, I decided I wasn't interested in living in
Washington, D.C.

But you did some research while you were there, didn't you?

Well, yes, I went down to the National Museum, since I was on
the swing shift.

What were you working on there?

Waldo Schmitt had given me a bunch of crabs and things to sort
out.

Wasn't it Waldo Schmitt who suggested that you could help
Ricketts with the pycnogonids?

Yes, that's one thing. He introduced me to Ricketts by mail,
because I was interested in looking at them, but they didn't
have any around there to look at at that time. Subsequently,
they found bushels of them, after I once published a couple of
papers.

Did your papers have some influence in interesting others in the
field in looking at these little animals?

Well, according to Bill Fry, they did.
Was he accurate?

Yes, I guess so. Kept grinding them out. Of course, now this
guy in Holland, I just sent—he's published 400 papers. They're
not all on pycs, though; I think about half of them are some
other subject. But he just retired, and he's still grinding out

130

papers. His name is Jan Stock. And then Al Child at the
National Museum started out with some advice from me, and we got
a joint paper out together, and he's gone on. He's been
grinding them out too. 1 have to look at them all and see what
1 can make of all this. There seems to be no end of new kinds
you can find.

Lage: So the papers are partly discovering new examples?

Hedgpeth: Of all the literature of this group, about 90 percent is
systematic, just description of species.

Lage: And what has been your primary interest in them, or has there
been a primary interest?

Hedgpeth: Well, I didn't have any particular primary interest, except I

was always interested in getting a little more information about
geographical distribution, significance and so forth. So
anyhow, we worked that out.

Lage: I notice one of these articles that you wrote for this 1976
meeting had to do with locomotion.

Hedgpeth: Yes. You see, these animals are rather peculiar in that there
are some which have an extra pair of legs, and even a few more
kinds which have two extra pairs of legs — in other words, they
have twelve legs. They don't move like centipedes, and we were
figuring out what kind of pattern of leg movement they might
have. Of course, it's to be suspected they did have some kind
of synchronous movement, so they wouldn't get tangled up with
each other. So I had a couple of students down in the Antarctic
taking movies for me, and we eventually got that written up.
It's part of the paper in here by Schramm.

Schramm, incidentally, is now working in Amsterdam. He was
curator of paleontology at San Diego Museum and the trustees
decided they had too many people doing things that didn't
interest anybody, so they fired him. They fired about five
people. Fred couldn't get a job anywhere in this country, so he
accepted a job in Amsterdam.

Lage: But he is American?

Hedgpeth: Yes, and he speaks English. I told him, "Well, I hope you'll

learn a little Dutch in two years, but they don't worry too much
about it." Enough, I suppose, to give a graceful introduction
or suitable statement at a commencement.

131

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Which reminds me of T. A. Stephenson when he was professor
at Aberystwyth. He came from South Africa and rather fancied
that he really should be at Oxford or Cambridge, not in a
tidewater, second-rate place like the University College of
Wales. So anyway, came time, according to his secretary, for
him to take part in some official ceremony and present an award
or mention an honor, and to do that, it would have to be done in
the Welsh language. So they handed him the text of his speech,
four or five lines long or something. He practiced it, and then
down amongst the lower life, taxi drivers and so forth, he got a
bit of coaching.

Finally got brave enough to try it out on his secretary.
She said, "Well, you're doing pretty well, but I'm afraid
they've given you the wrong speech." [laughter] He was so
happy the day I called on him; the Yugoslavs had just won the
international choral competition, so the way Welshmen think
they're too good and don't practice enough, or something like
that. He was quite happy. It made his day.

Have you made a lot of collecting trips in connection with the
pycnogonid?

Not too many.

Have you gone to the Antarctic on it?

Yes, I've been to the Antarctic three times. The rest of the
places I've been to I haven't seen — not much opportunity to
collect. But there are people collecting all the time, and they
send them in to the museum.

And then you tend to look at what they've collected?
Yes. Look at it, and see what we can make of it.

Evolution of the Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology

Hedgpeth: I really didn't start as a professional biologist until 1938.
Lage: What marks the professional biologist? That was the first job?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I was on the civil service roster. They were getting

together a field team. That was the salmon study's first year,
1938, on the American and Yuba Rivers--

132

Lage : At the Army Corps of Engineers.

Hedgpeth: And this is in connection with the idea to build some big dams

for hydraulic mining to stop the debris. Turns out this doesn't
work very well, so those dams were never built. The big one on
the Yuba, that's for another purpose. Some of the sites we
looked at, we have to have a dam on them, like the American
River, of course. What's being talked about now is something
for flooding and irrigation, not mining. So they have to be
much bigger, and there's been yapping about Oregon- -Auburn Dam —
ever since.

So anyway, we got together a field crew; it was got
together by random.

Lage: You're looking at a scrapbook now; is this relating to that
study?

Hedgpeth: Yes, this is the first gang. The reason for mentioning this at
all was that here is where the Treatise on Marine Ecology, at
least my part, had its beginning. This man, Gordon Gunter, who
came here, is from Louisiana by birth, from Natchitoches .

Anyway, Gordon was in Texas this time working with the Game
Fish and Oyster Commission. This fellow George Giles [refers to
scrapbook] was on the civil service rolls from way back. He
didn't know any biology, but he was a veteran of World War I.
And here we were all summer, working at going down rivers in
rubber boats —

Lage: Which rivers did you go down?

Hedgpeth: The American and Yuba, and various branches. He didn't know how
to swim. Near drowned.

Lage: Was he useful in your study?

Hedgpeth: No, not very. He was just along. He helped out with keeping us
from getting lost in the woods, at least for two of us.
Actually, an interesting part about it, much of this thing took
place in country where I'd lived as a kid on Clipper Gap in the
American River. In fact, we passed the house we lived in there.

Lage: That must have had some special meaning for you.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it did. I took a picture of it; I don't know where it is
now . Funny .

Lage:

And Deer Creek; is that Ishi country, Deer Creek?

133

Hedgpeth: Yes. I was stationed there for a summer. That's why I wrote an
article about Ishi. It's back here, I guess. [flipping through
pages]

Lage: What was Gordon Gunter's background?

Hedgpeth: He was a fishery biologist and naturalist. He was a very good
naturalist. Worked on Texas shrimp and fishes. What had
happened was he was working at Rockport, which is near Corpus
Christi. In that area, there's been interest of geologists or
paleontologists for a long time, because they're right backed up
on the Texas — the edge of the plateau, you know, the Austin
chalk and all that stuff. It's very highly fossiliferous and
quite rich, and there's a lot of papers and discussions of it.
So Harry Ladd from the U.S. Geological Survey came around,
wanted to look at that environment and the fact that it was a
hypersaline environment he wanted to look at, the Laguna Madre.
So he came down there, and he got Gordon, who led him around,
pointed out places.

Hedgpeth: The standing committee on paleoecology, ecology of past times,
was set up in 1935, I believe.

Lage: Was paleoecology an old field, or was that something new?

Hedgpeth: No, it's not very new. It's been popular in Germany for years.
This was a committee on paleoecology for the National Academy
Research Council. [flipping through pages] Then you got a bit
more formal, some of the same dramatis personae. Somewhere,
Harry Ladd got in on this. He was a paleontologist for the
Geological Survey.

Lage: Were you involved in any of this, or are you just showing me the
history?

Hedgpeth: No, I'm just showing you the history briefly. [See Appendix F
for Treatise foreword and contents.]

Lage: Here's Harry Ladd.

Hedgpeth: And now, you see, he's gotten a little more pretentious. Ladd
was the chairman of the committee or subcommittee.

Lage: Now it's called the Subcommittee on Ecology of Marine Organisms.

Hedgpeth: Yes, but now look at what was happening here. Here's Roger

Revelle, and T. [Thomas] Wayland Vaughan. Vaughan was director

134

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

of Scripps at that time, and he was primarily a specialist in
coralline foraminifera and things like that, so these grand old
— see, they kept on going for years like this, getting together
and having a buzzy time —

And are these good papers that are being published?

Well, these are preliminaries. But here it's gotten a little
more simple. Now suddenly Gordon appears on the scene.

Okay, this is 1942.

That's because Ladd put him on the committee. See, Ladd is
chairman. He'd met him and thought maybe it would be a good
idea to have somebody like him. So that was that.

Then, along came- -well, let's see, "The Ecology of Marine
Organisms," one, two. So they decided that they would have to
publish a monograph on this subject. Now, this was the National
Research Council, that's related to paleontology number five.
Ladd is still chairman. I knew nothing of all this.

So we ' re up to
still--

'45 and '46. These are the war years, they're

Hedgpeth: That's right, and they were still rattling around.

Lage: In '49, they're talking about a committee on a treatise on

marine ecology and paleoecology, so it seems they've decided to
publish a book. Were these monographs the beginnings of the
work to be included in the Treatise?

Hedgpeth: Yes, and they started writing things before that. So they were
fiddling around, and Gordon sent me a draft of what he was
writing. At that time, I was rattling around as a doctoral
candidate at Berkeley.

I was sitting there in the Berkeley library, of course, and
I said, "You missed a lot of things. I can find this by
browsing on the shelves in no time. You really ought to have
somebody full time to do the Job of editing this thing, and
carry it on, for you'll never get it done this way."

Lage: Were you thinking of yourself?

Hedgpeth: No, I was not. Really. I hadn't quite thought of myself as a
full-time editor; after all, I was trying to get a thesis done.
So they appointed me to the committee.

135

Research Biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and
Editor of the Big Red Book

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Now all this time, until I think he became director of Scripps,
anyway, I don't know whether Revelle was on the committee or
not--

He seemed to be on the committee.

Well, he was the earlier one, so he knew all about it. He
wasn't on this. We had a couple of out-and-out strange ones,
like Earl Myers, who really didn't know much. Yes, Roger
Revelle was vice chairman for oceanography, so he had
sidestepped a little of the main problem. But he was
responsible for getting me on the payroll. The Office of Naval
Research is what they applied to for a grant. So I was kind of
in a funny position: I was there on an outside-supported
payroll, though I nominally held a rank as a research biologist
at Scripps, but I was responsible directly to the director, not
connected with any department.

The director of Scripps?

Yes. I didn't learn until years later that Martin Johnson, who
was one of the authors of the big tome on oceanography, The
Oceans, by Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, expected that he was
to be in charge. That never got to me until after I left. I
don't know why, but anyhow. So it took me about five to six
years.

Did they anticipate that it was going to be a five- to six-year
job, or did you anticipate?

I didn't anticipate it was going to be that long, but I knew it
was going to be several years. I said, "The first thing is that
there are a lot of people working abroad who have more to say
about this sort of thing," and they wanted to discuss some
environments like the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea and so forth.
So I knew the people who knew most about this sort of thing- -

How did you know so much as such a relative neophyte? You had
just recently gotten your Ph.D., and you seemed to have a great
grasp of the whole.

Well, I just started looking through the journals and seeing
what was being done. All the journals everywhere in the world.
Berkeley, you know, had big stacks of journals from everyplace

136

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

that had an acceptable language. Some of them were
unacceptable.

How were your own language skills?

Not that good. I could read German and French.

Any Russian?

Rather feebly- -enough to know what was in the Russian
literature, but that was simply scanning it. I only took a
semester of Russian from somebody who should never have been
asked to teach it. He was a fine professor to talk dreamily
about Pushkin and War and Peace and Anna Karenina and so forth,
but not to try to teach a language. He would sit there and ask
us to read a sentence or recite it or try to write it and say
what something meant, and his poodle usually sat on a chair to
his left. One day, Mrs. Kaun came there, and the poodle had to
take the other chair. She sat there knitting.

This was his wife?

Yes.

What was his name?

Alexander Kaun. But the result was, we didn't learn much
Russian.

But you had some.
Yes.

It seems essential, as you describe what you were trying to do,
that you had languages.

Yes. Well, the language of paper titles is relatively small, so
you can learn that in a few days. All you have to do is learn
to read the Cyrillic alphabet, which was no problem to me, since
I had worked as a printer during the Depression. For a while, I
had a job in a print shop, and I would do some fooling around
with a little printing press for years.

Tell me more about the big red book,
as the big red book.

I've heard it referred to

Yes. Well, I said, "You've got to get some other people
interested in this, and since we don't know those environments,
we ought to have the people." One of the things I did in 1953,

137

I went to the Zoological Congress in Copenhagen. That was the
first big international meeting in Europe after the war in which
Russians appeared in any numbers, and they had quite a
contingent there, including the guy who was to write the book
which was to be put into English, and that was partly my doing,
I think. He was always writing terrific big books; I don't know
whether he wrote all of the words himself or not, but he got
them out. His name was L. A. Zenkevich.

So 1 tackled him right there at the meeting and said we
wanted to have a chapter on the Caspian Sea, and he agreed to
it.

Cold War Concerns of Naval Intelligence at Scripps

Lage: How did the working relationship with Dr. Zenkevich go?

Hedgpeth: Oh, fine. It had certain little interesting by-effects. Of

course, Scripps was still deeply in the Cold War, classified up
to the hilt.

Lage: You mean even the area of Scripps you were working in was
classified?

Hedgpeth: Well, the whole darn institution. You could hear so much at
seminar to put two and two together.

Lage: How did that affect the climate of working?

Hedgpeth: It didn't affect the climate of working with each other, of
course, so much. Internationally, there were slight
repercussions. I got a call from some young character from the
Office of Naval Intelligence. I knew that they were carefully
looking at stuff, because writing a chapter of a book entails
sending things back and forth, haranguing over meanings and
things, and someone forgot to mention this one or that, or
something like that.

So he said, "You're getting an awful lot of heavy mail from
the Soviet Union." I said, "Oh, yes, we are preparing this
international treatise. We're having this Russian write the
chapter on the Caspian Sea, since nobody else has as much access
to it as he has." To say nothing of all the very extensive
literature that had been piled up on it. I said, "Actually,
it's being funded by the Office of Naval Research." Nobody had
apparently told him that; he was--"0h, well, well--."

138

I pulled out this text, and the last thing I had gotten,
which had probably prompted his visitation. I said, "You can
take this along and read it if you want to." This was the
English version, about eighty pages of stuff. "No, that's all
right." [laughter]

Lage: He didn't care to —

Hedgpeth: He said, "You're getting a lot of stamps on this mail, aren't
you?" The Russians just loved to plaster their mail with all
kinds of different fancy stamps. It had about twenty on it. I
detected something from the tone of his voice. I said, "Our
grandchildren may collect stamps someday; I'm saving these for
them." He said, "Oh, that's all right," kind of sadly.

Then he looked at this and he started to swear. I said,
"What's the matter?" Well, they had a stamp of a domed tent
with outside guy wires, and little flimsy metal poles around it,
on an ice island in the Arctic Ocean. He said, "We're using the
same tent, but ours is classified."

Lage: And theirs was on the stamp! [laughter]

Hedgpeth: Yes. I got another rise out of this guy when we had a big

international meeting at La Jolla, and I was asked to be one of
the commentators on a bus full of people touring San Diego.
They expected the Russians to come along. What we got instead
was the official interpreter from the State Department, who was
a New Yorker who spoke more Yiddish than Russian, apparently,
judged from comments that came back to me, and a covert guy from
the CIA who was a longstanding personal friend of mine. He told
me there that he worked for the CIA —

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

You hadn't known it?

— as a desk authority on Russian—no, I hadn't known it. I knew
he knew the Russian language very well. As this built up, I
told the organizer, "These two people aren't marine biologists
that we know about." I had a very good friend who was extremely
competent in the Russian language; son of an old Czarist
diplomat, in fact. He was a professor of zoology up the coast a
ways. "We ought to invite him, so we can find out what's really
going on."

So we had these three characters, so all they could do was
speak Russian to each other. There weren't any Russians.

Lage: No Russians came?

139

Hedgpeth: That's right. I was told later by one of them that trips abroad
were predicated upon having published a stated number of pages
in the preceding year. A stall-out in the state printing office
could fix these guys, if that was the case, if nothing else.

Well anyway, we got out to the head of Point Loma on this
tour, and somebody said, "What's all that over there?" We could
see across the channel to the navy airfield right behind the
Hotel Del Coronado. I said, "Well, that's a military airfield,
and those are ammunition bunkers you see around there. You can
find a map of this in the latest issue of the Russian Fisheries
Gazette."

Well, this brought my little pal in the Office of Naval
Intelligence out. "What do you mean by making jokes like that?
This is no joke." I said, "San Diego, of course, is a major
tuna port. The Russian Fisheries Gazette has a big article
about it, and they happen to have a map of the whole San Diego
harbor with all the things that are blanked on our maps all
carefully labeled." He said, "I don't believe you." I said,
"Well, it's still on the rack upstairs; go ahead and look at
it."

So he tromped up there, and after about half an hour he
came back and said, "Well, you're right." [laughter] I guess
he could read a little Russian anyway.

Lage: The irony of the Cold War psychology.

Hedgpeth: Yes, I got so I--I should be ashamed of myself. I got in the

habit of baiting these characters. We had a big affair with the
Russian exploring vessel Vitlaz, meaning a knight, or a
conqueror, very similar to Challenger, as a matter of fact, at
least in the context of the name. That of course was the first
big world-round research vessel in the history of oceanography.
But the Russian ship was a reconditioned old fruit-boat, or
something. Big ship, though.

Anyhow, they wanted to stop at San Francisco at Fisherman's
Wharf. Since the request had come deviously from Canada via the
Soviet Embassy in Canada to the U.S. Department of State in
Washington, it became a high matter of protocol and all that.
Since they had asked to come up by Dillon Beach where I had this
lab then, I was a member of this discussion committee.

Things went like this: the navy wanted to pull them off to
Treasure Island or down by the dock at Hunters Point where they
could keep an eye on them. I said, "Well, they want to come to
Fisherman's Wharf, and I thought we ought to be able to show

140

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

them this is a free country." They looked at me rather
frostily. Some idiot said, "Well, they were talking about
plannings all for the scientific staff, not for the crew. All
these people play soccer, don't they?" And they said, "Yes,
yes."

"Well, there must be a ship's crew for soccer. Why not
have a game with them with the Olympic Club soccer team?" I
said, "Well, it happens that this year's Olympic Club soccer
team is a gang of Hungarian refugees who skipped the Australian
Olympics. You'll have blood and brains scattered all over Kezar
[Stadium] if you put that batch together."

They were Hungarian refugees?

I think they were Hungarian refugees. But anyway, the Olympics
had been held in Australia. Somehow they wound up in San
Francisco. So the committee agreed that might not be a very
good idea.

When the dust was all settled, they all went up to Fort
Ross and put their name in the book there- -

They took the crew up there?

No, the party was supposed to be for the scientific staff. One
of my friends who worked for the Office of Naval Research was
along incognito; of course, it was difficult for him to manage
that with me around. Some guy asked me if he could borrow the
guest book from our station. I said, "What for?" He said, "We
think some of these people were not supposed to have been on
this trip." I said, "You think those guys would sign a guest
book?" He said, "Well, you have a thought there." [laughter]

So after that, a few days later, the ship had gone, I got a
call from ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, again, saying,
"There's been a cylindrical package left for you here." I said,
"It gurgles?" They said, "Yes. Can't send it through the mail,
you know. When are you coming down to San Francisco?" I said,
"I don't plan to come down for a couple of weeks or so."

About two days later, he shows up,
to be going by — "

By Dillon Beach? [laughs]

said, "I just happened

Well, yes, from Highway 101 out to Dillon Beach. Hardly what
you'd call just dropping by. So he handed me this bottle all
wrapped up, and I put it on the desk and said, "Thank you." He

141

said, "Will you open it, please?" I said, "Oh, all right." So
I unwrapped it, and it had two brochures wrapped around it. He
said, "What are those?" I flipped them open and said, "Well,
this one's a guide to the great monastery over to the west of
Moscow, sort of like one of our national park guides; here's the
architecture and history of it, and not exactly what you'd call
a military document." "No."

Lage: He couldn't read Russian?

Hedgpeth: I guess not. At least, he behaved as if he couldn't. And a

reprint about a fish population, and the bottle was revealed at
last. I said, "Would you like to photograph the label?" He
said, "No, we--" and stopped in mid-sentence and realized he'd
given it away. They'd been all the way through the thing, of
course. He said, "Tell me, why did you stop there at the
highway below Fort Ross? Everybody got out and broke off a
piece of the redwood tree. Why do you suppose they did that?"
I said, "Well, I suppose the commissars advised them to bring
back specimens to test for radioactive fallout." I should have
been ashamed of myself, because he got real interested and
started scribbling in his notebook. I don't know what the devil
they made of that.

Lage: What was in the package, aside from these things that wrapped it
up? Was it a bottle?

Hedgpeth: Yes, a bottle of second-rate champagne. Can't say that some of
the Russian vintages are very good, but anyhow, just the
thoughts behind them. [laughs]

Lage: Those are very telling experiences with the Office of Naval
Intelligence.

Did the work on the treatise do a lot. in terms of your
recognition as a--?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. I was sent off to the Zoological Congress in '53 as an
official delegate of the Geological Survey, and that sort of
thing .

Lage: And you certainly got to know a lot of people that you--

Hedgpeth: Yes, and I got the nice invitations to the better cocktail
parties and that kind of stuff.

Lage: Did you enjoy that?
Hedgpeth: Oh, sure.

142

Lage: At one point you make the remark that, "Not much was going on at
Scripps in those years." Elaborate on that.

Hedgpeth: You see, they were just getting started. In the first place,
what had been going on was highly classified, and this was the
business of underwater sound and tidal heights and offshore — .
They were working all this out, and they were strictly military
matters.

There's a story about that, too; two of my friends in
Washington were asked to do the same thing. They were under
strict rules or regulations not to tell anybody what they were
doing. It turned out they were trying to work out the wave
action and tidal action on the atolls and so forth of the
Pacific theater of war, and finally, inevitably, these two
people wound up in front of some higher-up at the same time.
One of them had been assigned to do this on the basis of
Japanese maps, and the other on the basis of British Admiralty
maps. "Why didn't you two guys get together? You've duplicated
this work," and so on. "We weren't allowed to speak to each
other, sir." [laughter]

So anyway, it was just beginning to open up, and it got
much livelier as we went on.

Responsibilities of Editing the Treatise on Marine Ecology

Lage: Who was the director at Scripps at that time?

Hedgpeth: Roger Revelle.

Lage: How was it working with Roger Revelle? What kind of person--?

Hedgpeth: He never asked you to do anything. The only time he asked me to
do anything is when he wanted to get in on the treatise; he
thought maybe with this all going on, and seeing all these--

Lage: He'd been on the committee, after all.

Hedgpeth: Yes, right. I don't know how often he'd been to committee

meetings. He was notorious for forgetting things. So he wanted
to write the chapter along with the Australian fellow, named
Rhodes Fairbridge. I don't think either of them understood what
the other was trying to say. He was the last one to get his
paper in, Revelle — this is to be expected—he often diddled so
long with the budget, or ignored it, he had to carry the entire

143

staff out of his own pocket for a month or so. At least one
time, I worked on a monthly check from Roger Revelle. It was a
no-interest loan, of course; we always paid him back, but it
didn't endear him, I guess, to the pencil-pushers in the
university system.

Lage: Was this just a habit of procrastinating?
Bedgpeth: Yes, I think so.
II

Lage: Now, you were mentioning Roger Revelle writing an article with
somebody else, and they didn't understand each other. What did
that involve for you as editor?

Hedgpeth: Well, I just had to ignore it, or correct their grammar when it
got a little too fuzzy, which--.

Lage: Did you have to make major changes in people's articles?

Hedgpeth: Not then. I had to remove a lot from Hubert Gaspers' draft; he
wanted a whole subchapter on the commercial fisheries of the
Black Sea, about another 100 pages. At that time, he didn't
know English well enough to write it, so it was in German.

Lage: Did you have to translate it?

Hedgpeth: No, I prevailed upon Karl Patterson Schmitt at the Field Museum,
who had a hobby of sitting around at lunchtime translating
German for anybody who needed it. He would read and translate
it off, and they would have to write it down as he proceeded.
He learned his German from his German- speaking family in
Wisconsin, I guess. German, of course, was a regular language
in many of the high schools in the Midwest up to 1917. So
anyway, old Karl would rattle these off. I think it was sent in
bits and pieces anyway. He translated, and we assembled it for
him. Finally, I realized we couldn't have that much on
commercial fisheries. I heard a scream of anguish from poor old
Hubert Gaspers — "Aber, Gerade keine Kiirzung, bitte!"

Lage: You'll have to translate that one —

Hedgpeth: "But certainly no cutting, please!" [laughter]

Lage: It's a delicate position to be in, I would think.

144

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Yes, yes; you had to make some decisions now and then. Well, he
took it in good grace. When he finally saw what we had done, he
realized it was a bit out of place.

Now, I notice that you wrote a lot of the chapters. Had you
intended to at the beginning?

No, I didn't know I was going to have to do that much. I knew
I'd have to rewrite Gordon's, because his style was a bit more
anecdotal than we needed. Also limited; he was restricted in
some of the things we required, partly because of limited access
to libraries. Of course, we supplemented it also with annotated
bibliographies, and some of these are by different people.

How many volumes do we have here?

Two, the living and the dead.

So you have ecology and paleoecology.

Yes. I've got paleoecology, but I don't have much to say in
that one .

Now, you say Gordon Gunter's style was anecdotal,
usual for a scientific presentation?

Was that

Not all of it, a trace of it. [in drawl] We are still friends,
though I must say, his politics is something. For a while, he
did time as a chaplain at a Jefferson Davis post of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans. I asked "What do you do at those
meetings?" "Well, talk about history and the past. I did
accomplish something at the last meeting, there was some
complaint about having the U.S. flag in the room alongside the
Stars and Bars. I settled the argument by saying we could leave
the U.S. flag out in the hall during our meetings."

We were driving along the waterfront past Jefferson Davis ' s
mansion, Beauvoir, in Biloxi. He said, "We put one over on them
Yankees. They don't know it, but the Confederate flagpole is
six inches higher than the Yankee flagpole." I said, [in drawl]
"You reckon I should take off my hat?" He said, "You're makin'
fun of me." I said, "Well--." It cost me two bottles of
bourbon to calm him. [laughter]

I hope he has a good sense of humor,
that to have the friendship.

Yes, yes.

It seems to me you'd need

145

Lage: This must have been quite an accomplishment, when the treatise
finally came out.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: How did the fact that you were so involved in this publication
influence your later direction?

Hedgpeth: Well, I learned a lot about all the worldwide situations and
stuff.

Lage: It sounds like a great way to start out a career.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Gave me a lot of lecture material. [laughter]

Lage: And a lot of people got to know you.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

[I owe a great deal to Gordon because of our summer in the
Sierra in 1938. He encouraged me to return to college, and
eventually to work for the Ph.D. My thesis, in fact, is based
on the work I did in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the job he
got for me during the World War II years. Last December, when I
had a speaking engagement in Tallahassee, I made a side trip to
Ocean Springs to thank him for what he did for me. I don't know
where I would have wound up if it hadn't been for him. It was
probably our last meeting. --JWH, 3/2/1995]

Lage: Do you have anything to add about Roger Revelle, or what you saw
at Scripps while you were there?

Hedgpeth: Yes. There were a lot of young people who were really coming
up. Most of them have now finished their careers. For
instance, [Henry W. ] Menard, he died of cancer a few years ago.
Several others have fallen by the wayside. But some of these
people are the senior ones now, and, "Who are these new
whippersnappers taking the place over, don't even know what
oceanography is all about?" Well, they've had several directors
who weren't oceanographers . Nierenberg was some kind of an
atmospheric physicist or something, and he had an ego somewhat
larger than necessary.

Roger was always pretty easy to get along with. They had a
graduate student group that had no official name, really, that
met around in people's homes, and after some experience with one
professor who was a notorious windbag and would horn in on
everything, the students decided that faculty members would be

146

allowed only by invitation. Since I was not on the faculty, I
was more a member than visitor.

Well, Roger always tended to be overimpressed by slick-
trick-talking fellows, so there was this guy, Buzzati-Traverso,
an Italian geneticist who appeared on the scene, I believe, as a
visiting professor at Berkeley for Curt Stern when he was on
sabbatical. He came down to Scripps, and he gave us this song
and dance that genetics is the only real biology because it was
predictable. Some of the old guard around the place, like
Martin Johnson, I don't know who else--oh yes, Denis Fox, who
was the cause of the anti- faculty policy of the student groups
and probably Carl Hubbs--resented Buzzati and did their best to
"get rid of that damned Italian."

So anyway, one night, we were going to hear Buzzati defend
his case. Roger asked to come along, so naturally they didn't
tell him to stay away. You may have known, Roger Revelle was
about six-feet-six or something. (One story about him is that
the only shoe store that could outfit him was a store in
Washington, D.C., that specializes in supplying shoes for
outsized blacks. He said he and some other important
personality were the only white customers of these people.)
Anyhow, the conversation went on this evening in the usual
agitated way, especially with John McGowan, who is now a senior
biologist there I guess, simply by enduring it all. He's a
little banty Irish type, expresses himself loudly and with
somewhat picturesque profanity at times.

Anyway, after the evening, I was getting into my car, and
Roger's car was parked right in front of mine. He turned back
and looked and saw me, and he came over and said, "I'm worried
about John McGowan. He doesn't believe in population dynamics."
Well, in the context of that meeting, I didn't either. I said,
"I don't either." Roger got up straight, shook his head, went
on and got in his car and drove away. [laughs]

In his chapter he wrote for the treatise, he was the last
person to submit his copy. And then about two weeks after, he
writes me a little note on that inevitable blue memo paper that
he would like to have his manuscript back so he could rewrite
it, and he would of course pay for all printing costs and
everything. Of course, I was only the--I was not the head
editor of this series. That was Agnes Creagh, who was a very
nice gal, but she was a pretty strong-minded Irish type herself.
See, now her name doesn't even appear in it.

Lage: Doesn't appear. But she was editing the whole series?

147

Hedgpeth: Yes, she was editor for the Geological Society of America, and

she had the last word over style and other such things. She did
very well. But anyway, 1 forwarded this on, in fear and
trembling. I got this letter which in effect said, "Roger can
go to hell. The problem is not that somebody will pay for the
cost, but all the time that's necessary to do this all over
again!" So I went up and laid this in front of Revelle, and he
looked at it. He said, "Well, she's right." [laughter]

Lage: A reasonable man.

Hedgpeth: He may have had some run-in with her previously, I wouldn't
know.

Lage: He sounds like he knew it was hopeless. Was there any talk in
those early years about expanding the campus to become a--?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. One of Roger's favorite ideas for a while was to call
it a Technische Hochschule.

Lage: What does that translate to?

Hedgpeth: That would be the kind of thing like MIT or something, an

institute. Of course, some of us wags, I don't know who did it,
worked out an acronym for what we should consider the proper
name for it: the Scripps Higher Institute of Technology,
[laughter]

I guessed that before you even said it!

Yes, that didn't go so well. [laughter] So anyway, it became
university. He irritated the board of regents no end, I gather,
by preparing stationery on his own volition and labeling it as
University of California at La Jolla, instead of at San Diego.
Of course, the city fathers of San Diego rose off like
skyrockets when they saw that one. [laughter] I guess he was
reprimanded before the board for doing that, I don't know. It
was sort of uncalled-for, like fiddling around in the budgets.

Lage: La Jolla is part of the city of San Diego, just for the record.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. Scripps Institution of Oceanography is still at La
Jolla.

Lage: La Jolla maintains its own identity.

Hedgpeth: Yes, it's managed to hold out for its own post office and all of
that. Well Roger was prone to that, but he was loyal to most of

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

148

his people. He and Carl Hubbs were on the same list for the
National Academy--.

Lage: To be fellows?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I don't know which one was first, but I think Roger was.
We were walking across the lawn that day, and I said, "I'm glad
to see you've made the academy." He said, "Well, thank you, but
I don't know what Hubbs did to deserve this." Of course, tried
the same line on Carl Hubbs and got about the same kind of
retort on Roger Revelle.

Lage: There wasn't too much love lost between them?
Hedgpeth: No love between those two.
Lage: I guess I don't know Carl Hubbs.

Hedgpeth: Well, Carl Hubbs was the big I am of ichthyology, had written
hundreds if not thousands of papers. He couldn't say anything
without having to put an "ah" between each word, almost. Took
him a long time. The story goes he learned a bit of what we
call Chicano Spanish by making trips up and down from San Diego
to Ensenada, and probably further south of that, as a matter of
fact. Anyway, he attempted to give a lecture in Mexico City at
the big international geological convention, in Spanish. The
audience awarded him both ears. [laughter] I don't think Hubbs
ever knew what that really meant.

Lage: Well, what did it mean?

Hedgpeth: That's when you really bungle things in the bullfight, or
anything like that.

Lage: What was the influence of this big red book itself on the field
of marine biology? Did it take the field in a different
direction or have an effect?

Hedgpeth: Not a particularly different direction, because we already knew
those basic directions, which are in there. The only thing is,
I pointed out it didn't have a chapter on statistical
procedures. I couldn't get anybody who wanted to do it at that
time. We had a person here who was doing a lot of nonparametric
statistics. He didn't want to be involved. But for some years,
the treatise was one of the essential books that had to be seen
in every library.

The last few days of it I had to assemble the chapters and
all that kind of routine stuff, so I had to spend about two

149

weeks at Columbia University in New York, in some little
subsidized hotel they had for visiting faculty. What we had was
a little attic suite somewhere in one of the buildings. 1 had
to work right under the head of Nathanial Southgate Shaler
[founder of the Geological Society], which was bronze and looked
pretty heavy, but it was fairly solid on its pedestal. They
don't have very many earthquakes there, anyway.

Association with College of the Pacific

Hedgpeth: Our topic next time is going to be the Pacific Marine Station.
How did you happen to move to Dillon Beach?

Hedgpeth: Well, Hubbs made me feel he wasn't too much interested in seeing
me stay around La Jolla. I gather Martin Johnson felt somewhat
the same way.

Lage: Did you get a sense of what their thinking was?

Hedgpeth: No, not really. Rather odd, as a matter of fact. I had been
summer teaching at Dillon Beach for several years, since 1947,
as a matter of fact, before I got associated with Scripps, as a
summer instructor. So they [College of Pacific] made me an
offer. They wanted me to come up there in the laboratory full-
time. I had some certain sentimental attraction, I guess, to
the place, since my father's people were all Methodists.

Lage: Was this the College of Pacific that was the overriding
institution?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And was that a Methodist —

Hedgpeth: Yes. You had to be a Methodist to be an executive officer in
the place.

Lage: Did you have to be a Methodist to be a head of the laboratory?

Hedgpeth: No, they were a bit concerned about that aspect in me when they
saw me smoking cigars, and they didn't approve of that. But
anyhow, we got along all right in that context. They offered me
the job, so I went up to see Roger and told him about it. He
said, "Well, we've arranged a budget for you." See, I wasn't on
the main line for anything in particular; I wasn't connected
with any department or anything.

150

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

You weren't being paid by the departments,
by the Office of Naval Research.

You were being paid

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Of course, two-thirds of the staff was on outside money. That
didn't make much difference to me. But it didn't go through a
regular department decision or anything. So I said I hadn't
heard anything about that. He seemed a little surprised at
that. I don't know who was supposed to have told me, but 1
expect it must have been Hubbs.

Anyhow, he summoned it up and showed it to me. 1 looked at
it, and—see, they wanted me to run an invertebrate museum and
work on the collections. They had a guy running the fish
collections, which was Hubbs' influence, of course. The budget
had already been debited before I even knew about it for about
$5,000 for office furniture and stuff.

You mean this was all set up, but no one had told you?

Yes, particularly Carl Hubbs. I took a look at that and I said,
"Well, I think I'd prefer to go on and be cock of my own dung
hill," or something like that — I don't know whether I said
exactly that.

But you foresaw that this would be a difficult working
situation.

Yes, it was obvious it would not be a very useful way to start
out.1

So the idea of being in charge of the lab at Dillon Beach was
something that appealed to you?

Oh, yes. That, of course, was a little better country, too.
San Diego is an awful, dry, desert place, and not much to do
after you once go over the hill except look at an old ghost town
or go out to the desert and wander around among the cactus.

Was La Jolla a lively place intellectually at the time, or was
it kind of a backwater?

Oh, it was very lively intellectually, yes.
people there coming through, going on.

We had all kinds of

'It is not without significance, and considerable speculation, that
Hubbs left his files to the Scripps archives with the stipulation that they
were to be closed for thirty years. — JWH.

151

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

We haven't talked about when you were married,
that date on the record at this point.

We ought to get

Florence and I were married December 29, 1946, in Texas. [We
have two children: Sarah Ellen (Mrs. Paul Boly), vice-principal
of Westview High School in Beaverton, Oregon, and Warren Joel, a
practicing architect in Santa Rosa. Both are graduates of the
University of Oregon. Sarah has two children and Warren, four.
Since Sarah's husband is a grade school principal, both the
children get all A's; they have no choice--JWH. ]

Did you meet your wife in Texas?

No, at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, after some
correspondence. Later she came down to Texas. We're both
graduates of the same class, but you know how Berkeley is. It's
even bigger now.

More on Graduate Studies in Texas

Hedgpeth: Anyhow, in Texas I was registered as a graduate student. I had
to get out of the Game, Fish, and Oyster Commission, because
there was a very peculiar boss who was somewhat difficult to get
along with. Turned out later he had done time for petty
thievery or something, but I never detected any of that aspect
in his conduct. He was an essentially untrained person who had
a heck of a lot of energy, really could work hard. He loved to
drive around in the fast Texas patrol boat. It's rather
dangerous in those shallow bays, because there was apt to be a
log or something floating around to run into. I gave him the
name Admiral Bilgewater behind his back, and finally — it may
have got to him, I don't know.

So the University of Texas was building this lab at Port
Aransas, out on the outer shore of Mustang Island, and Dr. E. J.
Lund came around to Rockport and he said, "We have to have
somebody there before we can open the place for any regular work
to meet the fire insurance requirements." He was talking to me
about Thursday or Friday, and "Would you move over there on
Monday?" [laughter] I did. I went to Port Aransas and
registered with the University of Texas as a full candidate for
the doctorate.

Lage: And you were heading up this lab at the same time? Overlooking
it?

152

Hedgpeth: Yes. I was sort of the chief biologist at that time. Gordon

Gunter was director for a while, except he was over in Miami as
visiting professor for a year, teaching at the time. Anyhow,
Dr. Lund was a person who had a high capacity, being a stubborn
Swede, for irritating people. I don't know what brought it all
on, but he was tried before the faculty senate for refusing to
teach a course. The course was biophysics. He was a great one
on studying electric patterns in fir tree tips and this kind of
stuff. He wrote a whole book about it, as a matter of fact.

Anyhow, I was up there in Austin one day when this fight
was in full tilt. He wasn't around. I was in his office, it
was a warm day, a long drive from the coast up to Austin, 200
miles. So I was reclining on the couch in his office and the
people came in and didn't see me. They were from the botany
department. Lund had a greenhouse there, raising a lot of
plants. They had charts, and they said, "Now, we will turn this
into such-and-such a room, and we will put in a partition here,"
and this kind of conversation. Of course, I knew that Lund had
never heard about these characters, guys from the botany
department anyway.

As the fight went on he would come down from Austin and
would sit there and read the testimony of his trial and complain
flat-out, "Can't you see how wrong this is?" Well, I understood
enough English to know he was misinterpreting some of the stuff.

Lage: So he was at some--

Hedgpeth: Well, they said what he had done was --he said he couldn't find
any physicists who wanted to take his course who knew enough
biology, and he couldn't find enough biologists who knew enough
physics or mathematics to take his course, so he canceled it.
Nobody met the prerequisites. Well, this was considered a
disingenuous way to look at it.

Lage: Terrible lot of back-biting going on.
Hedgpeth: Yes. It went on for years.

Lage: Well, it brought you back to California at least. We might have
lost you.

Hedgpeth: Dr. Lund was a member of the American Society of Zoologists, and
one of the things he was charged with was abusing his mailing
privilege by sending out an eighty-page statement of his cause
on the university mailing privilege to the entire membership of
the American Society of Zoologists. [laughter] So I wrote back
to the chairman of zoology at Berkeley at the time, who was

153

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Harold Kirby, and I said, "I have encountered some difficulties
here, perhaps best explained if you've seen Dr. Lund's statement
he sent to the ASZ membership." The reply from Kirby was very
brief and to the point: "We certainly have read that statement.
We are arranging for a fellow teaching assistantship for you for
next term." That was that.

So you got some sympathy there.

Well, it was obvious there was going to be a fight. One of the
things Lund did was go out and make a lot of money in real
estate. His wife said, "You're supposed to be bright; you ought
to be able to make more money than all those fool professors
over there."

So he invested in real estate and subdivided one of the choicest
parts in Austin.

Did that annoy people, or did it--?

It annoyed his faculty colleagues. He obviously was becoming a
millionaire. That just didn't ride well with some of these
guys. But anyhow, the controversy was all through no fault of
my own. I did go as far as two foreign language examinations.
Of course, they were not allowed at Berkeley, but it didn't
matter.

What do you mean, they weren't allowed at Berkeley? Oh, they
didn't accept them?

Yes, they don't accept a foreign language exam because they want
it given by faculty members who can—most institutions are this
way- -see whether you know enough science as well as the language
to manage with it.

They want their own professors to give the exam.

Yes. I remember the one in French I took at Austin was kind of
funny. You were allowed to bring along your own book, so I
grabbed the first thing off the shelf, a little book on oysters,
and oyster culture. The gal who was assigned to this language
exam was from the French department at Austin. She asked me to
translate this paragraph as I read it, and so I did that, and
that was all right. Then some chum of hers came in, just from
Paris, and these two ladies got to jabbering away in machine-gun
French. Finally she turns around to me and says, "Can you
explain why we don't have any good oysters in Texas?" in

ISA

English. So I got to talking about the Texas oyster problems,
and "Eh bien, that's beautiful."

Lage: You explained it in French?

Hedgpeth: No, I did not. You don't have to speak the language to pass a
reading exam, you know. She was too interested in the latest
notes from Paris from her friend. So finally she more or less
pushed me out of the room, signed my card.

The other guy in German collected dictionaries, and I said,
"The problem I have here, sir, is that you have so darn many
dictionaries, I got too interested in looking at the different
definitions of some of these long words." "Mmm, yes, I suppose
that's right," and then he signed me off.

When I got to Berkeley I got through the exams very easily.
The first part of the German exam was very easy; there happened
to be a lot of pictures in the paper the professor had assigned
me to read, and you can translate the pictures and come out
pretty well. The second was a couple of long passages from
Richard Goldschmidt's Physiological Genetics or something. He
said, "The first part of your exam is pretty good, but this
second part, I don't know."

I said, "Dr. Stern, I have enough trouble trying to
understand Professor Goldschmidt in English." He said,
"Jawohl!" and signed the chit. [laughing]

Lage: It helps to have the quick comeback, I would think.
Hedgpeth: Yes, I guess so. So that was that.

Then the other one was funny, that was French from
Goldschmidt himself. I knew French a little better than German,
but anyhow, got a long chapter on stridulating organs in
orthoptera, which means grasshoppers and crickets. At the end
of it, I wrote a list of names. I said, "These apparently are
local names for various kinds of crickets." He said, "Yes, they
are. Nobody knows things like that in another's language, you
know." So that was that.

Lage: That was okay?

Hedgpeth: That was all the comment I got from him.

Lage: At least you knew what they were.

155

Hedgpeth: Yes, that's the main thing. Yes, they won't fight too much when
you indicate that.

Lage: Okay, well I think we should stop for today and take up next
time with Dillon Beach, and I'd like to talk about the Bodega
Head controversy- -

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, thatl

Lage: --and the way you brought that to light, and some of your
observations on the PG&E and on the fight against PG&E.

Hedgpeth: Aha, dear me, yes.

Lage: That should be lively, shouldn't it?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Yes, that was kind of entertaining in some ways. Did keep
me occupied.

156

V DILLON BEACH AND BODEGA BAY, 1957-1965
[Session 5: October 15, 1992] ft

Director of the Pacific Marine Station at Dillon Beach
Alden Noble

Lage: We ended last time with your story of how you happened to leave
Scripps and come to the Pacific Marine Station. So I wanted you
to give me an idea of what the Marine Station was like, and
something about its background, and then we'll go from there.

Hedgpeth: It goes back, in part, to the influence of Drs. Light, Kofoid,
and those people in the grand old days. Alden Noble was a
student there in the 1920s.

Lage: What was that name?

Hedgpeth: Alden, direct descendant of John Alden. At any rate, he got a
degree in working in parasitology primarily. Both he and his
two twin brothers did. As far as I know, the twins are still
living. One is Glenn, who was the professor—Glenn was at Cal
Poly, and Elmer was at UC Santa Barbara. Elmer rose to the
position of assistant or maybe chancellor for a few years. He
was a fairly well known administrator. But they were born in
Korea, and all of them spoke Korean, I think. Their parents
were Methodist missionaries.

When they came over here, the Korean accent sounds very
much like a British accent. Alden was, I think, the oldest
member of the family, in his generation, anyway. He started
leading field trips in zoology out to the nearest beach. He was
at the College of the Pacific then.

157

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

He was a marine biologist?

Yes. Well, he was by more or less general background. So he
liked to run summer sessions, and for a while, they used to rent
the old dance hall at Dillon Beach. The University of
California was interested in getting a marine lab somewhere near
Berkeley. For years, they went down to Moss Beach.

But anyhow, both universities were trying to get out to the
seashore, and at Berkeley, they used to give Easter courses, a
week course, and that was held at Moss Beach. The only building
big enough was the local beer hall, and Dr. Light used to have
to lecture at the bar, standing over the bar.

[laughs] From his pictures, it would seem that would be very
incongruous .

Well, he managed to get along with these minor indignities, you
know. Took that in his stride, though I'm not sure he hasn't
made jokes about it.

So both Berkeley and Pacific were interested, and there was
some talk for a while that they might join forces and have a
cooperative lab at Dillon Beach. I first saw the beach in 1941,
and that was in the spring or early summer, when the tides are
very low. Light was running that course at the time, and I
think Ed Ricketts stopped by to give a lecture also.

You were a student?

I wasn't a student there
Light's, and had been on
two or three times. One
people to see as much of
picked this seashore for
along pretty well, but I

at all; I had been a student of
the regular field trips to Moss Beach
of his characteristics was to get
animals in nature as possible, and he
that purpose. So Light and Noble got
think there was always the basic worry

that big brother would be a bit overwhelming.

So then the war intervened — see, the summer of "41 was the
last session of anything for several years around that part of
the coast. Soon after December 7, the army moved in and
fortified Tomales Point. I don't know if they had there more
than 50-caliber machine guns or something. I just learned the
other day a funny thing I didn't know about, that a Japanese
submarine stopped two or three times at Port Orford, Oregon, and
they submerged and rested on the bottom near Battle Rock. My
great-grandfather founded that town.

Lage:

And they knew — they tracked them at the time?

158

Hedgpeth: They didn't know about that. They didn't know it until after

the commander of the submarine let it all out years later. See,
they had dropped some of these—thrown a few shells over, and
set loose some balloons, fire balloons. Fortunately, they
didn't start anything. You have to have the right climate and
wind conditions to really do damage with those things.

Anyhow, Dillon Beach was closed, pretty much off limits
except for people who owned cottages there and came out for a
couple of weeks or two. But they couldn't have classes there or
any of that kind of activity.

Charles Berolzheimer ' s Contribution

Hedgpeth: So as soon as the war ended, about '45, '46, the interest

renewed. Noble had given a course of field trips at one time or
another which Charles Berolzheimer attended. He was a member of
a very wealthy family, the owners of Little Saint Simon Island
in Georgia, and the Great Simon Island used to be owned by the
Baruchs, I think. As far as I know, Charles and the family
still own Little Saint Simon's, and they welcome people to come
there and look at the birds, Audubon types and so on, so forth.
He said any time I get anywhere near reasonable distance of the
islands, say like Atlanta, I was to phone the number and they'd
send a plane to take me out there. Well, I have never been near
there since. I'd like to see their island, but I don't know
whether I ever will.

He was very curious and a person interested in all sorts of
things. So the family gave him one of their businesses, one of
these kind of things they didn't realize they had or anything,
namely a mill or a plant in Stockton for sawing up pencil slats.
It also included a lot of forest land. Now, the best tree for
this is the incense cedar. The place is called California Cedar
Products. You have to understand the significance of this in
another way, namely that most of the lead pencils we have, the
leads are made in Europe, Czechoslovakia in particular.

Lage: This was even back in the forties?

Hedgpeth: Well, of course, now, lead pencils are an endangered species,
but Berolzheimer hopes not, obviously — . So to make the wood
casings--a lot of those pencils are cased in this country — they
have to cut them in blocks about six by three inches, and I
don't know how long- -and then they have a gang saw which saws it
up and it splits up into slats. Then they work them in other

159

processes into those little halves that they encase the pencil
in. So who controls the cedar controls a lot of the wood pencil
market in the country. I called him the pencil baron now and
then, [laughs]

Lage: And he controlled the cedar, is that what we're--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He donated the cedar for the buildings, they were made of
incense cedar.

Lage: The buildings at Dillon Beach?

Hedgpeth: Yes. The framework of the buildings, two big buildings, were

government warehouse steel framework, and these planks are three
inches thick, because they had the dry rot in them. Most of the
cedar when it gets older, apparently, very commonly, has dry
rot, and when you get a three-inch plank, there's seldom a place
where the thickness is less than an inch. So these are heavy,
stout things, and they simply bolted those things to the steel
framework.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Now, a story about that, of course, goes all the way down
to the end of time. County regulations say that studding must
be used so many inches apart, fourteen inches, and all of this
kind of stuff. They came out and looked and saw this was
impossible. Of course, they demanded all electrical connections
be in conduits. It cost much more to do that than string them
up if anything. We had our problems with the Marin County
Building Department, or whatever it was.

I remember once when we were changing some wiring, I phoned
down and said, "I think the electric wiring is now ready for
inspection." The little girl said, "Well, Mr. Faraday will be
right out." I said, "Mr. who?" She didn't think that was odd
at all. [laughter]

So when the Marine Station was abandoned, Pacific found
itself in a real hole. You've got a building that's not to
standard specifications, which was more or less conceded to the
university for this particular function. When one guy on the
county board expressed fear that that dry rot would infect the
buildings nearby, Berolzheimer hired several wood specialists to
point out this stuff is not transferrable from one piece of
lumber to another. He hired a whole committee, I guess.

Was this when the station was closed in the seventies?

No, it was when it was being built. And he was donating all
that lumber for it; it came from him. For years, he subvented

160

the lab by about $5,000 a year. I never knew about it, I was
never told.

Lage: Did he come around?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he often came around. He was a great one for picking up
interesting characters. I think they picked him up, to some
extent, minor French nobility and heavens knows what. Of
course, he paid all their expenses, so he'd always be bringing
in these interesting and sometimes strange people.

Lage: But you didn't know that he was donating on an ongoing basis?

Hedgpeth: I was not told by the business office.

Lage: Isn't that interesting?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And I've never told Charles that either.

Lage: What made him become interested in the lab?

Hedgpeth: He was interested in Alden Noble, because he had taken the

course in marine life. He had a very lively interest in that
kind of thing. So this was primarily based on the fact that
Alden Noble was being helped out.

Lage: Now, Alden Noble was still around when you went--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Actually, I started going to Dillon Beach about 1946 or

'47. I was down in Texas at the time, and wrote a letter saying
I was interested-
Mrs. H.: It was the summer of '48, Joel.

Hedgpeth: Well, you think that was it? Seems to me I was there one time

before. But anyhow, yes, they dedicated it in '48. I know they
had a session in '47. So I became a member of the summer
faculty, came there for several years.

Classes and Oceanographic Studies at the Station

Lage: Would you be teaching to the college students, or the broader
community?

Hedgpeth: No, what we did for the community is hold these public lectures.
That was my idea. I was surprised at the number of people who

161

showed up. Of course, Dillon Beach is not exactly on the main
line, you know. A lot of these people came from San Francisco
or Oakland. Of course, what they did was --we'd usually give it
on Fridays or sometimes Saturdays—they'd go and load up in the
Italian restaurants in Occidental and then come back in a mildly
torpid state to listen to lectures. That was all right by us,
but anyhow, that was the routine, you see, coming up that way.
I don't know whether the restaurants are as good as they used to
be or not. Some of them used to be very fine.

So we arranged series on every conceivable subject related
to the ocean or the locality. Most of the lecturers were my
friends from UC Berkeley.

Lage: Was this during those summers, or was this after you became
director?

Hedgpeth: It was after I became director. Put in a little budget for

that, not very much. [We paid the speakers fifty dollars, and
some of them spent overnight in the dorms. Some who brought
their wives spent the night at our homes. Our most popular
event was the seaweed excursion, led by Professor [George]
Papenfuss. He arrived early in the morning for the low tide and
stayed with people well into the afternon, helping out with
identification of the specimens. He loved it. --JWH]

Lage: Was it a project that broke even, or did it have to be
subsidized?

Hedgpeth: Well, they were free.

Lage: Oh, all the better.

Hedgpeth: Yes, we didn't expect to make any money out of that.

Lage: Times have changed.

Hedgpeth: I know. Yes, things ain't what they used to be.

Especially toward the end, we were operating primarily as a
graduate department of Pacific. We granted the master's degree,
and Pacific really didn't have the faculty for a good doctoral
program, though they changed their name to University of the
Pacific, gave honorary degrees, doctor of this or that. I
remember them giving my distant cousin Herschel H. an honorary
D.D., and as I passed by the academic line-up in the hallway,
waiting for the procession, I heard Herschel say, "Where's my
renegade cousin?" They looked over at me, "Oh, there you are."
I said, "Well, I congratulate you, sir." Well, the president

162

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

and the vice president were standing around beaming. Herschel
said, "Well, you know, D.D. either stands for deserved dignity
or donated dignity." [laughter]

Sounds like something of a renegade himself.

They were usually given to help the person, or he'd just been
named district superintendent and it was always felt the
district superintendent, you know, sort of like a monsignor in
the Catholic hierarchy, ought to have some title that might
enable him to get a little more money out of the congregation.
Methodists work that way. But I must say, it was highly
amusing. Made up for the fact that we all had been ordered to
buy academic regalia, and we were always seated in the rooting
section of the stadium without any protection from the
splinters. It was where the students sat, they'd had heavy
paper put on the seats so they wouldn't harm the robes, because
they all had rented robes. I always thought that was not very
nice.

And you sat in your own robes--?

Yes, in the splintered seats. Discrimination in sort of
reverse.

So your program was an academic program as well as a public
program?

Primarily academic. The public thing was only in the summer
season.

Was that part of your responsibility too, the teaching of these
students, or were you more running the lab?

We were funded enough to bring in visiting instructors, too, so
they could offer courses like oceanography and ichthyology.
That was one of the years of white shark occurrences, and
everybody was chasing white sharks around. Our ichthyology prof
was the only one who didn't catch a white shark, poor fellow.
He's retired out in—that horribly expensive region over there,
what the heck is that thing called, right below the Gualala
River in northern Sonoma County?

Sea Ranch?

Yes, he lives in Sea Ranch. His father-in-law was a very
successful engineer. He helped design our seawater system,
had a seawater system, couldn't figure out why we weren't
pulling much water in. See, we had to get out to the sandy

163

beach and use a filter out there. One of the disadvantages of
Dillon Beach is that the exact locality is inside a sandy beach,
so we had to filter water through the sand and pump it up about
a quarter-mile. That was the difference between about a half-
inch pipe and three-quarter-inch pipe. Mr. Mercer, or whatever
his name, sat down there with his pencil and said, "Well, to
begin with, you need a slightly larger pipe," in working on the
five-fourths or something like that ratio, circumference and
volume and so on. Well, it was an arcane world to me.

But what he did for us, I suppose it would cost us several

thousand bucks with anybody else, he did it all just for fun.

He was designing pumping systems for Arabia and that kind of
stuff, so I —

Lage: So he was a good resource.

Hedgpeth: I think he was a good resource for Fred Tarp to settle down in
Sea Ranch. We bump into him once in a while in the store in
town, and that's about it.

Lage: Why were you pumping the seawater in? Did you have tanks?

Hedgpeth: We had aquariums. We wanted to work with living materials. So
we had water tables, and an aquarium. Th& idea is, you bring
your animals in as alive as possible and watch them for a day or
two. A lot of students got interested in things that way, and
kept up with it. One of our prizes was--of course, she didn't
seem like that at the time. She was pretty much a kid then, I
think barely out of high school. Something seems to infest
young ladies with the idea that nudibranch are such beautiful
animals, we ought to be able to preserve them in full color.
Well, this is biochemically impossible. There's no known way to
do this. Try to tell them that, and they still want to fiddle
around with that.

Anyway, this gal was pretty bright, but the course she was
taking was a bit over her head. Lo and behold, about three
years ago, she gets a $25,000 prize for junior high school
teaching. I had lost track of her.

Lage: Do you remember her name?

Hedgpeth: Yes, Joan Steinberg. And so I phoned her up to congratulate
her, and she said the best course she ever had was the one we
had out at Dillon Beach. That was a wild one, because that was
the year of '51 when we had a lot of very advanced doctoral
candidates from Berkeley. They didn't want to take the course
from Ralph Smith and Cadet Hand.

164

Lage: Why is that?

Hedgpeth: I think it in part was the ancient dichotomy that existed

between paleontology and the vertebrate museum. The museum was
Dr. [Joseph] Grinnell's bailiwick.

Lage: The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And these people thought and lived rather differently than
the people up on the fourth floor. Field work was emphasized
under Grinnell. Bird watching was his forte.

Lage: What were the differences?

Hedgpeth: First place, their leading professors loathed each other.

Lage: Personally?

Hedgpeth: Yes, and they wrote rather stiff little memos on

interdepartmental or intradepartmental blue stationery. They
refused to speak at times, apparently.

Lage: This was paleontology and the museum?

Hedgpeth: Paleontology and the museum, they got along all right. But the
invertebrate or general zoology folk up on the fourth floor were
the hitch, and they were the ones that ran the course.1

Lage: And that was Cadet Hand and--?

Hedgpeth: Ralph Smith. Well, Ralph was an interesting character. Sir

Maurice Yonge, a visiting professor from England, said once he
was spending all his time trying to live up to the expectations
of that austere New England intelligence, referring to Ralph
Smith. I think I used that when I was asked to roast him at his
retirement party. I did tell some of the stories about him.
There was one about the hotshot solid A student who, when he got
a B in the course that Smith gave — he gave a course that started
on Friday afternoon and lasted until Monday morning, because it
was a course in physiology and he asked you to do experiments,
some of them requiring twenty-four hours or that kind of stuff--
this guy got a B in the course so he went around to see Ralph.
He said, "What's the matter? What did I do to deserve a B?"

'Since that time old L.S.B. [Life Sciences Building] has been
completely rebuilt inside, with entrances placed in the middle—a whole new
world, and everybody reorganized and most of them in "Integrated Biology."
— JWH.

165

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Ralph said, "Well, you know, I didn't see you around on
Sundays. I didn't think you were interested in the course."
[laughter]

There was another one played on him at a Christmas party
skit by a fellow who's now up in Oregon, Frank Gwilliam. Ralph
had this habit of tucking his necktie in his shirt all the time,
so at his roast we all arrived with our neckties tucked in the
shirt.

So anyway, the story is that Professor Bligh was out on a
field trip with his class. The teaching assistant runs up and
says, "Professor Bligh, the waves have just carried away two of
our students. What are we going to do?" He said, "Send out the
reinforcements." [laughter] These were the kind of stories
that generated about him.

The Paleo Department asked me if I would serve for the
living invertebrates on their prelims, and I said, "Well, I know
what's going on, and I'm not out to drum up trade, but I would
prefer to examine students who had taken a summer course so I'd
know something about them." So that year the course was packed
with invertebrate characters and paleontologists, and poor
little Miss Steinberg was sort of lost in it all, but she did
pretty well. I gave her a B.

So they were there because you were going to appear on their
doctoral panels?

Yes. Oh, I had great fun with that.

How did the conflict between these two departments come into
play here?

I don't know if it was so much of a conflict — .
Did you get in the middle of it?

No, I took a seminar in paleo from Wyatt Durham; I don't know
how I got mixed up in it. But of course, paleo was clear up in
the Hearst Mining Building with geology, and geographically it
was far away from LSB and even from the library.

That ' s an odd placement for it .

Yes. Well, they had their own library up there. But they sort
of lived in their own world. That's one of the reasons the
Treatise on Marine Ecology was made at all, was to try to bring

166

a living life to the people who were interested in animals that
were very dead. Things have changed in that a bit, I think.

Lage: In what respect?

Hedgpeth: Well, they're more enlightened. Actually, you see, Dillon Beach
plugged along as a sort of an insular little place, not too well
known, until Ralph Gordon Johnson appeared on the scene.

Lage: When was that, and who was that?

Hedgpeth: Actually, I have an obit here on him that I keep [by Thomas J.
Schopf , from Paleobiology, Vol. 2, No. A, Fall 1976, pp. 399-
391]. Ralph died in 1976 at forty-nine.

National Science Foundation Program for Teachers

Lage: When did Ralph Johnson come to Dillon Beach?

Hedgpeth: Oh, around 1957, just when I got up there as full-time director.
Pacific wanted me to come up there; at least Noble did. So I
remember there was this summer group, a field trip group, coming
out there, and the high school instructor got to talking to me
and he said--

Hedgpeth: --"You know, we've been asked to bring these field trips out to
the coast. But we have no background for this. We don't know
anything about all of this."

Lage: And this was an instructor from College of Pacific?

Hedgpeth: No, this was a high school teacher of biology. So that gave me
an idea, and at that time the National Science Foundation was
sending out a circular about its research participation program
for high school- junior college teachers. So I sent in a
proposal, got accepted, and it must have been right after Ralph
had arrived. He came out from the University of Chicago,
according to a letter he wrote here. He was trying to study the
recent environment to get clues for the past. One of the
reasons for doing this at Tomales Bay is that at Millerton
Point--! don't know how well you know the geography around
there, right opposite Inverness —

Lage: Millerton Point, it's called?

167

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Yes. There's a fossil deposit of Pleistocene age or late late
Pleistocene, early Recent, or whatever, some of the same
species, but there are others in there that indicated that the
water was warmer then. He was comparing that to the present
living associations. Then for years, he worked in a critical
study of the reality of communities and this sort of thing.
It's not very well quoted in most of the literature at the
present date. I think it was published mostly in
paleontological journals, but it's actually for present times as
well. So he worked on that for several years.

Was he centered at the Dillon Beach Station?

Well, he came to Dillon Beach, and then I said I would recruit a
team for him. He said, "Really?" Very skeptical about it at
first, it turned out to work well, and they really enjoyed the
experience.

One of them became the

This was the high school teachers?

Yes. And junior college teachers,
president of Skyline College.

That must have been exciting for them, to be a part of a
research program.

Yes. Another was David Mertes, who's now chancellor of the
entire junior college system in the state. He was responsible
for my getting a secondary teacher's credential, though I have
never had a course in education. But just after I retired, I
came down here looking for something to do, to get back in line.
I talked to Mertes; he was at that time president of San Mateo
College. So we cooked up an evening lecture series about San
Francisco Bay that included a field trip that started with buses
from Coyote Point at San Mateo and went over to the Coyote Hills
on the other side of the bay where they have that big Indian
midden and museum.

Then we went on up to Stockton and took a boat down through
the delta, with Karl Rortum telling us whatever old hulk in the
mud along the way was once some great ship- -he knew the names of
all of them, and that sort of stuff — and down the bay to Coyote
Point. We had a lot of fun with that. But anyhow, in order to
give credit, I had to have a credential. I didn't have a
credential. Dave said, "Well, you can apply for a temporary
credential," so I did that. Cost fifteen bucks. I got a snippy
letter saying, "We note you have had no courses in education,
and you have no courses in the subjects you are teaching.
Therefore, we don't think you're entitled to a credential."

168

So I said, "Dave, you know, I'm thinking of writing a
letter to these characters pointing out if they're going to talk
like that, they ought to revoke the credentials for any student
who's claimed credit for taking my courses." He said, "Oh,
don't do that, I'll do something." The next thing I get is —
they hadn't returned my fifteen bucks, either- -a full-time,
lifetime credential. I've never invoked it; I ought to frame
it.

Lage: I think you should! [laughter]

Hedgpeth: Harder to get than some of the other things I've gotten.

[However, I was elected a foreign member of the Linnean
Society of London a couple of years later, framed their handsome
certificate of membership and hung it on the wall. I get
announcements of all sorts of meetings I cannot attend. --JWH]

Anyway, Ralph Johnson came in the program, and he really
took over. This was carried on in addition to the regular
students.

This was a separate program of teaching how research is done.

Yes. We got funded for that pretty well. We got enough for
Ralph to come out in the simmers and all that sort of thing.

Was he still based in Chicago?

Yes. So this was a University of Chicago connection, and some
of our students went back there. I think that the most
interesting one that appeared was — somehow, Ralph had been asked
by this boy's parents whether he would help them out. Well,
they were Polish anthropologists and—most Poles seem to be
anthropologists- -

Lage: [laughs] I hadn't heard that before.

Hedgpeth: Yes. And Steve had been in one of these high-pressure special

science high schools in New York City. When he came out, he was
a pretty good boy. He eventually got his Ph.D. at Chicago.
He's now living in Petaluma, doing part-time teaching for San
Francisco State. They have for some reason, been required by
politics or something, to have a course in oceanography. He'd
been giving it at Tiburon for some time, and now it's also
taught on the main campus. Some students can't afford to drive
out to Tiburon and back. Ghastly place to get in and out of,
you know, way out the end of the peninsula, at that old navy net
depot. It had a terrific dock, and great, big wartime storage-

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

169

building-type structures where the staff rattled around like a
few dried peas.

But anyhow, so he was one of Chicago's prizes. But there
were several people working through Ralph in pretty high places
now. Ralph had quite a collection of students at one time or
another, and then he got liver cancer and that took him down in
about two months. He was succeeded by Tom Schopf.

Lage: Now Schopf is — ?

Hedgpeth: Dead, too. I think the stress of trying to keep up with his
brothers did him in.

Lage: He's the one who wrote this obituary and--

Hedgpeth: He died. Yes, he died on a field trip in Port Aransas, Texas.

Lage: Did he have any connection with Dillon Beach?

Hedgpeth: Not really, but he was chairman succeeding Ralph.

Lage: Chairman of the department in Chicago?

Hedgpeth: Yes, the Department of Geophysical Sciences, an unlikely

sounding category that included people actively involved in
"neo-ecology," and included paleontologists, geophysicists, and
other such people.

Other Studies and Researchers in Tomales Bay

Lage: What else was there about the physical setting at Dillon Beach
that pertained to the Marine Station? You mentioned the fossil
bed and —

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, there was Tomales Bay, and we had a small boat and
we could go out- -kind of small, about a thirty- seven- foot boat,
surplus — in fact, they even wanted to give us a submarine over
at Mare Island when we went over there to see if they had a
better boat. Of course, we were an educational institution, and
right after the war, they were going to give you everything.
But the controlling depth in and out of Tomales Bay is nine
feet. Just what we could do with a submarine in there; if we
ever got it in, we'd never get it out again. [laughter]

Lage:

That might have been fun, though, for some other exploration.

170

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Yes. But even floating above water, a submarine takes more than
nine feet.

Was a lot of your work done in Tomales Bay?

Tes. Done over on the other side of Tomales Bay, in the sea
side, still inland. White Gulch is a little cove which is a
very fine place for field studies. Of course, the process of
field studies has changed through time. These communities are
mostly scattered around mud flats and sand flats.

Any other visiting professors we should talk about?
cossack Victor Loosanoff a visiting professor?

Was this

Cossack and adjunct professor—well, a research worker who came
toward the end of the life of the station.

Did he come after your time there?

I knew him personally; toward the end of his career he worked at
the Tiburon laboratory. But, he was at Dillon Beach most of the
time when I was in Oregon. He was working on oysters, and he
needed the seawater. The water in northern San Francisco Bay
gets too fresh at times for oysters, or did then, I don't know
what it is now. But in winter, of course, there's sometimes a
pretty good run near the surface. Anyway, he was conducting
experiments in oyster culture. He worked out a system of
culturing the organisms that oysters eat. For a long time, this
was not known, just what — how to feed them. So what you did was
mostly put them around in bays where you thought they'd do well
after you hatched them out. The system now used in most
shellfish laboratories was worked out by Loosanoff.

What did your own research focus on during this time?

I was working on my own little animals, the pycnogonids, writing
papers every once in a while. And some of the community work
rubbed off on me; I did some of that. That was great fun; it
was a nice little place to work with.

Where did you live during that period?

First fraction of the year, we lived on the beach itself. Then
we moved in to Sebastopol, lived there about seven years, I
guess.

How did the relationship with the College of Pacific work out?
Did they hang over your shoulder a lot, or were you pretty much
left on your own?

171

Hedgpeth: I worked directly through the vice president or whatever he's
called now.

Lage: What was his name?

Hedgpeth: His name is Samuel Meyers, Sam Meyers. He was a marine

biologist, but he always wanted to be president of a college and
finally he was offered the presidency at Alma College somewhere
in Michigan. And whether he's still there or still living, I
haven't heard from him for years. But he was all right, he was
pretty good to get along with. I worked directly through him on
course requirements or anything else.

Lage: Did the courses you offered have to go through approval
processes and all of that?

Hedgpeth: Not really. Come to think of it, we just set them up in the
summer catalogue and sent it over to be printed. I think we
were more or less trusted to offer pretty standard stuff.

Lage: What about Alden Noble? Did he continue to be involved?

Hedgpeth: Not much. He was pulling out after a couple of years. I think
he was getting pretty tired, and all of a sudden he just had a
bad heart attack and died.

Lage: Anything else that we should get a handle on about Dillon Beach
before we go on to talk about the proposed nuclear power plant
at Bodega Bay?

Hedgpeth: They're kind of mixed up.
Lage: Did they get mixed up?

Hedgpeth: Well, no. You see, part of the reason for opposing the power

plant was that we were conducting long-term studies on the tide
flats for many years, and their possible changes in the
environment, and if you produce perturbation like that in the
system, well, it's apt to produce results that you can't
evaluate properly.

Lage: Were you researching up in the Bodega Bay area, or did--?

Hedgpeth: No, but we were —

Lage: You just knew it would affect it.

Hedgpeth: We were right downstream, we knew it would affect us. One of
our people, as a matter of fact, when the quarrel really got

172

going, got his masters working up drift-bottle results and
things .

Lage: To see how the tides and whatnot would--?

Hedgpeth: Actually, he released batches of bottles right at the proposed
power plant site, and threw them out in the ocean. Of course,
some of them came right back and smashed against the rocks. But
others went on their way. Some of them went all the way down to
Inverness and all, right past the middle of Tomales Bay. Once
they got caught in an incoming tide, they got pushed right down.
Then there were some that disappeared. See, we had these orange
tags you put in a small half -bottle size, and ballasted them
with sand, so that just the top came above the water. The idea
was that you couldn't put them down too far, because then you
would have something you don't know about, but enough so that
the main surface currents were catching them, and there isn't
enough up above water to take the wind. All this has been gone
through for years with drift bottles.

There is a positive means to figure out from A to B, but
not where they went in between. They might have wandered
around--

Lage: You know where they ended, but not the course.

Hedgpeth: That's right. And not the exact speed it took them. Of course,
sometimes people pick them up a year or two later on the beach.
A lot of them get out a little too far, and they just go west.
The bottles were given to us by a winery, a whole carload of
them. Cute little bottles. We thought of putting a note in
them in Russian to the commander of Soviet submarines, "Please
return this card via diplomatic mail, we'd like to know your
position." [laughter]

Lage: Did you ever get any from distant lands?

Hedgpeth: No, we never did that, we just thought it would be a nice idea,
[laughs] Start a little fuss and feathers.

Well, Scripps had been through the silly business of
classifying the ocean, and Revelle considered this nonsense. Of
course, the cream of the jest was when the Nautilus made its
first voyage into the North Pole. They had a lot of sounding
gear on that thing. They detected something nobody had known
about before, namely that in the middle of the Arctic Ocean,
starting from Greenland over to Siberia, I think, on a somewhat
westerly route, there was a ridge, a rise in the bottom of the
sea. This effectively divides the Arctic Ocean into two basins.

173

There were rumors that this had been discovered and it was going
to be named the Peary Ridge, but they didn't think they ought to
tell anybody, so it was classified. Of course, at Scripps,
hardly anything stays classified; you know what's going on
pretty well.

So lo and behold, the Russians start poking around in their
subs, and they named it the Lomonosov Ridge, which I think is
perhaps more suitable, because Lomonosov more or less organized
and sponsored the Bering expeditions in the 1740s. So anyway,
they published a paper with the name in the Canadian Arctic
Journal with a map and everything, calling it the Lomonosov
Ridge, so we were scooped.

Lage: [laughs] We considered it classified, and they published it?

Hedgpeth: Yes. When I was working at Scripps, we had to pass some kind of
routine classification just for being there, and if we were
doing really critical work, we had to really--of course, I
wasn't considered a critical worker. But anyhow, part of my CV
is based on the stuff I was required to state, like every place
I'd lived in for a period of more than six months all my life.
I said, "Well, one time I lived in the old fish hatchery on the
McCloud River, now under 300 feet of water." They went around
and interviewed neighbors about things they'd picked up on these
things .

Lage: So the atmosphere at Scripps was heavily in that direction,
classified work?

Hedgpeth: Well, there were things we were not supposed to talk about, like
atomic tests and that kind of stuff, but other than that, and
the tedium of having to fill out all this paperwork- -that's
about all it affected me.

Proposed Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) Nuclear Power
Plant at Bodega Bay. 1957-1964

Lage: Let's get into the controversy over the proposed nuclear power
plant at Bodega Bay. When did you first hear of it? The story
I get is that you had your ear to the ground and heard of it
before others?

174

Hedgpeth: In a way, yes. My secretary at the time, Josephine Alexander,
was a stringer for the Santa Rosa papers.1 She had picked up
some of the rumbles around the waterfront that something was
going on. She got some kind of a note or remark stuck in the
paper with advice from Don —

Lage: The editor there?

Hedgpeth: No, he was a staff writer, I think, at the time. Engdahl. He's
somewhat of an engineer himself. So he suggested how she might
publish a note that would really stir them out. Well, it did.
They said they were interested in securing Bodega Head for--

Lage: You mean you got PG&E to declare themselves?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Of course, they said they hadn't made up their mind
whether it was going to be nuclear or conventional.

Lage: Did that concern you early on?

Hedgpeth: Yes. About that time, 1957, there appeared this little article
in Science about Windscale. Now, one of the things I'm sure is
in the Bodega file [in the Bancroft Library] is my amicus curiae
statement. I submitted a statement pointing out that recent
episode in England as recounted in Science magazine had spread
radioactive iodine to the extent that milk had to be condemned
over a fairly large territory, and in Science there had been a
little map of this. Well, I took this little map and placed it
on Sonoma County and Bodega Head, and it went clear over into
Petaluma.

Lage: The great milk — all the dairy ranches throughout there.

Hedgpeth: Yes, of course. So I said, "This is the sort of thing we ought
to think about."

Lage: So a lot of people initially weren't worried about the nuclear
element?

Hedgpeth: I wasn't really worried about it; I said, "I just like to think
of roadblocks." Sometimes, I think it all began when my mother

'In 1992 Jo developed macular degeneration, and in her increasing
blindness set fire to her robe while heating coffee over an open gas burner
and suffered third-degree burns over her entire body. She survived about a
week and gave up when she learned she would require intensive care for a
year at a cost beyond her means. She asked that her friends gather for a
picnic in Golden Gate Park in her remembrance. We did and it went very
well. --JWH.

175

discovered that PG&E had sent out a dummy buyer to buy the plot
next door to her and put in a substation, meaning a whole
battery of transformers and wires and a link fence around it,
destroyed her view of Mount Diablo from her window. She
complained bitterly about that.

Lage: So you weren't happy about PG&E.
Hedgpeth: No, I didn't like their tactics.
Lage: What did you observe with their tactics there in the Bodega?

Hedgpeth: Well, the first thing they did was ask me to come down and talk
to them, so I did.

Lage: Was this after you had published some —

Hedgpeth: Yes, I had published this amicus curiae, I think it cost me
three dollars to file it. Only I didn't call it that. It's
interesting to note that I was never asked to mention that
afterwards, though I was a witness for Rose Gaffney on the
condemnation suit.

Lage: Did you file this with the PUC, the amicus curiae, or was--

Hedgpeth: With the superior court, whatever had charge of this in Sonoma
County. Not the PUC.

Hedgpeth: They must have sent a memo out to their entire staff, "Do you
know this person or anything about him?"

Lage: About you?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Because the next thing that happened to me was, they sent
Donald Cone to talk to me. Mr. Cone is an engineer who designed
high-tension towers and things like that. His wife was an old
missionary friend of my mother's.

Lage: Oh, my goodness. So they found someone with a connection?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So they sent him out to cope with me. I just said that I
just didn't like the idea of putting that thing in there where
it would be nearest our research field, six miles away, upwind
at that. He went away shaking his head. But then they
approached Robert Burns, who was president of Pacific at the
time. They said that I was quite possibly a rather ignorant

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

176

fellow who didn't know what he was talking about, which was
quite true. [laughter] But I'll tell you why in a minute.

And so it might embarrass the college if President Burns
didn't reprimand me and encourage me not to say the things I was
saying. Burns told me this.

Burns told you what they had said to him?

Yes. He was a little annoyed by it himself. Which was very
surprising, because we always figured Burns was not much but a
Rotary type. Of course, later we really had McCaffrey who was a
real Rotarian.

Lage: Stan McCaffrey?
Hedgpeth: Oh, yes.

Potential Hazards of a Nuclear Plant

Hedgpeth: Anyway, Burns was a very enlightened character, and he said, "I
told them, "I can't do anything to change his mind.'" But you
see, what we did not know in 1957 was that that affair at
Windscale had been very bad, and had almost taken off like
Chernobyl did, and they caught it just at the last minute. The
engineers involved, the scientists, wrote a white paper. They
asked to have it distributed in the United States. The prime
minister of England said no, that would make them worry too
much. That just came out in the last few months, you know.

Lage: No, I didn't know that.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: So it was much worse than you had suspected at the time.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, than we ever knew about. See, the thirty years are up,
so the Freedom of Information Act of Britain took effect. It
all came out. There were several long articles in the New
Scientist, and there was an article in Science. It has been
replaced by Sellafield.

[tape interruption]

Lage: We were talking about how the truth came out about Windscale
just recently.

177

Hedgpeth: Yes. For some reason, I can't find those articles. I don't
know where I put them. But you can certainly look up in the
index within the last year, I think, for Science. Though for a
while Science did not index its news items. Strangely stupid.

Lage: And this was a news item?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And New Scientist, I don't know, I think they do, I'm not
sure. But they had much more detail than Science had.

Lage: So when you say you were ignorant about it, this is what you
were referring to.

Hedgpeth: That's what I meant, I didn't know how bad it really was. Well,
I didn't have any idea. Neither did the PG&E. See, what I'd
also brought up was the San Andreas Fault, and they made
comments saying, "Well, we are looking into this matter." When
they got me down to San Francisco to talk to me, they said,
"We've just hired a geologist to look into the fault situation."
Meaning they hadn't done anything about it before then.

Lage: Was this still as early as '57?

Hedgpeth: It ran on into '58.

Lage: So they had you come down to headquarters and--?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. See, they had read that amicus curiae brief; it's an
open document, especially to attorneys.

Lage: Was it hard to stand up to that kind of pressure?

Hedgpeth: It didn't seem to bother me. Kept me alive, I guess. Of
course, I took to my mother's habit of writing verse about
things. I inherited my talent for writing satirical verse.

Lage: You have a couple of good poems on Bodega.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, actually, they're songs; some of them are, anyway.
[See following page, "Ballad of Bodega Head."]

177a

The Ballad of Bodega Head

(An authentic song of social protest)

Music: From a random number table Words: Anonymous

Allegro Vivace

The Indians lived on Bodega

Their middens are there by the sea —

The Indians are gone, remembered by song,

Will this happen to you and me?

Chorus

Out on * rock called Bodega
There's nothing but granite and sand;
But do not make the mistake of
Thinking this country ain't grand!

The Russians they lived on Bodega
The Eskimo and Aleut, too;
They built a fort up to the north,
The seal and the otter they slew.

Now Gaffney owns part of Bodega,
The Smiths owned part of it too—
All of the rest, the very best,
[s lost forever to me and you.

Oh, this old lady named Gaffney,
Who owns a great desolate strand;
She fought U of C, and the PG&E,
For trying to pre-empt her land.

The courthouse gang is counting
Up taxes beyond all their dreams;
But every delay is a cause for dismay,
As it puts new crimps in their schemes.

Oh, democracy indeed is upsetting
To those whose schemes are delayed;
They find it a bore to listen to folks,
Who ought to be tied and belayed.

So Guidotti and Prather are planning
To skid us all into the sea,
On a road they will build
With the help of the PG&E!

The company's man, old Stan Barton,
Thought up a scheme in the dark:
So he said, when the atoms are tamed,
We'll open the gates for a park!

On to the scene came old Salo,

With drift poles and Rhodamine-B —

He said some went West, to hell with the rest,

1 work for the PG&E!

When the hot water leaves old Bodega,

Flows north to Horseshoe Cove —

What will they think when the water turns pink;

That's when the coral reefs grow?

Drift bottles were thrown from Bodega,
Ten each hour for nearly a day.
To Dillon Beach they came, the very same,
Where people study and play.

When hot isotopes leave old Bodega,
There'll be terrible hell to pay-
When the clams in the bay down Tomales way,
Glow bright with the light of the day!

What will become of Bodega,
Dillon Beach and Tomales Bay,
When PG&E puts their stuff out to s«a—
What will happen to you and me?

(Repeat chorus)

178

Public Involvement in the Controversy

Lage: What happened in those early years? I know after the Northern
California Association to Protect Bodega Bay and Harbor was
formed, things got much more public. But what was going on in
those early years?

Hedgpeth: What happened, you see, was that this thing became a matter for
local discussion. And of course, the county said, "Look, this
will pay half the taxes we need." I pointed out, "Yes, and we
will just become vassals to the power company. You won't have a
word of your own to say about this matter once they really get
going." As a matter of fact, the first thing they did was order
the airport out of the way. They had a little airport down on
the south end of Bodega Harbor, because their power lines would
have to go right through there, and they didn't want that sort
of thing around there, thank you.

Lage: Were you testifying at council meetings and that sort of venue?

Hedgpeth: Not then. I wrote letters to the editor of the Santa Rosa
paper. In fact, I don't think I ever testified at the town
planning meetings about this guy, these people, directly. I've
been doing that lately on the gravel business, but that's
another matter. No, they held public hearings to explain
themselves, since things were getting a little tight for them.
I think it was at the Quaker meeting house down here in south
Santa Rosa out amongst the orchards. The governor's man- -I
don't know where they found him- -Alexander Grendon [governor's
coordinator of atomic energy development and radiation
protection] --wanted to talk to us.

He was a gentleman of limited imagination for the impact of
the kinds of things he was about to say. He said, "Of course,
only the experts will be heard at the Atomic Energy Commission
hearings, because you people aren't qualified, are you, to say
anything about atomic energy?" A bunch of union guys were
there, and they didn't like that kind of talk. They got up and
said, "You're insulting our intelligence." The radio station
from Berkeley was there at that time.

Lage: KPFA were there?

Hedgpeth: Yes. They had a big Ampex recorder, and they were rolling away.
This whole dialogue came down bright and clear. This was about

179

the time that [David] Pesonen1 had organized the committee and
all of that, Save Bodega Head. So that got rolling, and it was
a very popular item down at KPFA.

Lage: This Grendon's remarks, you mean?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He had such a limited mind. Just told us we're all out of
order, so to speak, and go home, and let the experts decide what
to do about it. That won't go over so good. I don't know where
I put the chronology. See, I've written three articles on this
thing .

Lage: We can supplement this with some of that, but I kind of want
your own personal —

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, this is my personal--
Lage: Experiences?

Hedgpeth: Yes, as much as this. The exact chronology of some of it is a
little fuzzy now.

Lage: Now, that is--?

Hedgpeth: This is the chapter in a book edited by Charles Goldman, James

McEvoy, and Peter J. Richardson, Environmental Quality and Water
Development [W. H. Freeman, S.F., 1973). I was asked
specifically to do this. I was asked to do two chapters.

Lage: This was solely on Bodega--! mean your article?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, I have two articles in the book, the other's on

estuaries and other things. But I think this is the best one I
wrote about Bodega, at least explains what I--

Lage: How you viewed it and —

Hedgpeth: Yes, and I pretty much used my own files. We were all in

Goldman's book; Tommy Edmonson of University of Washington is in
here, too.

Lage: There we go, "Bodega: A Case History of Intense Controversy."
Hedgpeth: Yes.

'Oral history with David Pesonen, who led opposition to nuclear power
plant at Bodega Bay, in process.

180

Lage: Okay. And W. H. Freeman, yes.

Hedgpeth: Yes, I put that marker in there. Of course, that was just for a
copy for my own purposes, to copy a title page, in other words.
This chapter is twenty- five.

Lage: Okay, so this is a good supplement here.

Hedgpeth: Yes. See, I wrote three articles all told. One of them, is in
the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "Bodega Head — a partisan
view."*

Lage: I think I've seen that one.

Hedgpeth: Yes, that was kind of funny, because Steve Obrebski was working
on his doctorate at Chicago at the time. I think it was he who
suggested selection of certain verses; I didn't. It was from
the Ballad of Bodega Head, especially the one about out on the
rock of Bodega and a professor named Hand.

Lage: Now, tell me more about this--

Hedgpeth: Tearing his hair, and the fauna ain't there, and the isotopes
splatter the land, or something like that.

Lage: Do I have a copy of that? You gave me some verses here.

Hedgpeth: I think it's in Poems in Contempt of Progress, I gave you that.
That was one of the better verses, though I think the best verse
was written by one of the grad students there at the time,
namely Bob Hamby:

"The mutants converge on Bodega,

And lumber right out of the water;

Both saprophytic and hermaphroditic —

Would you want one to marry your daughter?"

Lage: [laughter] That's wonderful!

Hedgpeth: PG&E didn't know how to deal with this kind of stuff.

Lage: How did this get spread around? Were these poems published in
the local papers?

Hedgpeth: I don't know what happened. Malvina Reynolds got hold of them,
and she was- -actually, when the fight was all over, she wanted
to hold a program, and she offered the PG&E equal time for their

''See also "The Battle of Bodega Head," Per/Se, fall 1966.

181

Reddy Kilowatt commercial. They threatened to sue the station
and her and everybody else--

Lage: Oh, this was KPFA still?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Did it ever come off?

Hedgpeth: Well, after the PG&E caved in, a lot of us wound up down at the
KPFA studio rather late in the evening, I think, slightly
perhaps influenced by a certain carbohydrate. A lot of those
things got sung, including possibly some slightly off -color
things as well. I just wonder--of course, those were the days
when they recorded on great big platters—whether that's kicking
around anywhere or lost long since.

Lage: Was Malvina Reynolds for that--

Hedgpeth: No, she wasn't there, I don't think. But she was at our victory
banquet. I think I've got a picture, I don't know. I think I
have a picture of her standing up there with her guitar at the
podium.

University of California's Involvement

Lage: Tell me more about the connection with UC and what you observed
about the university's response.

Hedgpeth: Very early in the game, at a time when Cadet Hand was on a

sabbatical in New Zealand, I was approached by George Papenfuss
and Ralph W. Emerson, UC professors of botany. They said they'd
planned to build a laboratory out there, and PG&E wanted the
property; they were trying to stop that. Ralph Emerson told me
--see, he was assistant to the chancellor at the time—this was
a rotating post to give professors experience in administration.
They hadn't really any authority. He had written a protest and
said it ought to be appealed to the governor, and this was an
obvious collision course between the PG&E and the university.
The university had announced for some time they had planned to
build a laboratory out there.

So they said they wanted me to be the director of it, and I
said, "Well, I don't know about that."

Lage:

When they came to visit you they — ?

182

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

No, I was out in Berkeley, we were all walking down the hall in
LSB [Berkeley's Life Sciences Building] in that one. Then
Emerson's tour of duty ended, and Starker Leopold got put up
[assistant to the chancellor]. Starker was sort of ambiguous
about this. He was a bit more concerned with political aspects
and pleasing the guys upstairs.

Did you observe that in other cases, or just in this one?

Well, mostly in this one. Because usually you get a bit
stronger. 1 heard some rumbles; I never asked Luna about it.
These rumors came to me that the family wasn't speaking to each
other on this thing.

On this Bodega thing?

Yes, they strongly disapproved of Starker 's position, that he
was playing the game of the administration. But I never had any
particular dealings with Starker one way or the other on that
point. I was his T.A. when I came back to Berkeley to finish up
the Ph.D. I had started at Texas.

I T.A.'d a course I knew the most about, was more or less
given my choice of two or three. They were trying a joint
course with Paul R. Needham [professor of zoology] and Starker
Leopold; he would talk about upland game and stuff, and Needham
would talk about trout and salmon and so on. I knew Needham
from the field, even though I didn't work under him at Shasta
Dam. He came bouncing in and out. He was pretty much the club
booze boy type. He was surprisingly ignorant of zoology. He
asked me to write his syllabus. All I did was hoke it up out of
the Encyclopedia Britannica and a couple of textbooks.

1 took it down to Stanford one day and showed it to George
Myers, who was one of our best ichthyologists. He looked at it
and he said, "Paulie couldn't have written this." He looked at
me and he said, "Oh." [laughter] So I said, "Well, it's
nothing you couldn't find in the encyclopedia."

Well, anyway, he would get up and talk about the
"lacriminal" (Needhamese for lachrymal) bones and the "gill
rakers" of whales and stuff like that, and didn't know any — .
Of course, Starker was much more competent than that.

Starker had his troubles with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
I thought.

Yes. They were relieved when he shifted over to forestry,
went over to the Multiple Use Department, they called it.

183

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Well anyway, he became the vice chancellor in place of Ralph
Emerson.

Well, it's not vice chancellor, it's assistant to the
chancellor. It's a very different thing. These people are not
permanent. They only do it for two years at a time or
something, I think. It might have been some guy out of the
English faculty would succeed him.

His scientific qualifications had no bearing?

No. It's just kind of a post for administrative experience. So
he was the person delegated to try to calm Pesonen down.
Pesonen refused to meet him in his office, so they had
discussions out on the lawn. [laughs] He called him Professor
Loophole. [laughs] I don't know whether he printed that name
or not.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

I contributed to this merriment myself; after it was all
over, about 1960, I was asked to talk to the joint American
Fisheries Society and Wildlife Society meeting in Fresno. These
guys always met--see, these were mostly the outdoor types, fish
and game and so forth, fly fishermen and all these sorts of
characters. At that time, they had this guy named Ray Arnett in
charge, who was a big bulking hulk of a man about six feet
eight. He was in charge of the fish and game. He was telling
them they shouldn't discuss any of these matters in public,
because they were state business.

I said in my talk, "Well, if you don't like your job, you
can always quit." Of course, those were the days it was
possible. About that time, Arnett got up and stalked out of the
room. But at the beginning, Starker gave a very good talk.

At this same meeting?

Yes, and he said the state water plan made no ecological sense
whatever, which was quite true. So at the bar afterwards, a
couple of the young fellows came up to me and said, "What made
Dr. Leopold say that? That's the first time we ever heard him
talk like that." I said, "Well, I think Starker has finally
realized he's not going to be appointed secretary of the
Interior, so he might as well say something sensible." Which
was dirty pool of me, I must admit. [laughs]

But that was the impression you had, that he had ambitions--

Oh, he was very—he was a friend of Udall's and all this, and he
was very definitely engineering for the post. Then since he

ISA

didn't get that, he wanted to be on the Fish and Game
Commission, and they appointed Ray Dasmann instead. I think
that hurt him, too. Ray and he had been graduate students
together. Of course, I knew him way back then.

Lage: Give a little overview, now, what the — I don't think people who
aren't so familiar with it are going to get the story, that the
university switched its position, or what kinds of statements
did the--

Hedgpeth: Well, they decided- -well, they could live with this power plant.
Lage: It could coexist with their proposed marine station?

Hedgpeth: Yes, well then they put in a bid for $2 million or something to
the National Science Foundation to build it.

Lage: The university did?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And I was asked to be on the committee.

Lage: With the National Science Foundation?

Hedgpeth: Yes; I was a member of the facilities panel at the time. I

said, "No, thank you." I didn't want to get mixed up in this
any more. So I stepped out. But the grounds on which they gave
it, they said to me, "Well, if anything happens, at least they
can study the effects of the power plant." (laughter]

Lage: So it would become a marine station to study the effects of the
power plant.

Hedgpeth: Yes. By that time, Cadet had been named the director apparent
or whatever you call it —

Lage: Now, what was his role, Cadet Hand's role? You said he was
away.

Hedgpeth: Well, he was off on his sabbatical, but when he got back--
Lage: What position did he take?

Hedgpeth: I think it was primarily to — obviously on the suggestion of the
higher administration, that if he didn't do everything he
possibly knew to keep me out of this brawl, he wouldn't get the
job.

Lage:

So he wanted to be director of the station?

185

Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Yes.

Did he put pressure on you, then?

Oh, yes, sure.

What were his arguments?
would he say to you?

In a face-to-face discussion, what

One of the things that happened was kind of funny. I didn't
intend that at all. But an idiot from the Dally Californian
called me up, and this was when there were rumbles that the
administration of the university was in bed with the PG&E,
except I think they were, but anyhow. He said, "What do you
suppose happened?" I said, "You know, well, these guys are all
strong on being old lodge brothers, and I'm sure that Norm,"
meaning Norman [R.] Sutherland [PG&E president], "called up
Clark Kerr and said, 'Clark, this is Norm.' So on and so forth.
"You got some faculty over there who wants the same thing we
want, namely to build something on Bodega Head. Why don't you
encourage them to shut up or something?'" So he published this
damn hypothetical conversation in the Daily Cal .

Did he publish it--

Just about the way I put it. Norm calls Clark and says, "Move
over, we want the headlands," and Clark says, "Yes, sir." Words
to that effect. Some idiot from the chancellor's office says,
"Fortunately, it can't be proved." Putting the word
"fortunately" in changed the tone of the whole thing, you know,
suggested we hope there's nothing in the files. [laughter] So
Cadet says--came around to talk to me, "Well, you really balled
it, we're not going to be able to do anything with you now."
Words to that effect. Of course, I've insinuated in this thing,
because I refer to the Faustian bargain in here.

Well, all the things that you insinuated but didn't say, this is
your chance to say them, rather than just insinuate.

There's a lot of people who think Cadet kind of sold his soul on
this business. What he wound up doing afterwards is very
significant. He spent about three-fourths of his time working
for the Atomic Energy Commission. He was on their committees to
appraise things and I think they even made him an administrative
judge for a while. Seems to me I saw that. He was never around
Bodega; he just sort of withered on the vine until they —

Lage:

Did he not become director of the station?

186

Hedgpeth: Oh, he was director, but he didn't direct. He didn't fight for
a budget or anything. He just wasn't around. At one point,
Charlie Goldman asked me if I wanted to be acting director for a
year during Cadet's next sabbatical. I said, "An acting
director can't do anything. Probably even has to have somebody
else sign his budget. Not what I consider a very interesting
thing to be doing," especially since I didn't seem to have much
budget anyhow. So the people at Davis got very upset about the
whole thing. They wanted to get rid of him outright. They
finally did, and with Sea Grant funding moved in. They ousted
him, essentially, and put in [James] Jim Clegg, who seems to be
a good man for the job at this point. So then Cadet was asked
to come back to Berkeley to teach zoology. He took early
retirement instead.

Lage: You don't think he realized the position he was being put in?

Hedgpeth: No. Well, I try to be reasonable about this, but it's pretty
hard.

Lage: Do you have anything to say about—you testified at the PUC
hearings, didn't you, in '62?

Yes.

Did you answer some of the university's statements at that
point?

No, I never asked for them or anything. I just testified about
oceanographic aspects. Part of the evidence was that the water
would go away to the sea.

Wouldn't just drift on out?

Drift on out, yes, away. And I said, "Well, at Bodega Head it
would drift in toward the shore." An old attorney with lavender
glasses, Morrissey, said, "Are you trying to contradict Dr.
Sale's testimony?" I said, "No. What Dr. Salo was using was a
pole eight feet long with a weight on it--"

— the head, the water at the surface could move in the opposite
direction from the water eight feet below, because it was that
water which was being moved by those poles. He didn't expect
that, so he sat down. And they asked me, "In view of all that
you've said, do you think the university would be wise to have
this power plant?" I said, "Not unless they had absolutely
complete control of it." No, that wasn't a very good answer. I

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

187

should have said, "Hell, yes," but I didn't want to say that
right out loud at that point.

Anyhow, got to the end of it, old Morrissey said, "Well,
that was good testimony." Which is lawyerese for saying, "I
wish you weren't here," I guess. [laughter]

Opponents to the Power Plant

Hedgpeth: Another time at the end of this whole brawl, the state had a

hearing, the legislature, a joint committee. What were we going
to do? Part of this whole thing was the unplanned way in which
the PG&E could move in and do this thing, they ought to have a
siting policy and all that sort of thing. And Mrs. [Jean]
Kortum was there. She was trying to testify to the pressures
put on Karl [Kortum] , who was director of the Maritime Museum.
The chairman said, "We can't take that as evidence. You refuse
to say who these people are," that had made life miserable for
them.

So I got up. I said, "Well, there have been times when
President Burns of the University of the Pacific has been
pressured, I believe, by fellow lodge members who have
approached him on the matter, but of course, this is all bound
with the vows of lodge secrecy, you know," and they all sat
there and they knew damn well that the vice president of PG&E
was a grand master one year, and Burns was chaplain for the
Masonic Lodge. That kind of crap. They knew exactly what I was
saying; they didn't say, "Well, go on out of here." They all
snickered and turned to the next speaker.

And then some woman got up and started a harangue about a
big power line going over her house, or too near it, and so we
all had to walk out between those narrow doors of this building,
and I found myself walking beside Morrissey, the chief attorney
for PG&E. I said, "You know, I see you've got another fight on
your hands." He looked weary and said, "Oh, yes." I said, "You
must think of us folks like a lot of crabgrass, sprouting up
everywhere . "

He looked at me and said, "I've never thought of you as
crabgrass." I didn't ask him what he really thought. [laughs]

Lage: You should have gotten him to elaborate.

188

Hedgpeth: Yes. Of course, going around with tape recorders running in
your vest pocket or something like that. You never can tell
when these moments are going to come up.

Lage: Well, it did capture people's imagination.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And opposition really seemed to just sprout up everywhere.

Hedgpeth: Right. Well, the townspeople didn't like some of the ways they
were being pushed around.

Lage: Do you remember some of the local people who took a leading role
in it?

Hedgpeth: Well, Bill Kortum was not one of them. I think he was still
practicing veterinary medicine at the time.

Lage: He didn't speak out as much as Karl?

Hedgpeth: No. Bill has a problem, he has a very soft voice, and his
effect at public meetings is very poor as a result of that.
It's sad, but true. Karl has been a deep water sailor, and he
has a very loud voice. He can be heard. Of course, I have a
trained voice, and I can be heard, too.

Lage: [laughs] That's always an advantage. What about the — gee,

that's a long name — Northern California Association to Protect
Bodega Head and Harbor? You were in on the founding of that, it
seems. Was that founded before David Pesonen came on board?

Hedgpeth: Well, he founded it. He came aboard — see, when he was writing
for the Sierra Club Bulletin, they sent him in to make a
statement on behalf of the Sierra Club. I've never asked him
directly about this, but I think that's one of the things that
set him off to study law. The next thing that happened was some
guy from the floor was starting to attack him because his father
was known as a dangerous radical.

Lage: During the testimony at the PUC?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Dave looked at the chairman and said, "What is all this?"
There's an obscure book called the Transactions, or whatever, of
the governor's water conference in 1945, and Dave's father has a
statement in there about nature and fish and so forth. Right
now, it would be very fashionable. He was representing at that
time the Unitarian church, I think. That must be the kind of
thing they didn't like. One of the few dissenting voices in

189

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

that '45 meeting. That's where Earl Warren said, "We must put
every drop of water in California to use," or to work. I gave
you that squib, 1 think.

I think you did.

Pointed out it sounded an awful lot like Joe Stalin.

But there were people in opposition, even then.

Oh, yes. Well, of course, the Tyee club and those people, but
they weren't given very much space.

Okay. How did you observe Pesonen's role, and the work he did?

Oh, he worked full-time for several years, writing these—always
writing these position papers or statements, a whole blizzard of
this kind of stuff. I even joined in and wrote a couple that
annoyed him now and then. They all have to be formally answered
in the Public Utilities Commission ritual, and so forth.

Anyone else who had a leading role that you'd want to talk
about? The names I noted here were [Joe] Neilands, the UC
professor-
Yes. He was a real wild one, of course. Don't know whether
he's communist or not. Of course, he's a full-ranked professor
on tenure. I don't know whether he's a member of the National
Academy or not; he may be. He's a biochemist. He's kind of a
funny guy. [laughs] I was invited to his house for dinner, and
I was standing there on the stone doorstep. It had a fish
worked in pebbles on it. Old Neilands opened the door, and the
light went on, and I said, "I didn't know you were a Christian."
He said, "What the hell are you talking about?" I said, "You've
got one of the first symbols of the Christian church on your
doormat here." [laughing] He didn't even know it!

[looking through papers]
information.

This is the way Herb Caen treats

This is an '82 Herb Caen column. [October 1, 1982] Here, you
read it. Oh, you don't have your glasses, I'll read it.
[reads] "Joel Hedgpeth recalls a Tosca in 1913," and you say
here 1928. You would have been two years old in 1913.

I know. Well, that Frank Pitelka saw me a day or two after
that, and said, "I didn't know you were going to the opera so
early." [laughs] I don't know if Herb has just got his date
mixed up. Because that was a very well-known performance;

190

that's where she had not done any dress rehearsals, and she's a
tall woman, statuesque, blonde, and Scarpia was a little Italian
fellow about five-two. When she agrees to be his lover, if he
will just load blanks in the firing squad so her boyfriend
wouldn't have to die and all that stuff, well, at the end of
this confab, she heaves herself into his arms. She does this
physically, and he wasn't ready for it, so he's tottering on his
heels in a backward direction. There was this old sofa in the
middle of the stage, and steered for that. So the two of them
hit it simultaneously, and all four legs broke off of this
thing. A cloud of dust, and somebody behind the scene freed the
lines on the fire curtain; it came down with a great crash, and
it obviously hadn't been unrolled for a decade or two.

Lage: And all the dust--

Hedgpeth: Oh, and the dust, a great cloud of dust! Then somebody got the
fire curtain back up, and by that time, they turned on the stage
lights — or no, they hadn't turned them on yet. They were dark,
they were behind a curtain. Jeritza was reaching around for her
wig — of course, she had on a black wig so she would look
properly Eye-talian--she found it, got up, and made a Mae West
exit offstage waving her fanny at the same time she was waving
the wig, and we all yelled for an encore. Scarpia was still
groping with the furniture; he'd really got tangled up with it.

So finally, after about five minutes or so, they got
unscrambled and resumed the opera. [laughs] I've never been
able to take Tosca seriously since.

Lage: No, I wouldn't think so. Okay, anyway, back to Bodega. Are

there any other incidents that you think you should mention that
maybe you haven't written up, or do you think you have said your
piece on Bodega?

Hedgpeth: Well, I don't know if everything ever will be said.

Lage: It seemed to fit very well with your views that you'd already
stated about progress, and technology. Is that one of the
things, aside from the hot water coming into Tomales Bay, is
that one of the things that affected you?

Hedgpeth: I guess. Oh, here we are. This is only one page, it looks like
a three-page letter, from Neilands to I don't know who. It
wasn't to me.

Lage:

This is '64. This is after you've won the battle.

191

Hedgpeth: Yes. This is Neilands trying to explain some of the things, and
I don't know whether that's of any use —

Lage: Yes, that would be good.

Hedgpeth: I don't know what ever happened to the rest of it. I may find
it, and I may not.

More Citizen Activists

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Too bad it- -yes, it seems to stop in the middle.
Harold Gilliam? Was he very active in all this?

What about

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

He wrote a couple of pieces about it, and he attended the
hearings when he learned that any citizen can get up and
interrogate these characters, he--

That's the interesting thing at those hearings.

Yes. He asked a few pertinent questions. [laughs] A very
silly matter, some sharp kid got up and pointed out that the
chief engineer had made a statement that the base of the tower
platforms where there would be overhead wires were going to be
twenty- five square feet. He meant twenty- five feet on the
square, which is a difference of several hundred square feet of
space involved. He got the guy, the poor old engineer,
absolutely flustered, and he pawed through his briefcase, and he
said, "Well, I'm afraid you're better at arithmetic than I am."
[laughs] Rosie, she just took them apart. One time-
Rose Gaffney?

Yes, well, she gave testimony about the lovely place of Bodega,
and how the Indians used to live there, and all this stuff.
Then she got up again and the PG&E attorney, who was a
character, for stupid remarks, asked, "What's this, more
history?" She said, "No, this is combat."

She said this! [laughter] This was the woman, just for the
tape here, who owned the land, I guess her land was condemned
for the--

That's right.

And she was quite a figure, I guess, from what I've heard. Did
you know her very well, or you got to know her through this?

192

Hedgpeth:

No, I knew her.
1930s.

I had met her, good lord, going back to the

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

I had a tablemate [not Rose] taking a zoology course, or a
deskmate or whatever you call it there, and she was a Big-C
type, physical ed major.

She went to the university?

Yes. Well, she shouldn't have been in that course at all, she
realized. She barely got a D out of it. But she selected as
her term project to write up Horseshoe Cove, and she wanted me
to go along with her in the morning. She lives over in Napa,
she's a very robust, Germanic type. She's getting troubles now
and has to drive around in a golfing cart. But anyhow, she went
out there, and there was Rose with her baseball bat-
Did you go out with her?

Yes. Well, she knew Rose, apparently, so there was no problem.
They had a conversation. Yes, well, Bodega Head is no place to
go out alone; you've seen what happened this last week.

No, I didn't.

Well, a very sad thing. This woman, thirty-three years old with
two small kids, dropped her binoculars over the edge and reached
down to get them, a sheer cliff about 150 feet, killed her.

Oh, my goodness. Did the cliff collapse?

No, she just got out of balance, moved a little too fast,
probably. That sort of thing shouldn't happen. Now there's a
big sign saying-
There are lots of signs.

--"Stay back from the edge." People don't believe those signs.
So anyway, life out in Bodega Head can get rough, so you're well
not to be going it alone unless you really know what you're
doing .

Several things came up about the road that was built along the
tidelands.

Yes.

Did that change the ecology significantly from your point of
view? Was that a travesty in itself?

193

Hedgpeth: I don't think it did really, because the route is right at the
edge. It might have changed something for some critters, but
you see if you've been there, it's pretty well far back from the
water. But what it did, apparently, was it added weight from
the traffic, and it slumped... [tape interruption]

Lage: So, the road.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Oh, there was a meeting with the Corps of Engineers that

went on and on until one a.m. in the Grange Hall at Bodega. Now
these hardy old fishermen got up and said the road will force
the mud to sink in and fill up the ship channel.

Well the chicken-colonel type from the Corps of Engineers --
see, these fellows serve for three years at a post, and they
always hope to be able to go to Washington and get a star, in
other words, become a general. So they have to be very careful
how they conduct things. Well, the thing is, it takes them two
years and eleven months to learn enough about San Francisco Bay
and the area to be intelligent.

So anyway, he said, "We can only listen to testimony of
qualified experts, and what you are saying cannot be
considered."

Lage: What the fishermen had to say?

Hedgpeth: That building a road along the shore would push mud into the
channel. These were guys that lived around there all their
lives. So two years later, why, they built the road, and the
mud moved out and shallowed the bay and filled up the channel,
and so they wanted to bill the County of Sonoma for having to
redredge the ship channel.

Lage: Did it get brought up at the time?

Hedgpeth: Oh, naturally. Well, brought up that they--.

Lage: That they'd been warned.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: So you didn't have any problems from the College of Pacific,
then, from your role on Bodega?

Hedgpeth: No. Well, one of the things I think I told Dr. Burns was — see,
PG&E handed out money in fairly good little lumps to various
independent institutions. I think Pacific's take was possibly
$5,000 or something like that. I said, "Of course, they don't

194

dare cut back on that. They'll be placed in the position of
having discriminated against the college on account of me, and
that's the last thing they want in their publicity."

Lage: So he didn't--

Hedgpeth: Yes. He agreed to that. I don't think anybody over at Pacific
was very much worried about what I was up to. In fact, it was
difficult to get some of them interested in coming out to the
beach at all.

Lage: So you were kind of left on your own?
Hedgpeth: Yes, I was on my own, pretty much.

Lage: But they did fund you? You didn't have to raise funds to keep
your work going?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Of course, I got —
Lage: You got grants.

Hedgpeth: Yes. This NSF thing had a fair amount of money for maintenance
and running expenses, especially the boat expenses and so forth.

Leaving Pacific Marine Station

Lage: How did you happen to leave Dillon Beach?

Hedgpeth: Two things. One of them is the vice president said that the

salaries were never going to rise above $12,000 at Pacific, and
it was already obvious that that wasn't very much money any
more. They offered me a post at Oregon for considerably more
than that. What they didn't tell me there was that they
expected me to raise $650,000 a year--

Lage: They didn't tell you that when they hired you?

Hedgpeth: They did not.

Lage: Oh, my goodness. That made a change in--

Hedgpeth: Of course, the other thing was an extraordinarily crazy

administrative arrangement of the laboratory on the coast there.

195

Lage: Maybe we'll save that for next time, and start with Oregon,

instead of getting into it now, because I'd like to talk about
it, and I think we've covered things well today.

[After nine years on the Oregon coast my fingers became
arthritic and I had to give up harping. And it would seem, a
bit arthritic in my memory. Belatedly, after all the sessions
that resulted in this memoir, I realized at the last minute that
I had completely forgotten the festive event of my seventy- fifth
anniversary banquet held November 14, 1986 (perhaps because it
was not held on September 29th) at the aquarium in Monterey,
arranged by Bill Davoren and his Bay Institute and Bill Kier.
Among those who were present was Karl Kortum, who considered
"impossible" an unnecessary word. Certainly he salvaged more
wrecks for museums than anyone else, and changed maritime
museums from collectors of ship models to the real thing. In
his life, he made many more friends than enemies. He was indeed
a person about whom nil nisi bonum could be said with a will,
and was so characterized at his memorial service on the
Balclutha October 27, 1996.

--JWH, added during the editing process.]

Joel W. Hedgpeth, ca. 1960.

Photograph by Otto Hagel

Joel W. Hedgpeth
at Dillon Beach,
ca. 1960.

Joel W. Hedgpeth
in his study,
Santa Rosa, 1992.

196

VI MARINE SCIENCE CENTER AT OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, 1965-1973,
PYCNOGONID RESEARCH, AND ANTARCTICA

[Session 6: October 29, 1992] ti

Program. People, and Problems at the Yaquina Biological
Laboratory

Lage: We're going to start today talking about your experience as
director of the Yaquina Biological Laboratory at the Marine
Science Center at Oregon State. Last time, you told how you
happened to head up that way, and I'd like you to give some idea
of the program and the setting.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, this is going to lead to some rather- -fortunately,
the principal character is now deceased.

Lage: So you're going to be candid.

Hedgpeth: His name is Wayne Burt. Well, I didn't know until—see, I was

directing Dillon Beach, the marine lab, up through the summer of
'64 at least. Dr. Burt passed by on a visit and looked at the
setup. Of course, I had been on a number of National Science
Foundation panels, systematics and facilities mainly, but also
on one for the Office of Naval Research, which was a fairly
interesting one, since it was the navy's idea of trying to avoid
the taint of being military. Actually, the original Office of
Naval Research was something of a model which the National
Science Foundation followed later.

Dr. Burt wrote me a very fancy letter offering me a job.
At about that time, the vice president of [College of] Pacific
said he was going to try to keep faculty salaries under $12,000,
and didn't think they'd ever have much more. I was making about
$10,000 or $11,000 at the time. I think they've had to change
that rule or they wouldn't have anybody at all.

197

Lage: I would hope so, by now.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, they almost went on the rocks there for a while, but
somehow they've gotten some help. So that wasn't very
encouraging. So Dr. Hurt offered me a good salary. They were
building this lab at Newport, Oregon, which he wanted me to
direct. It was a field station.

Lage: So it was a new lab, a new —

Hedgpeth: Oh, brand-new, yes, and Burt said a whole lot of things about
the local school, which later turned out to be not very
accurate, about how it had a class-one high school. Well, it
was a class-one athletic school. They didn't mention that, and
I didn't know that's the way they graded them up there. I
didn't know, and he never told me, that he expected me to bring
in something like $650,000 a year in grants, though he may have
told others.

Lage: That seems like a crucial bit of information to impart before
you take the job.

Hedgpeth: It was indeed. So I arrived up there, and it was a rather

interesting setup. I think I have a program of the dedication
ceremonies. There's a rather big sprawly building designed
jointly with the fisheries and wildlife department on the Oregon
State campus. They had charge of one wing, and I was supposed
to have charge of the other. But everything you did, including
buying a box of paper clips, had to be cleared at Corvallis
fifty-five miles inland, and that was some fifty-five miles. I
think there was estimated to be at least three hundred sixty-
five curves in the road. The highway department proudly
announced once that they were cleaning it out at the rate of one
curve a year, which didn't promise well for the long run. In
winter, it's a bad road, it's very dangerous and snowy and all
that stuff.

Lage: So you were very isolated.

Hedgpeth: Yes. And nobody on the campus wanted to come out there. They

used it for a boat dock. They would come out, they'd get on the
ship, stop for supplies or something. I was never invited on a
cruise. It was assumed that all I was supposed to do was--and
as I say, I didn't know this — get money. I was considered by
some of the people as competition for funding, which of course
it would be, since it was a soft-money institution. I was never
asked to serve on a campus Ph.D. committee; I had no students
unless they were supported by my own grants.

198

Lage: Who were you in competition with?

Hedgpeth: My colleagues in the Department of Oceanography, to begin with.
And any other department that might be doing something at sea or
in the bay. In fact, once I noticed that the engineering
department was conducting studies of tidal action in the local
bay there, Yaquina Bay. Since I was interested in promoting
some studies in estuaries, I asked Dr. Burt, "Can't we join
forces?" He said, "We're an open game here; it's every man for
himself."

Lage: That's not too encouraging.

Hedgpeth: No, and the other thing was that they had found a fellow named

Tom Scott to be the director of the fisheries wing. He may be —
I don't know whether he's still alive or not.1 He's a great one
in the Rachel Carson Foundation, a fisheries biologist from
inland somewhere. But the fellow who was asked to be M.C. for
the thing was John Byrne, who is now president of Oregon State
University.

Lage: Is this the M.C. for the dedication?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And he completely forgot to mention Dr. Scott in

introducing all these innumerable characters and subcharacters
that turned up at the dedication. Incidentally, the governor of
the state at that time, Mr. [Mark] Hatfield, had not come to the
dedication. The place is now named for him. The reason for
that is, while he was on the [congressional] appropriations
committee, he developed this delightful habit of bypassing the
National Science Foundation and giving direct gifts to the
universities. So he kept giving us buildings but not any
support for staff.

Lage: Buildings for the whole university or for your lab?

Hedgpeth: No, he specifically gave funding for the laboratory, to build it
up. Actually, what had happened when the oceanography
department was set up, Dr. Burt hired anybody he could find, and
he had a couple of people he never could get rid of. They were
pretty dull and so forth. So when I looked over the plans of
the layout, I noticed there was no still. I said, "What gives
here? Every laboratory I've ever heard of has to have a still.
If you're going to work any kind of chemistry, you've got to
have your own supply of distilled water." It's a very simple
matter, actually. You could buy an adequate still for three or

'I saw his obituary not long ago. --JWH, October 1995.

199

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

four hundred bucks. So it was very strange in light of it,
there wasn't even a place for plumbing for it. So they had to
rearrange for that. There were other funny things about it.

Then they had a man in charge of the physical plant, and he
was palsy-walsy with one of the resident fishery characters
there, and so anything he didn't like, he would call up Tom
Scott or the dean of fisheries and agriculture and complain
about it. Then the complaints went back to Burt, who was
supposed to be in charge of the whole thing. Burt finally had
to fire this guy, he was such a pest. I remember once asking
him for a pencil sharpener. It took me about four weeks for him
to get it and stick it on the wall. Just plain ornery that way.

All that kind of stuff went on. I was told later by some
fellow who had signed a couple of Dr. Hurt's letters for me in
his absence that he wanted to tell me what, was going to happen
when I got up there. The place was remarkable for the number of
people who didn't stay around, who were first-raters gone off to
Princeton and Stonybrook and similar such places.

It was not a very good situation, because even the people
in the biology department felt that you were their enemy, that I
was brought in to build the place up at their expense.

So there wasn't a cooperation even with biology?

No. Oregon State at that time was rather uniquely arranged.
The only common stock room was chemistry. Biology didn't have
its own stock room, nor govern its own allocations of
microscopes and things. These were all built up by each
professor separately under his own grant applications.

You can see that leading to a lot of competition and empire-
building.

Well, it did. So what I tried to do was get these people
together and agree to come out and help me, the kind of thing
I'd built up at Dillon Beach, namely a summer training course
for teachers. Not so much training as participation in
projects. Well, I got two or three bids from these people.
Turned out what they were doing was simply stocking up their own
personal stock rooms.

How was that?

Well, if they wanted a new microscope, something like that, or
supplies and laboratory apparatus and things. In other words,

200

you have an allotment on the grant for the projects, so that's
what they were doing with it.

Lage: Instead of thinking about teaching at--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So the height of it was this guy who had gotten his degree
from his father at Harvard, and he needed a mass
spectrophotometer. It's about a five or six thousand dollar
item, and it looks more or less like a refrigerator. It doesn't
look very much like anything, as a matter of fact. All the
gizzards are inside. But it's essential if you're doing some
various biochemical work.

He never came out there, I never saw him. The thing was
delivered to Newport, Oregon, and installed in the room he was
supposed to use. One dark night when nobody was around, he came
over with an assistant, disconnected it, and trundled it off.
We didn't even know it was gone for about a week or so, because
we didn't go into that room very often. That's the way he
treated the deal.

Lage: And never came out to have students or do research?

Hedgpeth: No. Well, you see, nobody applied for it that year; well,

that's luck or something, you know. And maybe he just didn't
advertise. Well, actually, we had two or three good fellows
there. One of them now is the top man in the Oregon State
system for biology instruction. In fact, my daughter worked
with him for a while. She's been asked to deal with the K-12
biology, physiology curriculum.

Lage: In Oregon?

Hedgpeth: Well, not in Oregon, in the Beaverton [school] system, which is
one of the largest in the state and one of the best financed.
Oregon has a very undesirable situation. I think it's even
worse now. The budget has to be voted on by the public every
year.

Lage: By the public?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And so the continuity of many of the smaller school

systems is very perilous and doesn't work very well. That's one
of the undesirable aspects of things. They had a--

Lage: So this is the local school budget which is voted on by the
local communities?

201

Hedgpeth: Yes. So we had these hearings and so forth. I was there one
evening-- [laughs] the biologist, I think in the school in our
town, had asked for three aquarium tanks. One of these people
from the taxpayers' league, I think they lovingly called
themselves, said, "What do you want to do with all those fish
tanks? Two would be enough." So I didn't even get up to speak;
I just sat there and said, "Yeah, if you try to put all those
fish in those tanks, they'll eat each other up, you know.
You've got to separate them." The chairman said, "Well, you've
heard from the expert." [laughter]

Lage: Did he get his three tanks?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he got his three tanks. What the heck, they were about
twenty bucks or something.

Lage: Gee, that would be red tape to the nth degree.
Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, a fight down to the last thumbtack, you know.

Lage: Did people look over your budget process at the marine lab to
that degree, or were you pretty free up there?

Hedgpeth: Well, no, actually. We ran into some weird stuff in the

building. One of them is that — see, you were handling sea
water, so you can't use any copper. In a sea water system, if
you're going to keep live marine critters, very little copper
will kill them off. So we had these plastic valves. We
discovered that they were all one piece molded, so if you got
sand in them, you couldn't take them apart and clean them out.

So I looked them up in the catalogue, and discovered they
were saving two cents per valve buying this model, in contrast
to the ones we specified that you could take apart and
reassemble. So I had a fight with the guys, I said, "We've got
to replace all these things. You're going to have to buy these
new items that cost two cents more a valve." Oh, that was quite
a fight.

One of the things that was wanted around there — I didn't
want one personally—but we had ordered two stopwatches. You
use those in all kinds of applications, timing experiments and
things. My god, 1 got a call, "What do you want stopwatches for
out there?" I thought about it for a minute, and said, "Well,
we're setting up a staff track team here, and we need
stopwatches to time the races." He said, "Oh, that's all
right." [laughter] That's the way those things went.

202

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Who oversaw the budget like that?
Was it Burt?

Somebody back at Corvallis.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

That was the

No, he didn't have much to do with the budget,
budget office.

Of the university?

Yes. My crowning touch with them was when a whole bunch of us
went up to visit a Russian research vessel that was docked in
Vancouver, British Columbia. We were granted authority to use a
state car. And of course, an Oregon State credit card doesn't
work in British Columbia, so I had to buy a tank of gasoline.
Someone from the business office called me up and said, "You've
paid more than the permissible on this gasoline. We're going to
have to dock you about ninety-eight cents." I said, "Hey, don't
you realize in Canada they have imperial gallons? That's about
a half -pint more. 1 got a bargain for you, and you owe some
more money." Well, he said, "Oh, the hell with it, then." That
was too much, even for him. [laughs] Those miserable sorts of
things went on.

The real bad stuff was this business of having everybody
act as if you were out to do them in or competing with them. I
was never asked to attend a Ph.D. exam or to be a member of a
thesis committee. That simply isn't the way a university is
supposed to operate. So I never could get enough cooperation on
the National Science Foundation grant; I think it was more than
two years, and I gave it up.

With this teacher training?

Yes.

You couldn't make that go.

Yes. We'd had quite a record in California, you know. One of
our veterans is David Mertes, who is running the whole junior
college system now. So anyway, the only people I really got
along with there were in entomology.

In the Department of Entomology?

Yes. Of course, you realize that Oregon State originally was an
agricultural school, so they're pretty strong in entomology.
Several of the people had gone to school at Berkeley, and either
knew me or we knew the same people. A fellow named Lattin was
one of Professor Robert Usinger's students at Berkeley. He was
on my Ph.D. qualifying exam committee.

203

Lage: How did you cooperate with them?

Hedgpeth: Oh, I didn't have to. We cooperated. I think Ray Thiess was
one of the guys, he said he wanted to work on the study of
intertidal insects. So the prof on the campus agreed to help
him out. Of course, he didn't see any reason to go to the
marine station; that's all right, too.

Lage: Were there places for them to live if they came out, or to stay?
They didn't have to make that commute daily, hopefully?

Hedgpeth: Oh, no, we supplied their living, too, you see. We had a
dormitory of sorts, and then some of them came with their
families. It was up to them. But we supported them to some
extent on that thing. Anyway, obviously, they couldn't get very
far with the money involved. Also there were an awful lot of
bad projects nationally. We were one of the few good ones in
the country that really produced any results. It produced
several Ph.D.s, and one of them went on to medicine. A couple
of them went on up in the U.S. National Museum; they did
anything they could to get out of high school teaching,
[laughs] Which I'm not sure I blame, especially the junior
college. It's a little demeaning to have to fill out your
curriculum down to the dot, practically have your lectures
approved by somebody.

In fact, later when I was teaching at San Mateo junior
college, because we had an all-day field trip, I canceled one of
the evening lectures, and everybody agreed to that, except the
pencil-pusher in the department said, "We'll have to dock you
sixty dollars because you didn't hold an evening course as
specified." I said, "What we did was — " because this was about
the natural history of San Francisco Bay and we were in San
Mateo, we went down to Coyote Point, looked it over, and talked
about things. That was before the big museum was built there.
Then we went over across the bay and looked at the Coyote Hills,
which is a different matter, you know. Indian mounds and
diggings and all that stuff. Then we went to Stockton, and came
down by chartered boat all the way from Stockton to Coyote
Point, so they could get back in their cars. With Karl Kortum
narrating about every big old hull stuck in the mud and its
history that he knew about. He knew them all.

Lage: That must have been a fascinating trip.

Hedgpeth: Oh, it was very nice, everybody enjoyed it, and I think they got
a lot out of it.

Lage:

And it was a long day.

204

Hedgpeth: Yes, it was a long day. It was about eight o'clock in the

evening before we got back down there. Even in a reasonably
fast boat. But that's the way the junior college operates — by
the book—strictly by hours in the classroom.

Working with Bill Fry at Dillon Beach on Pycnoeonid Research

Hedgpeth: When I was still at Dillon Beach, along came this student from
England who wanted to study my favorite animals with me. He
came with very high recommendations from one of the best biology
profs in the United Kingdom at that time, and that was Carl
Pant in, who was at Cambridge. So that's when Bill Fry appeared.

Lage: Bill Fry from England?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: And he studied sea spiders.

Hedgpeth: Yes, right.

Lage: Did he come on a grant from England, or just arrive?

Hedgpeth: Well, the college [of the Pacific] had given me a little money

on the side for this kind of thing, for summer staff or—because
they wanted to operate the station year- round- -they gave me an
assistantship for a year, which was more than Oregon State did.
We had an assistant prof, but he was on their faculty list,
primarily expected to teach over at the campus too. So anyway,
Bill was hired simply as a research assistant. He only planned
to spend a year, and he wound up spending two years.

One of his kids was born in Sebastopol. I'm his godfather;
I haven't seen him now for several years. Since he had dual
citizenship, he thought he'd come over here and get in the
restaurant business. Found before he could get anywhere he'd
have to take a course in a subject matter he already knew
something about, and then get a union ticket. So he went back,
and he owns his own pub now over near Cambridge somewhere. So I
haven't heard much from him anymore.

Lage: That's your godson?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: What did you and Bill Fry do together on sea spiders?

205

Hedgpeth: Just went right to work with him. I had this tremendous
collection, the Antarctic, they kept sending me —

Lage: Oh, I see. It wasn't necessarily things that you explored and
discovered right there?

Hedgpeth: No, no. This is a major job. It went on and on and on, and

finally wound up his share of the monograph. He and I did that
one jointly.

Lage: What's it like to work jointly with somebody on preparing a
monograph?

Hedgpeth: Oh, well, you just help out with the descriptions, and maybe you
work one group or phase of the study. It was collaborate,
criss-cross back and forth.

Lage: Is it easier to do with some people than with others?

Hedgpeth: Oh, naturally. A lot of things are easier to do with some

people than others, depending on what they are. Everything from
marriage to working in the shop, you know.

Lage: Well, was Bill Fry an easy man to work with?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was. [In fact, Bill began to show skill in organizing
people and getting things done. After stints at the British
Museum (Natural History) and the marine laboratory at Menai
Bridge, he took a teaching post at Luton College of Technology,
and started the college on its way to its present status as
Luton University. He managed to have me serve as an external
examiner for Luton 's first doctor's oral (viva) as part of my
1967 trip abroad. The candidate did well. Bill was also an
efficient organizer of meetings and saw that the proceedings
were published. First this resulted in a book about sponges
(which he had begun to study during his time at the British
Museum) — the copy he sent to me was inscribed "With clear memory
of the fact that many good things began at Dillon Beach."

He arranged, as a tribute to me, a symposium in 1976 at the
Linnean Society of London on Pycnogonids that was published in
1978. In that year Bill and his wife were awarded a research
grant of 21,000 pounds to study sea spiders. Bill was obviously
headed for greater things and would probably have become a
Fellow of the Royal Society in due course. But he did not have
that time. He suffered a massive heart attack while driving his
car from a meeting at Brighton in October 1980 when he was
barely forty-four years old. It has not been easy to accept his

206

loss; I often wish that he was still going on to the good things
that "began at Dillon Beach."

Dillon Beach is also gone; nothing remains of Pacific
Marine Station but the two large concrete slabs on which the
buildings rested, now unoccupied and blank beneath the sky.)1

Lage: So you were working on Antarctica materials?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And I sent him down to the Antarctic. That was kind of

amusing. He got down to Christchurch, New Zealand. Well, first
place, before that, you have to go through a navy physical
examination down there in east Oakland at the navy hospital.
It's a pretty rigorous exam. They arrange it so everything gets
later and later. About three o'clock, they say, "You've got to
get an ERG up at the top of that hill, you've got about ten
minutes to make it." It was called Cardiac Hill. So you get up
there in time to get your EKG through, and if you do not drop
dead, they pass you, I guess. So I had to do that, too, one
time or another.

Anyway, they found Bill had a British army disability
pension. He had been tromped on in a soccer game and had a
pinched nerve in his shoulder. I was ordered to get him
examined by a neurologist to see if it was safe for him to go in
the Antarctic with that disability. I think the pension was
something like a shilling a week or something, more paperwork
than it was worth.

I called a friend of mine, an old junior college classmate,
I knew his specialty was neurology.

Hedgpeth: I said, "I've never pulled the old high school tie on you, have
I?" He said, "No, but you're about to." I said, "Yes, well,
this is ordered by the National Science Foundation, and you just
bill them for this. It's their request; they want this fellow
to be examined within twenty-four hours so it won't interfere
with the Antarctic schedule." He said, "Well, I guess I could
get him in tomorrow." So he looked Bill over and said, "Well,
you're all right. About forty years from now, that neck will
start to bother you."

'Mr. Hedgpeth added the preceding bracketed material during his review
of the draft transcript.

207

Unfortunately, Bill died at forty-four. He said his father
died young, too, so he had chosen the wrong genotype. But we
got along very well.

The British system in their museums is to just put you in a
vacancy and then expect you to become competent in it. I think
this is how they got by with the Piltdown fake. The person who
was most influential in being taken in hook, line, and sinker
had no basic training in that kind of thing, in looking at
fossils and sizing up stuff. Somebody —

Lage: So they just put you in an area that may or may not be your
specialty?

Hedgpeth: Yes. If they had a round hole and you were a square peg, why,
that's too bad, you've got to fit in, old chappie. Another
friend of mine who's a specialist in polychaete worms was asked
to work on mollusks. First thing he did was throw out all the
surplus mollusks that he didn't like, including some types.
People were madly retrieving them out of his wastebasket.
Finally, he had to leave. He wound up as director in charge of
the Scottish National Museum in Edinburgh, and surprising to
everybody, he worked very well at it. This was of course a
general cultural museum. I visited him there when I was in
Edinburgh, but that's another story.

A Research Program in Antarctica

Hedgpeth: So we built up this Antarctic program, and then I went down to

McMurdo myself a couple of years later, which turned out to be a
lovely way to absent myself for some time from the trials of
Oregon State. At least they got the overhead on the things, you
know.

Lage: How many trips did you make there all together? It looks like
you went also before you went to Oregon, a couple of times.

Hedgpeth: No, Bill went before. I think there were two trips that I took
to McMurdo, and then to Palmer Station--! guess I have to get
the dates of those things out, I don't remember them exactly
[1957, 1959-60, 1974].

Nymphopsis spinosissima (Hall)

A spiny Pacific Coast pycnogonid
Drawing (from Oregon) by Lynn Rudy

Syncaris pacifica (Holmes)

California freshwater shrimp

(Nominated for endangered species status
by J. W. Hedgpeth)

20 7b

208
Some Interesting Characteristics of Sea Spiders

Hedgpeth: What we wanted to do, because these animals are very abundant in
the Antarctic and some of the stranger phenomena about them
occur in the Antarctic, and we can't decide yet whether this is
some abnormal growth phenomenon or whether it's related to
reduplicated chromosomes. So we —

Lage: If it's reduplicated chromosomes, what would that imply?

Hedgpeth: It would be very interesting, what it would imply, other than it
wasn't any immediate environmental effect. But we found that
there are too many chromosomes, like the famous whitefish, which
used to appear on slides for everybody to look at, the set of
twenty-five slides you've got for some zoology courses. They
always gave you chromosomes of the whitefish, which had never
been counted because they were so small and numerous , nobody
could figure out how many. They may by now, of course, got it
all. Not that that's an essential thing to know, but it's a
nice thing to know.

So we also did observations on the biology of the animals.
You see, the phenomenon that's so interesting is that most of
these animals have only eight legs, four pairs. Some of them
have five pair, and that makes ten legs. And several of them
have six pairs. They look like a big circular centipede.

Lage: Are these ones found in the Antarctic?

Hedgpeth: They are there, yes. That twelve-legged guy is about eighteen
inches across when fully developed; he's a monstrous thing,
considering a lot of intertidal things we've got are about a
quarter-inch long or less. These animals have absolutely no
significance in the scheme of things that we can possibly think
of. Lately, a charming gentleman I've known for many years
named Henner (a familiar name for Heinrich) Fahrenbach who's an
ultramicroscope operator for the Oregon Primate Center... I
don't know just what exactly they do there with him, except they
now retired him and told him he can use the equipment. Instead
of a salary he does clinical work for the medical profession.
He seems to be about the only one around who knows how to
operate the apparatus.

He's taken up the pycnogonids to find out what their
structure is like, and right bang off the bat he's found out
some of their fine structure is like no other arthropods on
earth.

209

Lage: So they become an even more interesting animal.

Hedgpeth: Yes. They're more closely related to a horseshoe crab than they
are anything else, which is a surprise, but they don't have all
the fancy appendages that those animals have.

Lage: Did you say that you found that it was a genetic difference, not
an environmental difference?

Hedgpeth: We haven't found out. We still don't know.

The other strange thing about one of the main groups of
these animals, including Dodecolopoda, that's one of the great
twelve-legged monsters, is that we have no indication of how
they grow, how they reproduce. In most of these animals, the
male gathers the eggs as the female extrudes them, with a
cement-like secretion from special glands and works them into a
ball and carries them around until they hatch.

Lage: Even these little tiny ones that you're describing?

Hedgpeth: Yes, the shore ones. But these extra- legged giants, which are
mostly deeper-water things — well, deeper water from 100 fathoms
on, some of them are found in shallower water than that — we've
never caught them with an egg mass, and we've never caught a
larval stage. They have a very characteristic larval stage. So
we don't know what's going on. The eggs must be very small,
because the sexual apertures are not very large. So possibly,
they are parasites of some other animal, we don't know what.

Lage: That the egg would become a parasite on another animal?
Hedgpeth: Yes. It wouldn't be on the parent, of course.
Lage: How do you go about exploring a question like that?

Hedgpeth: Well, that's it. We have specimens, hundreds of thousands of
them now, I guess, all over the world, about which we have
almost no information. They're just there, and we just give
them a name.

Lage: But you don't know how they live, and reproduce.

Hedgpeth: Well, we know something about how quite a few of them live. We
know that one of them does get around probably on jellyfish, as
a larval stage. It's found in Japan and on this side of the
water, too. But the others are deep-sea fellows.

210

So anyway, I went down to McMurdo the first time and then
Palmer Station, where I had a charming voyage on the Hero.

Lage: What's the Hero?

Hedgpeth: The Hero was a research vessel built by the National Science
Foundation, according to the whims of one of the big shots in
NSF. What it is, is a downeast side trawler, and it works the
nets off the side of the ship instead of over the stern. The
most famous comment on it was by Athelstan Spilhaus who was
credited with starting Sea Grant, who said to the officials of
NSF, "You've gone and built an antique."

Well, it wasn't exactly suitable for research very well.
In the first place, the model of the pattern of the ship was a
coastal vessel, not for going out very far. So you had a big
heavy winch somewhere about where the wheel house was, and
running a live cable up forward and then going overboard there
on pulleys and so forth. She had quite a sloping deck. So from
the wheel house as originally designed, you couldn't see ahead
where you were going. So if you're going to go sailing with a
vessel like this in the Antarctic, where it's full of brash ice,
broken hunks of ice the size of pianos, you know, sometime or
another if you hit one of these, it's enough to bash you in.

Lage: It's nice to know where you're going.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, they had to build the wheel house up a notch so they
could see over it. So they had a laboratory, one of them was up
in the fo'c'sle area, and the slope was such that if you put
water in the sink, why, the water would be sloshing off the
back, and the fore edge would be down at the bottom of the sink.
You could only use half the sink. So the only thing that it was
good for was for skinning and stuffing birds, which you don't
need the water for. So the ornithologist was happy with that
place, but--

Lage: But not the marine biologist?

Hedgpeth: Well, you know, the darn thing was designed so that every bunk
was slightly different in shape and location, so all the
sheeting and so forth had to be specially tailored. If things
didn't fit right, you were out of luck. They weren't
comfortable for Antarctic duty. You couldn't open the hatches
and let things air out or anything.

Finally, they took it out of service. She's now on the
Oregon coast, actually, Florence, Oregon, I think. One of those
coastal towns, where they want to use her for an offshore

211

excursion boat. Well, Oregon is a rough water part of the
world, too, and you've got to get in and out of those little
ports usually between two big breakwaters. You're lucky when
the storm is coming in to get in and out of those places. You
usually stay ashore.

And so she rolls and pitches, and I don't think it's any
good for anybody who has any slight tendency towards
seasickness.

Lage: May not work in Oregon; is this what we're — ?

Hedgpeth: No, last I heard, she was up on blocks somewhere to be admired.
Of course, that is not quite as ignominious as Errol Flynn's
Zaca. He bought the Zaca from I don't know who owned it, and
was taking his dad, who was actually a pycnogonid authority, of
all crazy things, to sea. I never met Father Flynn.

Lage: Errol Flynn's father was a pycnogonid authority?

Hedgpeth: Yes, he was a zoologist. He was at Queens University. So Errol
was going to take dear old Dad on an exploring trip to the Gulf
of California, and it was quite a fiasco, I gather. It got
written up several times. Several people jumped ship. One of
the biologists had to extract a--I don't know whether it was a
hook or the spine of some kind of shark, some of them have
vicious big dorsal spines that are barbed. Stingrays do, too.
Sort of had to operate on him, pitching deck and all, to save
him. Apparently did.

Lage: When did that happen?
Hedgpeth: That was about 1941, was it?

Lage: So was that something you've heard about from people who were
there, or you read about it?

Hedgpeth: Oh, it was written up all the time as a matter of fact.
Lage: Because of Errol Flynn, I'm sure. Not because of his father.

Hedgpeth: Yes. He had his girlfriend along, which- -he was quite a

character. His language was something that can't be repeated in
the presence of a lady. At any rate, old Hubbs liked to tell
the story about how he went along on the thing, cleaning fish to
preserve them, gutting them and that sort of stuff. And a whole
lot of slop on the deck, and he brought up a bucket of water
from overboard, and swished it. About that time, the ship
rolled a bit, and all this stuff went sloshing down the side and

212

into the port hole of the cabin occupied by Errol Flynn's light
of love.

Errol Flynn came hopping up the ladder, stark naked,
dripping, and said something like, "Who the goddamn hell," et
cetera, "swabbing the deck in the bloody evening like this," and
all that. And then he said, "Oh, it's you, Professor," turned
around and went back. [laughter] Anyhow, it was all pretty
wild, and half the crew quit. So the Zaca wound up tied to a
pier in southern France, in the Riviera somewhere. It just sank
last year, finally rotted the hull out and sank. Nobody would
work on it, because they felt it was haunted by all the evil
people that had been with Errol doing god knows what any
Republican can think of. [laughs]

Lage: And would probably enjoy thinking of it.

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: Now, let's see. I want to get you back to Antarctica.

Hedgpeth: Yes, right. Well, these were strictly study cruises, which were
pretty nice.

Lage: Did you spend your time on ship?

Hedgpeth: Well, no.

Lage: Were you collecting?

Hedgpeth: Yes, we were collecting. No, I didn't go on any cruises; they

don't run ships in the summer out of McMurdo very much, and none
at all in the winter. There a lot of the collecting is done by
diving. They bring things up all the time. They've been
actively diving the Antarctic now for heaven knows, twenty-five,
thirty years. We flew to McMurdo from Christchurch, New
Zealand, and by ship to Palmer Station from Punta Arenas, Chile.

Lage: Did you do any diving?

Hedgpeth: No, I can't dive. Lose what's left of my hearing. Only got
good hearing in one ear anyhow. I just wasn't meant for a
diver ' s life . Paul Dayton who was down at Scripps is one of the
experts on that. At Palmer, it wasn't so deep, and not much
diving was carried on there. We went around by ship collecting
and dragging a bit, so forth. We got enough there to raise in
tanks, and we watched them and photographed their motion. Here
you've got an animal with about twelve legs, circular, you want

213

to figure out how — whether it's developed a rhythm or not, to
keep from tangling itself up.

Lage: So how it locomotes?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So we did a paper on that, that's in that fest book thing,
the Festbuch that was arranged by Bill Fry.

Lage: What did you discover about how they move?

Hedgpeth: Well, we discovered they did have an advantage to get what was
known as a metachronal rhythm, that is, working in sort of a
sequence. Famous jingle which I can't remember about the
centipede, when asked how it managed to walk, as soon as it
started to try to think about that, he got hopelessly tangled
up. [laughter]

Tourists at Palmer Station

Hedgpeth: We had an amusing scene down there at Palmer Station, which is
on the Antarctic Peninsula, when we were visited by the first
Lindblad tour. This was before they had a fancy ship, and they
had chartered some old bucket of bolts from Chile or Argentina,
looked like it belonged up on a ship dock somewhere. It had a
very high freeboard, and so they had these--! think the median
age of the people there was seventy or so.

Lage: These were just tourists?

Hedgpeth: Yes. I think one of them was about fifteen, I think had been
sent down for his bar mitzvah or something as a present.
Anyway, he stuck out like a sore thumb. Roger Tory Peterson was
the naturalist telling them one penguin from another. They got
caught on a rocky island in the harbor. In the Antarctic, every
once in a while a storm suddenly comes up, whooosh, like that,
and then goes. You've got less than twenty-four hours notice.

They had all the people out on these little low, rocky
islands in the harbor, not very far away. They knew they
couldn't get them back with that Jacob's ladder, after the storm
began to hit, they would have to climb about thirty feet up the
sheer side of the ship. Fortunately, we had a big icebreaker in
the bay that had a couple of LCIs aboard, landing craft infantry
types that go plop down on front so you can walk ashore. They
got the passengers all off, and they had to put them up in our

214

Lage:

dining hall overnight because they couldn't get back to the
ship.

So to entertain them, the purser dug up — I think they
issue—this is run by the navy--about 400 films to last a year.
They're all in the charge of the quartermaster, sort of naval
equivalent of a top sergeant, in some ways more officious and
overbearing. So he was showing this film, it was supposed to be
a humorous film set in the Colonies during the Revolution. Only
it was filmed in England.

I sat there sort of bored. Roger Peterson was there beside
me scraping his feet and saying, "Oh, dear, tut, tut, tut," and
so forth. Finally, I said, "What's the matter?" He said,
"Well, this is supposed to be in Massachusetts, but they haven't
screened out the English bird calls." [laughter] I said, "I
hadn't even noticed." So I went clear down to the bottom of
Roger's opinion as an ornithologist, not that I had one anyway.

So that was what he noticed about the film?

Hedgpeth: Yes, that's what he noticed about it. [laughs] The rest of us
just thought it was a bit dull.

I think one night the quartermaster had a real time for us.
They gave us "Bonnie and Clyde," and what was the other one? Oh
yes, the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" as a double bill. And
it wasn't Halloween.

Lage: How long was this ship stranded there with you, these tourists?

Hedgpeth: Well, just for twenty- four hours. The next day they could get
back aboard. These storms just last that long, sometimes less.
But they all thought it was very jolly. But anyway, in the
morning — see, we got these requests, and the stamp collectors
journals get this information from the National Science
Foundation of all the personnel going to the Antarctic. So we
would get letters from people we never knew about or anything,
because they stamped a letter, they got the right stamp, of
course, had to be U.S., asking us if we'd please send it back
with the station cachet on it.

Well, the quartermaster, CPO, whatever he is, chief petty
officer, he wouldn't let us use this station cachet. So while
the purser from the ship...

Lage: This is like a postmark?

215

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Yes. While the purser was stamping a great heap of envelopes,
or covers, you know, with the little thing he had that said,
"Commemorating the first Lindblad expedition to Antarctica," or
something like that, I had collected a whole- -we had bought some
beer in Punta Arenas, and they had rather nice labels, a penguin
dancing on the South Pole and the message, "La ceverceria mas
austral del mundo." So we soaked the labels off the bottles--!
don't know why, just to be doing something- -and I was pasting
these labels on some of the envelopes. The purser said, "What
are you doing?" He had been allowed to use the station cachet,
so I had borrowed it from him. I said, "Well, I think these are
going to be a lot rarer than yours, because I have a rather
limited number of these beer labels." He grabbed back the
cachet stamp and folded up his wares and went off somewhere,
[laughs] So I wouldn't be encroaching on his domain, I guess.

Funny deal about that was, I got a letter from a kid in
Germany. At that time, I hadn't access to the cachets, so I
wrote a little note to him and I said, "I'm sending you a very
special one; due to the limited number of labels, it's going to
be a lot rarer than a cachet which our CPO wouldn't let us use."
It's the only time I ever got a response on these things. He
wrote a nice thank-you letter. Usually you don't get anything.
In fact, when some Australian stamp club sent us a box of 250 of
these things to be returned, by command of Washington, the guy
in charge just threw them all away. Didn't want to get mixed up
in that much of the business. In fact, I think they try to keep
the stamp clubs from learning about who's there-

Yes, this sounds like a big enterprise,
your time returning mail.

Oh, sure, could if you would.

You could spend all

So the Germany boy appreciated the beer labels?

Yes, he wrote a nice letter to me. [laughs] Another time I was
traveling in Germany. I went to Frankfurt and to Nuremberg.
First place, I wanted to see Albert Diirer's house. Second, I
wanted to see the German railroad museum, which is a very fine
one. Trains began in Germany at Nuremberg. So they have this
lovely big model set up, and a whole locomotive cut in half, and
all this kind of stuff. I had gone there, about an hour's run
from Frankfurt to Nuremberg on a Eurail pass. Wasn't very many
people in the train, so I settled down in the second-class
compartment, and got a lecture from the conductor. The Eurail
ticket was a first-class ticket, and I should be seated in the
first-class compartment.

216

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

I told him I didn't know what real reason for that was,
since I was quite happy here, nobody else was here in the
compartment. He gave up on me after a while, first place I
guess because my German wasn't fluent enough to keep up with
him. But he kept—even when we got to the station, he looked at
me and shook his head as I got off the train.

So on the way back, I got in, I didn't even notice what
compartment it was. A boy there about seventeen or eighteen- -he
was a real addict. He had the complete timetables of the entire
German system, and he was ticking off the times as they went to
the stations, checking up to see whether this train was running
properly or not. Then apparently, he'd also been to the museum,
though I hadn't seen him there. He had bought a very nice model
locomotive, and I asked to look at it. Well, we both looked at
it.

So along comes another conductor and starts to work me over
about sitting in the wrong compartment. This kid chimes up that
I was a very dear friend of his, and also a well-known
railroader type, and all this kind of rubbish, and talked the
guy right out into the passageway and slammed the door on him.
[laughter] I never even learned the kid's name.

That shows a little lack of respect for authority.

Yes, well, I guess conductors are fair game. We got off the
subject.

Studying the Impact of Scientific Activity on the Antarctic
Environment

Lage: More on Antarctica.

Hedgpeth: Yes, the last time I was in Antarctica was--. Well, George

Llano cooked this up, I think for a certain deliberate purpose.
He knew what kind of--

Lage: Now, George Llano, who was he?

Hedgpeth: He was in charge of Antarctic biology, and that is a division of
the National Science Foundation under Polar Programs. Anyway,
he suggested I be sent down there to prepare a report on the
influence of scientific activity in Antarctica.

217

Lage: Was it something you had commented on to him, or how did he
happen to pick you?

Hedgpeth: Well, I know he just knew my temperament and about this kind of
thing, I guess. So they gave me a contract to go down there--

Lage: And that was November '74.

Hedgpeth: Yes. At that time, they had just decommissioned the—they had a
little atomic power plant there, old kind of little one- lung
deal.

Lage: To develop power for the station?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And it was halfway up Observatory Hill. Observatory Hill
is a little cinder cone right--

Lage: Is that at McMurdo?

Hedgpeth: Yes, McMurdo. It had started to leak or something, so they
decided they couldn't be running it any more.

Hedgpeth: So they were starting to take it apart. But among other things,
you don't have as much heat as you have in an atomic power
plant, so they were distilling water. The distilled water was
to service the base, which in summer had a population of about
2,500 people, a lot of navy personnel and all kinds of hangers-
on. I noticed that it had a chlorination unit on it. I said,
"What do you need that for?" "Well, we don't need it, but it's
requirements that all water served to personnel in the navy must
be chlorinated." "Even when it's distilled?" "Oh, yes, of
course." [laughter] So that was that part of it.

Lage: What was McMurdo like?

Hedgpeth: Well, you see, it's very dangerous to have a big fire to burn

trash there, because the wind would come up and take it out, and
it's very dry, everything will burn. If you've got anything
that could burn the whole base down, be careful. It was a mess,
they had all kinds of wires, of course, and like these old
pictures of New York in 1910 or so, there were solid masses of
wires on posts and all of this, between here and there.

The ships landed main supplies right down near Scott's hut.
This was his hut he used the trip before his last. It's not the
one from which he started to the pole; that's a few miles away.
But it's also one that he had over-wintered in. And of course,

218

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage :
Hedgpeth:

it's an international monument, and to be treated most sacredly
and all of that. But it was built there because it was right
near the edge where you can bring a ship up in the summertime
and unload and load and so forth.

So when the touring began, you can see real plainly what

was going to happen,
be asked to walk up
past the main trash
they're very neat,
all their junk over
called in my report
taken very kindly.

All these people get off there, and they'd
to the base, it's about a half a mile, right
dump. New Zealanders complained — of course,
Everything is scrubbed up; well, they'd take
and dump it into our trash heap, which I'd
the McMurdo Municipal Dump. That wasn't
There's a lot of old stuffed shirts in the

Antarctic program anyway.
More so than in other programs?
Oh, yes.
Why is that?

[in British accent] Oh, you should read what the British think,
about the story that Scott's crew were all a bunch of homos and
all of this stuff. One of the more pompous Britishers says,
"Polar men wouldn't do this sort of thing." [laughter]

Now, how did they react?
with stuffed shirts.

I would think you wouldn't do too well

No, just somehow the temptation of puncturing them is almost too
big.

How did they react to you?

Well, they cashed me out. They decided that what I had done so
far was about all they needed.

In terms of investigating the environmental damage?

Yes. They also sent me to the South Pole just to say I'd been
there.

So you did go to the South Pole?

Well, I went down there by a C131 with about 8,000 gallons of
fuel in a big tank. It was sort of the milk run; just turned
around and came back about two hours later. So I walked around
there. Of course, it was pretty hard to see anything there.
You go under, the original base is sort of now under ice — can't

219

be underground, because it was about 5,000 feet of ice there
down to bedrock. You can see where the pressure was beginning
to squash things in, but they had just built this great palace
of sort of a big dome, geodesic dome, lot of — what do you call
those darn barrel-like buildings? They have a name for them,
anyhow.

Then as I say, they decided they didn't need what I had
written, and to pay me off, which they did. That's all right.

Lage: But you didn't really complete your study?

Hedgpeth: No, I hadn't. But then comes the cream of the jest. They

proceed to hire some environmental impact outfit, which included
one of the fellows I'd seen down in the Antarctic several times,
and still see him around, Gordon Robilliard. He works for one
of these consulting outfits now. He was Paul Dayton's diving
mate in the early years.

So what do they do? They give him my rough draft to work
with. [laughs] Got to where my friend Jerry Bertrand of the
Massachusetts Audubon Society, a former student, was a little
piqued by the whole thing, and just for the hell of it, he got
it out of the files by the Freedom of Information Act-- [laughs]

Lage: Got your report?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, substantial — a lot of what I had said--I just

pointed out that one of the things that was not helping anything
at all was this regular run that was from McMurdo to the South
Pole, because the exhaust from the aircraft is creating a great
swath of carbon pollution on the surface of the ice. One of the
problems with that is it interfered with the projects that some
people had to take the firn, which is just that very crisp ice
at the top, and go straight down, so they could see that the
onset of the Industrial Revolution was recorded, because of the
increase in carbon. And this interfered with that kind of
information. You have to count that whole swath between McMurdo
and the South Pole as being useless for that purpose. Of
course, they finally agreed with me, but--.

Lage: So even for their scientific purposes, they were--

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, this was supposed to be, as I had said, one of the
things we find out in the dry valley—the dry valley is a very
interesting place there —

Lage:

The what, dry valley?

220

Hedgpeth: Yes. They are a strange sort of oasis in the middle of nothing.
There's no plant life there, except there's a puddle there
called a lake in one of them. These are not far from McMurdo,
they're only about forty minutes away by chopper. Walking
around there, and all the rocks had been smoothed over and
carved into strange shapes. They're called ventifacts, which
most of the unlettered keep calling ventrifacts. Makes them
more intestinal than windblown, but anyhow. [laughs] So they
called it Ashtray Valley on that account, because of nice-shaped
stones, and took them home, and there's hardly any of them left
anymore. I pointed out there was indeed a surplus of plastic
pen barrels being left all over the place, and you could walk
around and see those. Although the aesthetic impact may be of
no great value, they did indicate we'd been there somehow.
Things like that.

The other thing was that other delightful way of getting
rid of some of their undesirable material, like honey buckets,
was just to put them on the edge of the ice, and when the ice
broke up in the summer and headed north, they didn't know where
or when these things would sink or what would happen to them
afterwards. The crowning touch of that was when some
ichthyologist somewhere in Nebraska or South Dakota had been
studying fish, and he had pickled all his fish for further study
and put them in a barrel. They got the wrong label on the wrong
barrel, and so he was told that his fish were waiting for him
down on the station platform, about 90 to 100 degrees in the
sun. He opened up the barrel and found he'd been sent the honey
bucket. He never knew what happened to his fish.

Lage: It sounds very sloppy, very poor care of the area.

Hedgpeth: Well, it was. These little details, I don't think they cared
too much for.

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Do you think it's improved at all since they —

I haven't been back there to check up on it. I don't think I
will ever go back. I'm now overage for anything like that,
especially with my record of operations. But when they
dedicated the statue to Byrd at the McMurdo base, they invited
at that time the only surviving member of Scott's team, Sir
Charles Wright, who was a specialist on ice and polar physics
and so forth. He was the man who spotted the tent in which
Scott and Wilson had died.

So they took him down there to lend tone to the occasion,
waived all age and physical requirements. This was a VIP to
come down and go back on the next plane, that sort of stuff.

221

But anyway, the story is that one morning, some of the young
fellows who happened to be seated at breakfast with him asked
him what he was going to do today, and he said he was going to
walk to the top of Observatory Hill. Well, this volcanic cone
is about 300 feet high. It's not exactly an easy climb for any
age.

One of the navy brass overheard him, and so he said, "Well,
I think we'll have to send some fellows up along with you to be
sure things go well." He grabbed two of the stoutest looking
characters around, navy ratings, you know, didn't have anything
to say about their future. So off they went.

They got halfway up the hill, and the young fellows started
to pant and said, "We've got to take a breather." Sir Charles
looked at them, and he had this most angelic expression on his
face. He was at Scripps for a year or so, and we got to know
him pretty well. He said, "What's the matter, didn't you
fellows eat your Wheaties this morning?" [laughter] He wanted
to go up to the top and see—they'd put a cross up in honor of
Scott on the top of the hill, and he wanted to see what shape it
was in. [laughs]

Lage: So did he go on ahead?
Hedgpeth: Yes, he went on ahead.

There's another thing there, I had visited the chaplain to
find out what the thought was about these things, and he didn't
think much about them. But anyway, he said he had his own
disposal problem right now. Some professor for whom a hill had
been named wanted his ashes scattered there, and the chaplain
said, "Of course, it's rather ticklish, because we're not
allowed to do that in this part of the world. Strictly
forbidden, and all of that." So they had handed the whole
matter over to the chaplain, and he had a stack of paper about
this high he had to fill out for all this business.

What they finally did, he wouldn't want to commit. I
suppose they did scatter them for him. The Russians actually
buried several of their people who were killed in an accident.
They had asked us to- -there is a very nice, pink granite down
there, I think it's near Cape Halle t, but anyway, somebody
spotted it and carved a lot of it off for samples. The Russians
had seen this stuff, and they asked for a slab of it for a
tombstone for this guy. We obliged them.

Lage: And they buried him down there?

222

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, things happen in winter, you can't do anything about
things until the next ship comes in maybe six months later.

Lage: That's true, I guess you have to do something. Now, when did
you get the Antarctic Medal for contributions to Antarctic
studies?

Hedgpeth: I don't know, it just came along in the mail written by somebody
saying I was entitled to receive the Antarctic Medal. [1971]

Lage: Was that for your sea spider studies?

Hedgpeth: Well, I told some people I thought it was for putting up with
George Llano for three trips down there. [laughs]

Hedgpeth Heights

Lage: Now, how about the Hedgpeth Heights? Was that for the same
reason? Why Hedgpeth Heights was named after you. [See
Appendix G for Hedgpeth placenames . ]

Hedgpeth: Since the other adjacent one was Quam Heights and he was an
official at NSF, I don't know just why they did that, but I
think they have a lot of space in Antarctica, it's 5 million
square miles.

Lage: They don't have to name everything, though.

Hedgpeth: Oh, the Board of Geographic Names thinks that way. An
extraordinary stuffy lot.

Lage: Was the particular spot they named have anything to do with you?

Hedgpeth: No, it's just near Cape Adare. It's right on the main line, so
I could fly right over it and see it. In fact, I was flying
back in a New Zealand plane—they're much easier to get along
with than our people, who had all kinds of regulations — so I
pointed it out on the map, and the pilot said, "Oh, that's just
over there, it's only about five minutes out of the way. We'll
fly right over there for you."

Lage: So that was named fairly early, then, if you have flown over it.
Hedgpeth: No, that was the last time I was down there, in 1974.

223

Lage: Now, in the Sierra, I know they're always reluctant to name

anything after somebody who's living, like a Sierra peak. But I
guess they don't feel that way about Antarctica.

Hedgpeth: No. I had a tiff with the Board of Geographic Names. First
place, they said they wouldn't use possessives any more. So
they had written my grandmother's name as Nelly Cove; it's
Nellie's Cove up there at Port Orford. It's where she used to
collect agates. So I said that- -wrote them a note saying, "At
least I wish you'd spell her name right." She always spelled it
Nellie.

Lage: And how did they spell it, with a Y?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And without the possessive. But they said they wouldn't
put that back on it, because they don't believe in possessives.
And along came this new map of the California coast in which
they had taken the tilde off of Ano Nuevo.

Lage: They don't believe in that either?

Hedgpeth: Yes. So I pointed out to them, I said, "Hey, that word is one
of the few in which the failure to use a tilde really makes a
difference. "

Lage: What kind of a difference does it make?

Hedgpeth: I said, "What it means is that I would be unable to display the
latest edition of your map in the hallway where it might be seen
by the fine ladies of Spanish extraction."

Lage: You're going to have to explain that one for me.

Hedgpeth: All right. The tilde means year, afio. That's the tilde, the

curve. It's New Year's Point. It tells you almost exactly when
Point Reyes was named, since Point Reyes stands for the epiphany
in Spanish, Punta de los tres Reyes, which is the sixth of
January. They were at New Year's Day at Ano Nuevo. Now,
without the tilde, it means ass, it's anus.

Lage: It makes a difference.

Hedgpeth: It does.

Lage: Did they change it?

Hedgpeth: They did. They wrote a letter and said, "Few people have made

such a strong point as you, we're going to put the tilde back on
in this case."

224

Lage: So you finally got a response to one of your letters.
Hedgpeth: Yes.

More on Oregon State University

Lage: Okay, now let's see if there's more to say about Oregon, and
then we can move on to San Francisco Bay.

Hedgpeth: Yes. About Oregon is--a very funny episode did happen, not
funny, but rather mean in some ways. There was a meeting in
Portland on various subjects, and Oregon State had been asked to
participate. Nobody wanted to go. So they asked me if I would
be interested in doing that, and I said, "Well."

Lage: What was the meeting?

Hedgpeth: Well, I don't know what it was all about, mostly biological

matters of estuaries and pollution and this kind of stuff. You
see, it wasn't a really fancy trip. If it was, let's say to
Melbourne or Sydney, Australia, why, you'd have been trampled to
death trying to get on that one.

So anyway, I went up to Portland and gave kind of a little
preliminary speech, and I was asked to write it up. So 1 wrote
this paper up, and then it was passed around in the oceanography
department, and everybody looked at it. I forgot all about that
aspect of it. Suddenly, parts of it appeared in the proposal
written by two of my colleagues. So I complained to the
chairman, I said, "Look at this, some of this is almost the same
phraseology as was used in my grant proposal to the Office of
Naval Research."

Lage: So you'd already used some of it for —

Hedgpeth: Yes, and I said, "I have already used some of that in the grant
proposal," which they had seen, the top brass had seen, I guess.
The chairman had been assured that I had been told about it, and
I said, "No, that's not the case. It might cause some
embarrassment if these two proposals should wind up on the same
desk, as is quite possible in this sort of thing." So we never
resolved that matter. That was on Earth Day, so I had pretty
much lost interest in getting along with these people.

Lage:

So this is sort of another example of the competitive style.

225

Hedgpeth: Yes, right. Of course, they didn't get any grant.
Lage: Did you?

Hedgpeth: Well, yes, but the rest of their proposal was so silly that it
wouldn't work.

Lage: Were you able to get enough grants to keep the station going?

Hedgpeth: Not as much as they were supposed to get. That would be
impossible, really, without any cooperation from the--

Lage: Did you have much of a staff out there that you supervised?
Hedgpeth: No, I just had one usually.
Lage: And the maintenance- -

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, he disappeared. They had to send him home. He was
directly under building and grounds from Corvallis .

Lage: So you were sort of left on your own to take the research where
you wanted it to go, it sounds like?

Hedgpeth: Sure. So I took it to the Antarctic.

Lage: And that was the focus of what you did up there?

Hedgpeth: Yes. In the last several years.

Lage: So actually, the bay itself that you were situated on didn't
define the program at all. It wasn't local research.

Hedgpeth: No. And I was never asked by anybody to participate in any of
the programs they had.

Lage: What kind of program would that have been, on the campus?

Hedgpeth: Yes.

Lage: How did the fisheries side of the program go?

Hedgpeth: I don't know.

Lage: Wasn't too much communication there?

Hedgpeth: The guy in charge of it quit after a while, he had such problems
with the committee on curriculum. I didn't have any problems;
they had some problems with me. But [William J.] McNeil, the

226

fisheries guy, had recommended a textbook, because he had great
trouble with those chaps over there in fisheries, because none
of them knew any math and they didn't understand the mathematics
of population changes and all this kind of stuff. He named his
course after the very fine tome entitled The Exploitation of
Fishery Stocks. I knew about the book myself, too. The
curriculum committee objected to the term "exploitation" in the
title for a course.

Lage: Sounds like a very stuffy bunch.

Hedgpeth: Then they built up something about problems with an ecology

course because it impinged on the interests of entomologists and
the physiologists, and there was some objection in this part or
another, and they said, "The matter is adjourned, it will be
taken up at the next meeting." The next meeting went on the
same as the first, so I just patched up a memo with various
assorted quotations from the works of C. L. Dodgson, which I
submitted as being by C. L. Dodgson. [See following page.]

Next I heard of it was from a dean. He said, "Somebody
came around and said they couldn't find that name [C. L.
Dodgson] on the faculty list, and they wondered who he was. I
told him to try the mathematics department." [laughs] Anyway,
it was considered one of the best memoranda 1 ever wrote, and I
didn't write a word of it, I just rearranged the two quotations
from the successive meetings and this thing wound up finally
where the Mad Hatter says, "Oh, look what time it is, gentlemen!
It's time to adjourn, please go home." [laughter]

Lage: Did people appreciate that, or were they really kind of thrown
by it?

Hedgpeth: Well, a couple of those people didn't even know what it was all
about. They couldn't figure out what the memo was or why.

Lage: It sounds like it was a frustrating experience for you.

Hedgpeth: Considering I was raised with the story that my grandfather
always read Alice in Wonderland before sticky days in court.

Lage: Do you think you take after your grandfather?

Hedgpeth: I suppose I do, I don't know. I had so many of these rather

domineering aunts. One of them wrote to me in high school and
said, "I understand you are writing for the school paper.
Whatever you do, don't become another Ambrose Bierce." So I
immediately dashed to the library and found out who Ambrose
Bierce was. [laughs]

226a

TO: Council on Curriculum and Academic Policy
FROM: C. L. Dodgson
SUBJECT: Words
THE RECORD:

Minutes, Meeting 7, October 10, 1968:

Use of the word "animal M 1n the proposed titles for Ent 475,
Comparative Animal Behavior, and Mb 434, Animal Virology, were
discussed briefly. It was decided that action should be deferred
on these courses pending further discussions with the departments
raising questions about the proposed changes.

Minutes, Meeting 9, October 17, 1968:

Proposed title of Ent 475, Comparative Animal Behavior, was
further discussed, and response and communications were reviewed. . .
concerning definitions, limits, overlaps, duplications, and further
lines of developments, and procedures for Interdisciplinary dis
cussion and review In the areas of animal behavior. By a majority
of one, it was voted that the title might be changed to "Animal
Behavior" for the time being with the word "Comparative" deleted. . .
persons Interested in developments 1n this area should meet to
discuss this matter and to reach agreement if possible.

DISCUSSION:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said In a rather scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose It to mean - neither more nor
less."

"What 1s the use of repeating all that stuff?" the Mock Turtle
Interrupted, "if you don't explain 1t as you go? It's by far the
most confusing thing that I have ever heard!"

"Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?" the
Gryphon went on, "or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you
another song?"

CHAIRMAN:

"Is there a motion before the house?"

VOICE FROM THE FLOOR:

"No, no - sentence first, verdict afterwards! Off with his head!"

CHAIRMAN:

"Gentlemen, consider what a long way you've come today. Consider
what o'clock it 1s. Consider anything, only don't cry. Just adjourn!"

227

Lage: She led you in the right direction.
Hedgpeth: I suppose.

Lage: I wonder if she thought you had the capability for becoming
another Ambrose Bierce? She may have seen something in your
character.

Hedgpeth: I don't know.

"Steinbeck and the Sea" Conference

Lage: Was it at Oregon that you met up with Richard Astro and got
involved in the Steinbeck and the —

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. Well, he had done a thesis on Steinbeck.

Lage: Was it on Steinbeck and Ricketts, or just Steinbeck?

Hedgpeth: Just Steinbeck. But--

Lage: Was he in the English department there?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He's now a provost or something at the new Florida State,
central Florida, something in Orlando.

Lage: So he'd done a thesis on Steinbeck, and then how did you happen
to meet him?

Hedgpeth: He looked me up.

Lage: Because he knew you'd known Ricketts?

Hedgpeth: Somebody had told him. 1 don't know how he got hold of — .

Lage: How did this idea of the "Steinbeck and the Sea" conference come
about?

Hedgpeth: Well, he decided, since I could provide a lot of information and
so forth, that we'd get together a conference. One thing led to
another. Of course, there's money in the humanities for these
kinds of things, so he got some funding for it.

Lage: And you held it out at the station?

228

Hedgpeth: Well, I held one session there at the station, but the main one
was held in Corvallis. That's the one we got Joseph Campbell to
attend, and a few other people. I don't know whether he knew at
the time that Campbell had known Steinbeck and Ricketts or not.
Certainly didn't know about the stuff this guy Larson, who wrote
a biography of Joseph Campbell, dug up in the — .

Lage: What is that stuff?

Hedgpeth: Oh, the romance that Joe Campbell had with Mrs. Steinbeck, et

cetera. Well, they decided they wouldn't carry it any further,
and that was when Steinbeck said, "That's the worst thing you
could do." [laughter] They understood what they were
disagreeing, we'd not carry it on any further, before they
realized they were, according to Larson, potential soul mates or
something of the sort. Anyway.

Lage: Astro seemed to later develop quite a concentration on the
influence of Ricketts on Steinbeck.

Hedgpeth: Yes. He wrote that other book on that.

Lage: Did that thinking come about through that conference?

Hedgpeth: Yes. It sort of revived this business, thanks to me. Well, I

went down and talked to various people including Carol Steinbeck
Brown.

Lage: You did that after the conference, or to prepare for it?

Hedgpeth: Well, I had to write up this stuff, because Astro's thesis
depended on access to some of the stuff that Ricketts had
written, and I had published that.

Lage: Had you already published Outer Shores?
Hedgpeth: No.
ft
Lage: You put a lot of time in on studying Ricketts.

Hedgpeth: Yes. I dug up all his papers. One time I was in Tallahassee
lecturing; I had a friend there who was on the faculty, Albert
Collier. He drove me over to Gainesville, where I went through
Lisca's stuff, which he's still got, and won't give to anybody.

Lage: Who is he? I know you've mentioned him, but I've forgotten.

229

Hedgpeth: Lisca is a professor of English at--I gather he's gone

practically bonkers or something, had about five wives — I hope
the crocodiles eat him up or something, alligators.

Lage: But not his papers. Does he have Ricketts1 papers or
Steinbeck's?

Hedgpeth: He has Ricketts' papers, a lot of them. He had a lot of

correspondence, he had a lot of personal papers. See, Ricketts
kept carbons of everything he wrote. There's a set there to his
children they'd like to get.

Lage: How did Lisca get them?

Hedgpeth: He came down to Pacific Marine Station before this kind of thing
really got going, borrowed them or something, was told he could
have them I guess, I don't know what. I was not there, so I
don't know.1

I don't know what more you want to hear about goings-on in
Oregon.

Lage: Is there any more you think that we should hear, or do you think
we've gotten the idea?

Hedgpeth: I was the opening speaker on the first Earth Day there at

Corvallis. Then I went over to Eugene and gave the afternoon
talk.

Lage: Was that a big event in Oregon, Earth Day? This is 1970.

Hedgpeth: Well attended. Of course, I naturally wound up by quoting

Thoreau, last line in Walden, "The earth is but a morning star,"

so forth. I think there's quite a few people at Oregon State

who figure this is rather dangerous stuff.

Lage: Was it a pretty conservative community there?

Hedgpeth: [English accent] Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Especially at Corvallis.

Look at what's happening up in Oregon now, they've got a
proposition on their ballot that will ban homosexuals.

'Just lately (summer of 1994) all the Ricketts papers arrived at the
Stanford University Library without advance notice or any explanation. We
haven't learned what happened to Lisca; maybe the alligators did eat him.
--JWH.

230

Lage: Yes, I've read about that.

Hedgpeth: Consider it all part of original sin. That might be as genetic
as anything else, if they thought about it seriously.

Lage: It looks like they're going to decide that before too long.
Hedgpeth: Well, it will be chaos if they do vote on that thing favorably.

Retirement

Lage: When you left Oregon, did you retire or did you — what happened?

Hedgpeth: Well, the president of the university announced that the budget
was getting tight, and a compulsory retirement would be
enforced--! don't know whether it was [age] sixty-seven or
whatever funny year it was now, I forget—and that those who
could possibly retire earlier than that could make the salaries
available for the younger people who needed them, et cetera, et
cetera, you know.

So I went around to the business office and I said, "Well,
I've got three years to go, according to the president's
memorandum. How much more pension will I have if I stick it out
three years?" After a few minutes of fiddling with the buttons,
the guy came back and said, "Oh, it would be about eight dollars
a month." I said, "Oh, that ain't worth it, bye." [laughs]

Lage: Not much incentive to stick it out.

Hedgpeth: No.

Lage: So then you went into independent consulting?

Hedgpeth: Well, I guess so. Yes, I would be consulting and — .

Lage: How did you happen to move back here to Santa Rosa?

Hedgpeth: We'd lived at Sebastopol when I was working at Dillon Beach.

Florence wanted to live in a town that was a little larger, and
so on and so forth. Of course, even here in Santa Rosa is a
little far from the center of population. But things are a bit
more expensive down there around the bay.

230a

The author struggling with the bureaucracy (illustration on
the program cover of the 64th meeting of the Western
Society of Naturalists at Simon Fraser University, Dec.
1987), inspired by a vignette from the late Edward Forbes
(British Starfish, 1841 -p. 197) drawn by W. Schuss without
apology.

231

VII ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ISSUES OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND DELTA

Estuarine Studies

Lage: Now we need to turn our thoughts here to the San Francisco Bay,
and I thought we'd start with — I know you've written about the
history of scientific investigations, and I read your 1977
paper, which was very interesting.1 I just wanted to pursue a
few of the points that you made there. One, that all these
engineering decisions on the bay were made without much
knowledge of the biological needs of the system.

Hedgpeth: Of course.

Lage: And you particularly sort of indicted Stanford and UC Berkeley
for not pursuing their own back yard.

Hedgpeth: They're still getting that kind of static.

Lage: Why do you think they didn't pursue this area of study?

Hedgpeth: I don't honestly know. Of course, it never occurred to most of
them. Kofoid, though, tried to get it started, and he even got
this guy Allen to work on the plankton of the river around
Stockton. Then he went down to Scripps. That's the other
thing, it started at Scripps, the marine biology thing, and that
pulled a lot of people down south that might have gotten
interested in the bay.

Actually, one of the best theses on estuarine processes
ever done was Don Prichard's work on the Chesapeake Bay, it was

'Joel Hedgpeth, "San Francisco Bay: The Unsuspected Estuary: A
History of Researches," in San Francisco Bay the Urbanized Estuary 58th
Annual Meeting, Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement
of Science, June 12-16, 1977, T. John Conomes, editor, San Francisco, 1979.

232

a thesis at Scripps on salinity exchange and how- -see, when you
have a layering of the ocean water underneath- -it usually comes
in underneath, and fresh water is on top. There is a zone
between them there where things are mixing back and forth, and
it's called a zone of no net motion. It means nothing is going
strongly in either direction, they're just —

Lage: And it's a zone where the salt and fresh water are meeting?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And what is happening there, according to Prichard, is

that oyster larvae, among other things, would rise to that level
and move upstream against what appeared to be the main gradient,
the fresh water coming down.

Lage: They're moving against that?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Anyway, he worked it out very well, and he had pretty good
numbers for it. Very impressive job.

Lage: Numbers to demonstrate that it did happen, or to demonstrate why
it happened?

Hedgpeth: Yes. He's been out here a number of times trying to tell people
out here what to do. Of course, they invited this whole group a
few years ago.

Lage: Who invited them?

Hedgpeth: Well, actually, the state agencies, Division of Water Resources,
Water Board, Fish and Game, people like that, because they
realized that they didn't have—see, this hearing lasted for
nearly three years, and the board couldn't make a decision.
Unfortunately, Fish and Game was under terrific pressure not to
say anything. In fact, they were even suppressed or modified--

Lage: Not to say anything that wasn't in keeping with--?

Hedgpeth: The fact that it would interfere with the idea that we shouldn't
be sending all this water south. Most of them knew that, but
they just weren't allowed to say it.

I was born on the shore of San Francisco Bay, to begin
with. But other than seeing starfish on the piling at the Key
System pier and that kind of stuff, I never got much of anything
in school. But of course, knowledge of life in the bay even
around a city like Oakland wasn't very good. You get down along
the waterfront, and it was just wharf and not much access to
water. Where you could it was pretty yucky and tacky and all of
that.

233

Lage: So it wasn't a place conducive to exploring?

Hedgpeth: We all used to go swimming in north Alameda, good old Neptune

Baths. There's this picture of me when I was about four or five
seated by the fountain at Neptune Baths; it's now Crown Beach,
now a regional park. In fact, I gave them a copy of the picture
of me. I don't know if they've ever done anything with it or
not. Shows things about Neptune Beach they didn't have in the
pictures they had there, obviously not the great grand staircase
going down to the big fountain.

[An Encounter with the Archdruid

Hedgpeth: Some years ago, at a forgettable conference on Saving the Earth
on the Berkeley campus I was asked, just before sitting down
with the rest of the speakers in a final panel in Wheeler Aud,
to summarize what was to be heard from the speakers. Discussion
ended much too soon, and I found myself alone at the lextern.
While trying to gather my wits I mumbled that although I was
born in a large house a few miles from the campus where we could
see the shore of San Francisco Bay from the roof, I had never
expected to be at the lectern in a hall where I had attended
many evening lectures and courses as a student. Then I remarked
that one of my vivid memories was the spectacle of Charles
Erskine Scott Wood, who often sat in the third row near the
aisle, looking like Jehovah himself, who should be remembered
for his opinion that the greatest offense of mankind was the
fee-simple ownership of property (that produced a chilly
emanation from the audience). One of the first comments from
the floor came from David Brower:

"I don't believe you," he said.

"What don't you believe?" I asked.

"My mother wouldn't let me climb the roof," said he.

Suspecting an ego trip, I retorted: "Our house had a
stairway to the roof and a widow's walk."

End of conversation.

'David Brower is incorrectly alluded to as an archdruid in this (or
any other) context. The archdruid is the presiding officer of the
eisteddfod, elected by the gorsedd or council of bards. His function is to
bring the occasion to order and ask for peace: "Oes heddwcb?"

234

Later, I found myself in the chow line just in front of
Brower and wife.

"By the way," I said, "your mother-in-law was probably
often in that house since she was a dear friend of my mother."
Anne Brower nodded in agreement, and I sensed that further
conversation was not welcome.

A few weeks later there appeared a newspaper account of
Dave Brewer's autobiography, illustrated in part by a photograph
of the future archdruid at eight or nine years in a rig
consisting of a wicker cart pulled by an elegant black goat. I
could not resist sending the archdruid a copy of the photograph
of myself at the same age in the same cart and black goat. I
remember that I had been summoned from whatever I was doing to
sit in the cart while the picture was taken, and then
immediately ushered out of the cart (I thought that the outfit
was to have been mine). For all I know we may have been
photographed on the same day; we lived only about four miles or
so apart.

I have never heard from the archdruid since.]1

Lage: You and Dave Brower are pretty much contemporaries, aren't you,
in age?

Hedgpeth: I guess so.

Lage: Fairly close, I would say.

Hedgpeth: I get a little fed up with his ego-trip business. He gave a
great harangue before one of the bay meetings a while back.

Lage: He comes at it from a very different way- -not from the science- -

Hedgpeth: Yes, well, he's not particularly interested in the bay as such
anyway. Liked to go climbing rocks when he was able.

Lage: But has he supported efforts to preserve the bay?
Hedgpeth: I think so, I don't know.

'Mr. Hedgpeth added the preceding bracketed material, including the
footnote, during his review of the draft transcript.

235

Estuaries in Texas

Hedgpeth: I really didn't get any understanding of what estuaries were all
about until I went to Texas. Then you live in the middle of the
whole system.

Lage: Is that where you started — your roots as an expert on estuaries
goes back to that?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, see, before me there was this fellow Albert Collier
who had been working for the Texas Game, Fish, and Oyster
Commission, as they called it then. He had run a whole bunch of
samples with data, he had a great pile of data running for
several years. They had a hurricane down there, and Dr. Gunter
said, "We've got to save that data," so he piled it all in a big
box and took it up to his house, which was on reasonably high
ground. Just got a slight green tinge from having the
chlorophyll knocked out of the leaves along the front of the
house. The house walls just sort of went in and out like a
bellows a bit. It's reasonably sound. They were about sixteen
feet above mean sea level, I think, which for that part of the
world is high ground. [laughs] Well, the tidal range in the
Gulf of Mexico is much narrower.

Lage: Where did this all take you in your study of estuaries?

Hedgpeth: Well, it took me to analyzing this data and trying to make

something out of it, which I did. I published a paper under
Collier's and my name, a joint paper, though I wrote most of it.
He vetted a bit of it, but not much. Made it possible for him
to get a job in the university.

Lage: It sounds like the estuary would really be a very intriguing
thing to study.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, it's a very interesting process, especially in the part
of the world where we had the gamut from fresh water clear to
sea water three times as strong as the ocean, about 200 parts
per 1,000 in some places. That's quite a lot.

Lage: So the salt water was saltier than the ocean, and then you also
had the fresh water? Is that--?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, you see, we had no fresh water input down on the
King Ranch. It was in, of all places, an area called Baffin
Bay. Why, we never knew. No relation in any way, shape, or
form to the Baffin Bay of Canada. [laughs]

236

The Sea of Azov

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

When did you go into studying the Russian estuaries?
studied the Sea of Azov, is it, and the Volga.

You

This happened when I came back to Berkeley to go on and get a
Ph.D. I hadn't been around a major library for four years, so I
did a lot of prowling about in the Biology Library, down the
shelves, and 1 ran into this whole stack of stuff in Russian. 1
could tell from the diagrams and my limited knowledge of Russian
that this was a significant body of work.

So finally, I think I helped to get a translation of some
summarization volume of the [Biology of the] Seas of the USSR
[by Professor L. Zenkevich, 1963]. I used that book in evidence
at the first water hearings.

[tape interruption]

Hedgpeth: I wrote my thesis on the Gulf of Mexico and Texas bays, which
had nothing to do with San Francisco Bay.

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Did you work on this? [Zenkevich book]
"To my dear friend, Dr. Joel Hedgpeth."

The author here has,

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Yes. Well, remember, I was working through the National
Research Council and part on the treatise, and I recommended
that this be made available. I think that had something to do
with it. Not specifically stated there. I met Zenkevich in
1953 at the Zoological Congress. At that point, I recruited him
to write the chapter on the Caspian Sea for the treatise. The
chapter on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov was done by Hubert
Caspers, who had apparently spent a lot of time in Bulgaria
during the war. According to Rozengurt, he was a member of the
Gestapo. I don't know about that, but he certainly had quite a
collection of icons, which considering the looks of them,
probably were liberated from churches while he was in the German
army . [ laughs ]

Anyhow, he was a collector. Poor guy, he's now lost his
mind. I don't know whether he's still alive or not.

Did this book document the environmental destruction more or
less of the--

Well, he very plainly states that in the Sea of Azov, the
fishery stocks are dropping. That was why in "57, they knew
something was going wrong. It was river diversion, apparently.

237

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Do they point to the river diversion as the reason for it?

Yes. And I mentioned—see, I got involved in the hearings in
1969 in Sacramento, and there was very little material on the
bay that you could use. Of course, the study of the marine
borers brought a lot of this up, never carried it on very far,
namely the —

What was that study? Marine borers?

Well, you see, in a drought period, which they had in the early
twenties, late teens and early twenties, the salinity moved all
the way up past Chipps Island to I think it was about eleven
parts per 1,000. That is enough for borers and shipworms to
come in and start chewing—the piling began to fail. Since
then, they've turned to cement piling or steel-jacket piling.

Those animals don't thrive except where they have a certain
level of salinity?

Right, yes. They are marine organisms, and they will survive
some dilution. They are sub-estuarine sorts, but they have to
have a certain amount of salt in the water, more than you should
have for young salmon and the like.

So that was something that prompted a certain amount of study
when the marine borers appeared?

Well, that was a bit of the evidence they had. The borers
chewed up the piling, which failed, and that was a serious
matter in harbors. Of course, they had the salinity curve as an
indicator, which they hadn't sense enough to know what they were
looking at; it was generally disregarded. So this was a
renewal, and this is what I redid. I published parts of the
original testimony, and a memorandum to the—see, under the Bay
Institute, I worked for the Bay Institute —

Even back there in '69? Or are we up in more recent times now?
No, this was when we really got going with the bay.

When you first testified, it was '69 at the State Water
Resources Control Board hearings.

Right .

Whose auspices was that under?
environmental group?

Were you working for an

238

Hedgpeth: That was the City and County of Contra Costa, they were suing
for fresh water.

Lage: Yes, they have had a real interest.

Hedgpeth: Oh, they have had—well, a good lot of that changed—that old

hack of a water lawyer [Walter Gleason] . He made millions. He
never married. Some energetic mother superior discovered he was
a Catholic, and went around and shook him down to endow the
restoration of her convent and of Santa Clara University, as
well as a few other little goodies. He was alleged to have been
on all sides of every water controversy in the state since year
one. As I say, he left an estate of several million dollars and
no heirs, and it mostly went to the Catholic church.

Lage: But he'd take whatever side, he didn't just--

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes, sure. Whatever side wanted to pay him the most. He
billed Contra Costa County something like $650,000 for about
eighteen months' work.

Research on San Francisco Bay — Geological Survey, UC, and
Stanford ti

Lage: You told me that you yourself haven't done that much research on
the bay.

Hedgpeth: I first became aware- -the first real job on the bay was that

written by [Grove Karl] Gilbert in 1918, and it all started with
studying what was happening with the mining debris.

Lage: So that was the initial interest, the mining debris and how that
had filled the bay?

Hedgpeth: Well, I had picked up that report [U.S. Geological Survey

Professional Paper 170] in Sacramento in 1938, in this funny
little junk store opposite the main post office for fifty cents.
The corps of engineers office was in the post office building.
That was when we were working on the mountain streams. I picked
it up and started to read it, and decided it was worth the fifty
cents. I have had it bound in bright gold colors.

Lage: Was it a good piece of work?
Hedgpeth: Oh, it's a masterpiece.

239

Lage: Where was Gilbert from?

Hedgpeth: Upstate New York, graduate of University of Rochester. He

became the chief geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. He
was the fellow who had contributed most of the solid ideas in
Major Wesley Powell's work. He was a field man, one of the
great students of the arid West. He was getting along in years
toward the end of his career when this came along, and he didn't
have to take it on, but volunteered. I don't know if that was
before or after he got so interested in Alice Eastwood.

Lage: Oh, yes, that's the fellow.

Hedgpeth: I was surprised at the tizzy the gals over in the [California]
Academy [of Sciences] went into when that all came out. It
didn't occur to me it was generally unknown.

Lage: Were you the one who brought it out?

Hedgpeth: Well, I just casually mentioned that he had planned to come back
and marry her. Stephen J. Pyne, who wrote the biography of
Gilbert, found an actual letter of his to some friend saying,
"We've been lovers for years." [laughs]

Lage: And the ladies at the academy didn't quite believe that, or--?

Hedgpeth: Oh, I think they were kind of pleased to know that dear Alice
had known something about other things than herbarium sheets,
[laughter] Anyway-- [laughing] That famous picture of the woman
standing right by the crack on the fault at Olema in 1906 is
probably her.

Lage: We're not sure, though?

Hedgpeth: Well, what other lady would he be taking those days on a field
trip to Olema? Of course, it was easier to get to than it is
now. The train ran right up to Point Reyes Station and there
was a hotel at Olema a few miles down the road.

Lage: You made the remark--! 'm just now picking up a couple of things
from that 1977 paper — you said that the biology department at
Stanford has never been very environmentally oriented, or
something to that effect. What do you mean by that? It's non-
environmental in approach, you said. What does that mean?

Hedgpeth: They were — of course, at one time they were pretty strong on
systematic biology. They had pretty good entomologists, and
they had one of the major ichthyologists of the time as
president, David Starr Jordan. George Myers was the last great

240

ichthyologist who built up the collection and trained many
ichthyologists. It's all gone to the academy [California
Academy of Sciences] now; Stanford junked all the collections.
They cut off that part of their endeavors entirely. Of course,
[Paul] Ehrlich is just a kind of a paper mill, really, for
turning out tracts now.

Lage: When you say that, what's your implication, that his work is not
based on careful research?

Hedgpeth: Oh, no, I think he's based on pretty good research. It's pretty
good stuff. But he's emphasized that at the expense of some of
the other things. Nevertheless, he is a specialist on
butterflies, probably not quite as good as Vladimir Nabokov.

Lage: Has Ehrlich1 s direction influenced the department as a whole?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. There's hardly anything now as far as systematic

zoology is concerned; the academy has to carry the whole load
now. I don't know how long Berkeley will have a vertebrate
museum; I suppose they're planning to redesign it, if they ever
get through with LSB. It's taken how long now, four years at
least?

Lage: Oh, I know it, and they're still not anywhere near done. But I
thought that LSB is going to become the whole animal center,
systematics and--

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, I keep--I got a query from [William] Lidicker

[professor of integrative biology, UC Berkeley] about a proposal
to get interested in the bay. Didn't say it was about time they
did, but he wrote a kind of a querulous note about hoping for my
comments favorable, unfavorable, or whatever. I didn't know
what to do with an invitation like that.

Lage: He was proposing that the university--

Hedgpeth: Well, the development people had sent down a request to all

departments to come up with a memo or something. I said, "Well,
you've got to study your quarry first," that San Francisco has
never been very strongly noted as an oceanographic town or for
funding oceanography. Go down to Monterey, there seems to be
more interest there.

But anyhow, he said a couple of things that indicated he
didn't quite understand what they required for having a study
program on this, because the university already owned a piece of
property there at the Richmond Station. This had come up
before. I pointed out that at least they'd have to arrange for

241

a dock if they want people interested in studying the bay to
come in as tenants for building, so they could make some
overhead money and all that kind of stuff. The EPA had
expressed some interest, but the EPA has not done much original
work. They've regurgitated other people's stuff, become kind of
a paper mill, at least around here.

Lage: So is there really a dearth of basic information to base a lot
of judgments on?

Hedgpeth: Well, not exactly a dearth. Now we have pretty good- -except
some of the things are rather tricky, especially in the delta
situation where you have water now going backwards and
everything else.

Lage: As a result of the engineering decisions?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And the other thing that complicates matters is all these
new or introduced species from the other side of the world that
come in and have gummed up or changed the patterns of some of
the populations. That remains to be really critically studied.
Fish and Game didn't want to work too hard to get the kind of
people they need to do some of this work, so there's a lot of
things they didn't bother with, identifying a lot of the
organisms they were working with.

Lage: Do you think this kind of work is better done by contract to a
university, or better done in a government agency?

Hedgpeth: Well, we have the Geological Survey here, which is an exemplary
outfit for this sort of work. But they've sort of--

Lage: They're not biological.

Hedgpeth: --somehow bootlegged this work into the system, and they're

having trouble keeping it going. Of course, one thing they did
was to kick Fred Nichols upstairs. He was doing a lot of the
critical work. He's field director now for the whole region
nine, and that's an awful lot of territory, including
Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, California, maybe Arizona,
something like that, which is a terrific lot of space to go over
with everything that's going on.

Lage: Then you have the environmental impact reports, and you've

commented that they haven't really had a very useful role in
research results.

Hedgpeth: Well, the problem is environmental impact reports are contracted
by the people who are trying to impact the environment.

242

Therefore, it follows that the firm that does the contracts
figures out what side its bread is buttered upon, and acts
accordingly. We've got several environmental impact outfits or
consulting firms that have not done very well. And of course,
locally it's been practically farcical. No state qualification
or license is required for them to set up shop.

Lage: So they'll just turn out whatever results they're hired to do?
Hedgpeth: Yes, regurgitate each other's information.
Lage: Do they do good studies, or design good studies?

Hedgpeth: The last one we had for around here (it was based in San

Francisco) was thrown out by the court as being hopelessly
inadequate and they'd have to start all over again. That was
the city [Santa Rosa] wastewater disposal thing. They wanted to
build a dam on University of California property up here, and
the university is objecting.

Lage: Up here, in this direction?

Hedgpeth: Yes, on Button Ranch over here across the hills.

Lage: Did you testify on that?

Hedgpeth: No, I didn't testify.

Lage: You didn't need to.

Hedgpeth: I didn't state anything about it. Well, I analyzed some of the
reports. A lot of the things that I brought up were simply
ignored and not addressed, as they say.

Lage: So environmental impact statements, from your point of view,
haven't saved the world.

Hedgpeth: No.

Lage: They slow things down, though, and give time for —

Hedgpeth: Yes, I suppose they serve a useful function that way.

Lage: I think we've gone on long enough today, and we ought to take a
break and come back to this another visit. How does that sound
to you?

Hedgpeth: That's fine.

243

Testimony Regarding Water Rights
[Session 7: November 19, 1992] ft

Lage: Today we're going to continue with talk about the bay and your
environmental testimony about the bay. Last time, we mentioned
the 1969 testimony to the Water Resources Control Board. I
wanted to start this time with the later testimony, which was
'87 to '90. Just to give a general setting, what were the basic
issues? It was again a hearing before the State Water Resources
Control Board.

Hedgpeth: Yes. The later hearing, yes. It was by order of Judge John A.
Racanelli. I think the conditions under which the State Water
Quality Control Board was supposed to operate, they had
responsibility for ecological characteristics or ecological
matters as well as simply allocating water.

Lage: Was he the one that determined that, or that was agreed upon
that they had ecological — ?

Hedgpeth: No, he handed that down as a judicial decision. What happened
was --see, these are linked to the previous thing of '69, which
resulted in 1485.

Lage: Now, 1485 was a legislative bill?

Hedgpeth: No, that was the docket number for the decision of the original
hearing concerning the rights of Contra Costa County to water
from the Delta. That was the time I got up and pointed out that
draw down of water for agriculture and industry was endangering
the fish population, according to Russian information. At that
time, I was living in Oregon, so I didn't follow the details
down here very much.

But this got transmogrified into 1375, which was a later
decision on a different year series, since the number is lower
than the first one. And that one sort of eviscerated the first
decision. But what Judge Racanelli has said later is that if he
knew that the board was not going to come to a decision within
three years, he would have set a time schedule to get it done
before such and such a date, which is in his power in this
matter, as the presiding judge.

But they didn't. They still have yet to act.
Lage: When did he set forth the requirement?

244

Hedgpeth: I was trying to remember. It was about 1980. It kept on going,
and it's been going ever since. While we had these intense
hearings lasting for at least three years—these are evidentiary
hearings where everybody takes an oath, and where you have a
rather formal procedure to go through. And if you don't get
your thing right back in time, you never can get it back on the
record. That's very annoying, too.

Lage: What is that?

Hedgpeth: Well, I mean, if you're not in precise order arranged for a

rebuttal period or something, it will get out of your hand and
you can't do much about it legally.

Conflict between Agribusiness and Environmentalists over Water
Distribution

Hedgpeth: However, I'll point out that this all began, with me at least,

in about 1939 or '40, when I had finished my first experience in
field work with salmon in the Shasta Dam and all that sort of
thing. We finished up the report in 1940, but it was buried by
the bureaucracy and I went back to Berkeley and for a couple of
years worked on a master's degree.

While I was there, I went over to the ag department, and
somebody told me who to see, some professor whose name I forget
now, who was supposed to be a specialist in irrigation and water
use. At that time, they were talking about the proposed Friant
Dam. It hadn't been built yet, of course. I said to this
fellow, "Well, I think the fish and wildlife people are going to
ask for some release of water for the salmon run in the San
Joaquin River."

This fellow said, "What are they going to do with that
water? Waste it?" I went away shaking my head. Never
forgotten that since. But that is still essentially the
attitude of agribusiness in the valley. They say that people
must survive first, and fish be damned. There is now Jason
Peltier,1 who's a great one for putting things in over-
simplistic terms —

'Jason Peltier, The Passage of the Central Valley Project Improvement
Act, 1991-1992: Manager, Central Valley Project Water Association,
Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1994.

245

Lage: Is he an agribusiness representative?

Hedgpeth: He is. He's one of their spokesmen now. He started out as an

employee of the Department of the Interior in the Central Valley
Project, something like that. He wasn't very good at that
either. But he has a way of talking that in this multiple
purpose world, we don't have any time for single causes.

Lage: And he doesn't see his own as a single cause?

Hedgpeth: Well, I don't know whether you saw the Sunday program of Sixty
Minutes, this gal talking about Forest Service being multi
purpose?

Lage: I didn't see it.

Hedgpeth: Oh, she was a terrible dragoness type, one of these overprecise
females with a bitingly positive voice. "Of course, we have to
let the cattle come in there; we've got to cut the trees also.
This is a multiple purpose thing."

Mrs. H.: That was McNeil-Lehrer, three days ago.

Hedgpeth: Oh, was that Lou Lehrer? I thought it was Sixty Minutes.

Anyway, it's been on both programs in one way or another. But
I've said a number of times, and I've written letters to the
editor saying that, the multiple purpose idea, which is a Forest
Service favorite doctrine, simply invokes Gresham's law of
ecology, that is, the worst ecological situation possible will
be the end result of multiple purpose application. Well, that's
the way it's happened.

Lage: And you see the same thing in the water situation?

Hedgpeth: Oh, you see it everywhere. See, the water is only one part of
it. The other is clear-cutting, especially on steep hillsides
where they drag all the trees and everything, increase the
sedimentation and ruin the stream, and so forth. We said in
1940 that there must be some fresh water, cold water, for the
salmon runs. Instead, they have built a couple of things they
shouldn't have built. One of them was to knock a hole through
the mountains and run most of the Trinity River into the
northern Sacramento. Doing that, the river warms up through the
pipe and power plant system and everything, so it comes out too
warm for salmon anyhow. And of course, lower below the Trinity
is practically a dead river now. [In a crowning example of
malicious ignorance the Bureau of Reclamation sent bulldozers
into the Trinity River last year to grub out all the streamside
vegetation so the water would run faster and therefore cooler.

246

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Of course it just got warmer and destroyed the refuges for the
young fish under the banks. It was sheer insanity. --JWH)

Its major tributary, the Trinity, had so little water a
couple of years ago when they held the White Deer Dance in the
Hoopa Valley, which is at the mouth of the Trinity River just
before it enters the Rlamath, that they had to get a special
arrangement with the Bureau of Reclamation to release enough
water to float their boats. Part of the ritual is that they
have these dugout canoes, made from a log of cedar or redwood or
something, and there are three or four of the boats involved.
They float downstream, come ashore at a certain designated
place, and these all have some ceremonial significance.

I suggested to Hap Dunning [Harrison Dunning, UC Davis
public trust lawyer] that the approval of this by the Bureau of
Reclamation is a de facto participation in the religious
ceremony, and perhaps was subject to a test about separation of
church and state. He wrote down a note about it. There had
been a case to this effect somewhere else, and he mentioned it
at the meeting in 1992 in Sacramento, which I haven't dug up
yet. I usually write things in bound notebooks, which is fine,
but the thing is, I have a habit of picking up one which has
some usable pages in the back and use those, so they're all
mixed up.

So you don't know which is which.

Well, I have some vague idea. One of them I have indexed, so
that helps a bit, but that's only one of them.

Well, that will give you something to do in your spare time,
now.

Oh, yes, oh, yes. [laughter] And I really have to write this
down because I'm going to have to write something about it.

When you made that first study in 1939, was that a revolutionary
suggestion? Had it been suggested before that water be released
for fish?

No. What was done was, because you could read between the lines
of the project description, that the prior right on scheduling
was going to be for irrigation, and second would be for power.

So your report wasn't heeded, I am assuming.

Hell no. I was trying to find out whether anybody in Washington
has a copy of that original document, or where to find it. I

247

have a suspicion it just disappeared. It was about an inch
thick. It's Special Report Number 10. Bill Kier made a copy of
it, and my original has been deposited in the California Academy
Library.

Testifying for the Bay Institute. 1987-1990

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

In the hearings in '87 to
Institute?

'90, you were testifying for the Bay

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Correct. They were one of the major plaintiffs, between that
and the Environmental Defense Fund, EOF, and other action
groups .

Did they call together a whole group of consultants to testify,
or how did it get organized?

They have their own people, the EOF has. Tom Graff was the
chief counsel there for that. So they rely on their own people.
Of course, the Bay Institute had just been started a year or so
before that, and this was its first major appearance. So they
asked me to help them out.

Had you known them before?

I knew [William T.] Davoren; he'd been rattling around for some
time.

Is he a scientist, or lawyer, or--?

He's trained, I think, as a journalist, but he also had been a
federal employee, too, and he'd picked up an awful lot of this
material. Of course, I don't know whether Felix Smith is a
lawyer or not, but he certainly writes like one.

Felix Smith? He's another Bay Institute--?

No, actually, he was officially an employee of the federal
government [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service], and he could not
participate in this thing unless by order. They had pretty hard
control over these people, and the state did also. Fish and
Wildlife was more or less hamstrung for really coming out and
saying what they really thought about this matter.

Lage:

So people who may have known the most about it didn't testify?

248

Hedgpeth: That's right. Their testimony was more or less compromised. If
they got out of hand, they would be reprimanded and /or
transferred to some remote province or whatever they could do
with them.

They tried sending Felix up to Portland; they didn't have
anything for him to do up there. So they finally kicked him
back to Sacramento, and he was given a little room by himself.
He had tenure, and he had taken great care to have some very
influential friends, people like [Congressman] George Miller and
so on. So they didn't dare trample him too much.

But I've seen a lot of his memoranda—he wrote a great deal
on the public trust. Some of the correspondence about this by
attorneys within the federal government said, "This is not the
federal position. We don't want to hear any more about it. It
must not be released," and that kind of stuff. Of course, Felix
went on and released it anyway, usually in forty-page memos. So
he's quit now, and he's working for a private outfit, and he's a
member of the Bay Institute's advisory board. I don't think
he's quite as effective that way, but--.

Lage: You mean he was more effective from the inside?

Hedgpeth: Yes, because he could use all his energy on the one thing they
didn't want him to do, because they kicked him off in a room by
himself. Didn't want him infecting other people, and so forth.

So anyway, we went on with this, and various points.

The Sea of Azov Comparison

Lage: What was your testimony directed towards?

Hedgpeth: It was directed toward stating plain facts. The first thing I
tumbled into, of course, was public statements by the deputy
director of Water Resources and by some employees of the Bureau
of Reclamation, I think, and also the Division of Water
Resources, that because the Sea of Azov was completely land
locked — which is contrary to geographical fact — there could be
no parallel or example in the Soviet Union for what is happening
in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They even decided the
facts of geography. This was, of course, pure poppycock.

Lage: They didn't look at their maps too carefully.

249

Hedgpeth: The Straits of Kerch, which connects the Sea of Azov and the
Black Sea, are roughly two and a half mil*s wide. The Golden
Gate is one mile. Gibraltar is about six miles, I think. Of
course, the Dardanelles are practically down in the meter
category, very narrow there, even for ships, and barely adequate
for large subs to sneak in and out of the Black Sea.

But anyhow, I simply wrote this down with the dates of the
statements I had heard about the Sea of Azov being closed off,
and I noted them in my little notebooks. The first time, it
happened at a hearing before [State Senator] Barry Reene in San
Francisco--

Lage: That was a legislative hearing, then?

Hedgpeth: It was a legislative hearing. This woman got up, who was

identified as a Stanford grad and a deputy director of Water
Resources for the state of California. She laid that out
absolutely flat.

Lage: That the Sea of Azov was landlocked?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Unfortunately, she finished just before noon, and after
the noon break, she did not come back. So I contradicted her.

Lage: Without the pleasure of being able to encounter her directly.

Hedgpeth: Yes. And then they had one of these interminable "state of the
bay" affairs in San Francisco some months later. She got up and
said the same thing again. So it was obviously official policy
to do this. So I wrote this deposition, which is primarily
showing maps, and also the size of the systems is so different.
Any ordinary Russian river is about five times as big as the
whole Sacramento-San Joaquin system. Russia is a very large
country. [I have since learned that the young lady has died. I
don't know the details. --JWH]

250

Problems with Water Diversion in Russia

Hedgpeth: But what really caused the fur to begin to fly was in 1980, a

session at Davis, the summer meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, which was to concern San
Francisco Bay problems. I went around, and lo and behold, there
was this gentleman from Russia with a thick accent and a
somewhat different approach to handling of statistical material
than we were used to. He pointed out that the danger line for a
river withdrawal was about 30 percent. Take more than 30
percent, you're going to be noticing decline in the environment.

Lage: He was a Russian who had studied the Russian situation?

Hedgpeth: He had been employed in the Russian hydrographic network. He
was an employee of the Russian federal government. He and a
group of others, including another man who's now in Connecticut
named David Tolmazin, were a group of young Turks who were
insisting this sort of thing was not good for the future of the
country. They were asked to leave. They had the option of
having life made very unpleasant for them. There's an awful lot
of room out in Siberia for folks like that, and so forth.

Lage: Did they leave the country, then?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Tolmazin left, and Rozengurt left very soon after.
Tolmazin apparently had studied English a lot more than
Rozengurt had in Russia, and he's handling English better than
Rozengurt, but he's in Connecticut and so he wasn't mixed up
directly into this thing, though they were all communicating,
including the people that remained in Russia, who were trying to
do something about these things.

See, in addition to the diversion of water for irrigation
and industrial purposes—power, and all that—water diverted for
irrigation did come back later into the system. So you had
fertilizers and herbicides and all that sort of thing, then the
factories are using water in their processing or for power and
are running through very poor refining systems or cleanups, so
they're very dirty coming back, and a lot of the water going
through domestic systems was not cleaned up.

Lage: So some of the problem could have been pollution, 1 would
suppose?

Hedgpeth: It was. In addition to that, it decreased the water, and then
you see, when you decrease the water, then you increase the

251

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

pesticides, the concentration gets higher all out of proportion
to what the original was like.

So you don't get the flushing action —

And you're dealing with a steadily decreasing volume of water
that's going back to the fish, but it's getting a steadily
increasing higher load of pollutants, in addition to being warm.
So it all gets into a kind of an exponential bind. And one of
the things involved here is obviously a lot of these people in
this state, especially out in the Fresno area, don't understand
what an exponential increase means. Have no concept of that.
In fact, they have no concept of tides, either. We've had a
couple of people in the Department of Engineering at Berkeley
who had even less concept.1

Do they really not have a concept, or they just choose to ignore
it?

Well, this guy Denton [Dr. Richard Denton]--I'll have to use his
name—he was a professor of engineering at Berkeley. Did I give
you a bit about the state of engineering at Berkeley?

You referred to it.
shall we say.

I don't think you gave a full diatribe,

What happened was that the gal who wrote the tule hypothesis
wrote a special op-ed piece for the Sacramento Bee saying that,
according to Dr. Denton, an instructor in the Department of
Sanitary Engineering, the major factor in an estuary was the
gravitational tides. [Sacramento Bee, March 27, 1989. "San
Francisco Bay and its Pollution: Flushing the freshwater myth,"
by J. Phyllis Fox. This article so outraged Ray Krone, retired
dean of engineering at Davis, that he wrote a rejoinder:
Sacramento Bee, April 19, 1989. "Fresh water's vital role in
Bay-Delta ecology," stating among other things that "Phyllis Fox
presented broad-bushed superficial arguments to support the old
saw that fresh water that flows to the sea is wasted." — JWH]
She didn't use that word, but that the tide had a much greater
swing and force than any amount of fresh water could possibly
have. Therefore, it didn't matter whether there was any fresh
water at all or not, because the tide would exchange everything.
That fellow did not get tenure.

'There are now several books in English about the impact of the
Stalinist contempt for nature in the Russian environment, e.g., Weiner,
Douglas S., Models of Nature, 1988, and Fishback, Murray, and Friendly,
Alfred, Ecocide in the USSR, 1992. --JWH.

252

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Well, that's not the way an estuary works. It may not be
very much, but when you're adding the river water to a tidal
system, and the tide is pushed up, and then the river water
comes in as the tide goes out, it increases the speed of flow.
As everybody who's navigated into tidal waters knows, the tide
on the outgoing phase is much stronger and rapider than on the
incoming tide. And this doesn't happen where there's no fresh
water.

The simplest way to look at this is to go down to Baja
California or the northern state of Sonora--that god- forsaken
piece of landscape called the Jornado de Muerte--Journey of
Death—north of Puerto Penasco.

Is this all down in Baja?

No, it's on the mainland side. They have a number of lagoons
that are quite saline. They just have salt water, they don't
have any fresh water inflow, and they tend to stagnate up on the
upper end. Evaporation becomes a main factor, then.

Using Some Texas Estuarial Data

Hedgpeth: Of course, I learned a lot of that stuff in Texas, as I told you
last time. I didn't really start to understand tidal dynamics
until I had been around a relatively simple system like Texas.
In fact, I learned a great deal simply by writing up about five
years' data accumulated by a previous employee of the Texas
Game, Fish, and Oyster Commission.

Lage: Were the Texas estuaries comparable to the bay here, or were
they without fresh water?

Hedgpeth: They're rather different. The tidal range is much less, but
they have an extensive system of tidal gradients. Because of
the history of the offshore bars and rising and falling sea
level, you had a back (nearly fresh) bay and a front
(intermediate) bay, and then you had the oceanic Gulf shore.
One of the back bays is named Baffin Bay, why I don't know.

Lage: Baffin Bay?

Hedgpeth: Yes, like Labrador. Most unlikely comparison you could think
of. It's quite often hypersaline, because for months, maybe
sometimes years, there would be hardly any rain down below
Corpus Christi, and then suddenly you'd get six inches of rain

253

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

in a day, something like that, and everything would be
straightened out again.

Did that upset the organisms that lived there, that wide
variation?

Not too much. They would kill off a few, but the main thing
that affected the organisms was (a), getting too much salt in
the summer, and (b), the quick freezes. It's very shallow
water; a lot of them died, because there were bars that
prevented them from getting back into the Gulf in the better
water. So we had freeze kills quite often there in Texas.
Anyway, it's an interesting different system.

But I worked all this data up, since I was employed without
any thought of just what I was going to be doing besides
validating the insurance. The professor who was in charge said,
"Well, do anything you want to do." So I had decamped with all
this Fish and Game data that nobody wanted.

What was the nature of the data?

He took temperatures and salinities, and depth measurements and
that sort of thing, very standard type of thing, but he took an
awful lot of it. So 1 wrote it all up, and I put his name as
first author, and made it possible for him to get a university
position also.

We were good friends.
What was his name again?

His name was Albert Collier. On doctor's orders he got out of
the Gulf Coast climate, and being a gentleman with a stomach for
this sort of thing, he wound up making a fair amount of money
filming operations for the medical profession.

It's interesting how your previous work kind of fit so well with
the bay issues. From Texas and then the Shasta —

There was no way to learn about San Francisco Bay at the time.
I had really been exposed to it first off.

254

Measuring Water Conditions in the Bay

Lage: Do they have the kind of records that you wrote up in the Gulf
for San Francisco Bay, the salinity and the tides and all?

Hedgpeth: Not for the whole bay, no. Because the main disadvantage is the
bay is so large, and the other thing is that by that size alone,
you have larger boats. The original studies were made by the
research vessel Albatross, which had a draft of--I don't know
what it was exactly, nineteen or twenty feet. The average depth
of the bay is two or three feet. There are great, vast expanses
of shallow water.

Lage: And it just couldn't--

Hedgpeth: No, you couldn't get--. All this boat could do was to sample up
and down in the channels, which of course are more disturbed.
They did get a pretty good line on the tidal system. That was
fairly simple; you install gauges in the ends of docks every
place you can think of, and read them, and balance them off, and
you can get a pretty good idea of the tidal cycle or the tidal
prism.

Actually, that was worked up by 1918 by a geologist by the
name of Grove Karl Gilbert, who worked on that big job in the
hydraulic mining debris study. He had been asked to do this,
all this silt and gravel up in the Sierra--the Yuba and American
Rivers especially. As you may know, they've piled up enough
rocks lower down to build the Oroville Dam. That primary basis
for the Oroville Dam is the mine tailings, especially from
dredges in the lower river beds.

Lage: Rocks that washed down the main rivers?

Hedgpeth: Or that the dredges dug up. They also dug up the river bed and
made great crescent-shaped piles and so forth.

Some of the more tricky hydrodynamic details were not
worked out until Hugo Fischer came along.

Lage: When was that?

Hedgpeth: I first heard him in Pensacola — darn it, when was it? I'm

trying to remember the date. He gave a paper on San Francisco
Bay, and he was working at the UC Engineering Department. That
was about five years ago. Now, in the middle of all the
hearings, he died. Most of us didn't know that his hobby was
gliding. He'd gone up to Reno for some kind of a tournament or

255

race, and nobody knows what happened because you don't see these

things going on, but it looks like either he or somebody got too

close to another glider, and they tangled a little, and he lost

control and went down, and that was the end of him.

Lage: Was he a good guy?

Hedgpeth: He was very good.

Lage: And he came out of the Engineering Department at UC.

Hedgpeth: He actually came from Cal Tech to the Engineering Department,
and he was bringing them around to a solid basis. Well, the
sudden loss of him left them with people who didn't know how to
carry on that work.

Lage: Who in particular? Are there people at UC who have testified
improperly, or is it just that they don't take an interest and
follow through with Fischer's work?

Hedgpeth: They don't understand Fischer's work, so they can't follow it
through. Some of it is highly mathematical, of course. That
was another problem. But oddly enough, the University of
California has been responsible for one of the very best
mathematical modelers related to salinity exchange in the
business, namely Donald Prichard, who is a native of Maryland.
He did his thesis at Scripps on the salinity exchange in the
Chesapeake Bay and how, during the slack water periods, the
larval oysters would rise up, be swept upstream, and then have
sense enough to drop down as the water began to recede so they
didn't lose the distance. And crab larva, the same sort of
thing .

They were working in this whole system, and the whole thing
came out as kind of a bookkeeper's balance. I attended his
doctoral presentation. Of course, he had just finished reading
the paper I had written for Albert Collier, too, and he was glad
to see that I was in the audience. [laughter]

But Don has been out here a number of times. See, we had
these people who were not related to Berkeley at any time who
were capable of doing this kind of work, but not at Berkeley; it
didn't produce them. Fischer wasn't there quite long enough to
really get the thing going. So his sudden departure left a kind
of a void there, which hasn't been filled yet, as far as I know.

Lage:

And he was working on salinity?

256

Hedgpeth: He was working on what's generally called tidal hydrography. In
other words, the exchange of tidal action, tides and currents,
related to water masses and all that sort of thing. This is a
very tricky subject in estuaries.

Lage: Is the bay model that the Corps of Engineers built of use in
these matters?

Hedgpeth: Not entirely. It is of some use in the laminar flow aspect.

You see, one of the problems with that model is that to get any
depth proportional to the rest of the size, it would have to be
several acres larger, because if you want to model, say, what is
it, a couple hundred feet or more at the gate, you'd have to
have a great big model so that the surface and the bottom area
were proportional to the depth of the whole system, and it can't
be done .

Lage: So they can't show the deep--

Hedgpeth: No. But they can show the kind of tidal currents and exchange
of surface, and that sort of thing. But they admit- -they know
their limits. What they had built it for originally was to test
the Reber plan. This guy Reber used to run around--! 've written
about him, you've seen that [see Appendix H, "Summary of
Statement to the Natural Resources Subcommittee of the Committee
on Government Operations"] --preaching this gospel of the thing
to do with the bay was to dam it up so both north and south
parts would become fresh, and then we could have all our fresh
water, and then we could build ports in what is left of the bay.

Lage: And that was in the fifties, wasn't it, that they were talking
about the Reber plan?

Hedgpeth: Oh, they still are. In fact, there was some guy who said what
we need is a twenty-foot high dam at Carquinez Straits, and the
editor of the Contra Costa paper wrote an editorial saying that
we ought to examine this, how to do this.

Lage: Was this supposed to help Contra Costa 's water problem?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, the only thing he didn't realize was that if you

raise the level twenty feet at Benicia, Stockton's got wet feet.
Stockton's about four feet above sea level, and — [laughs]

Lage: It's amazing, the ideas people come up with.

Hedgpeth: Yes, they do. They don't seem to know what the consequences are
more than fifty yards from where they're working.

257

The Tule Hypothesis and the Oyster Shell Challenge

Lage: What was your testimony about bay oysters?

Hedgpeth: You see, what happened was that the tule hypothesis reared its
slimy head.

Lage: Tell me what that is. Are we talking about the tule grass?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, it's not a grass, it's a very large sedge, I guess,
or something like that. And of course, there were cat tails and
everything else in the marshlands. The theory was proposed that
at times past before all the subdivisions and pavements, there
were great areas of the whole Sacramento-San Joaquin system
which were vast tule marshes. And their rate of evaporation,
transpiration and evaporation--evapotranspiration, they call it
--was such that actually more water was pulled out of the system
by these plants, and never got to the sea. Therefore, there
being no more tules of any consequence, we were getting more
water now than we ever had before.

Now, what was done, the first thing we really got—although
I understand somebody had been fiddling around before with this
notion, too, so it may not have been original with her—was the
planimeter measurements. Do you know what a planimeter is?

Lage: No.

Hedgpeth: Well, I've got one, I can demonstrate if you'd like. It's a
device, an analog device, for measuring areas on maps. It
consists of a pair of arms and a little roller wheel that gives
and takes as this thing moves around. So it comes out with a
reading for the area, no matter how irregular the perimeter is.
The scale of the map used is significant. If the scale is too
small, like thirty to forty miles per inch, it's not detailed
enough for the results derived, and a larger scale like two
miles per inch is too much for the instrument to enclose. With
the old-fashioned planimeter (which photos indicate was being
used in this case) larger scales would be outside the reaches of
the instrument. At best, with ordinary maps, these instruments
are approximate. Now, the Japanese now have beautiful things
that work on laser, and a lot of this whole analog stuff which
was invented way back about the time of the French Revolution
may be obsolete. The basic patents I know about are about 1850.

It's a tricky thing to do, because if you have a small-
scale map, a lot of the little bends and indentations and so
forth are masked out by reducing the scale and the needed detail

258

is not there. The other thing is following this, because what
you're doing is you're moving this point vertically right around
the bend of an irregular shape. If you check this out, say, and
you've got squared paper of an inch square, reading your map as
a mile to the inch or something like that, you can pretty easily
check your accuracy on doing this just on the square of the
coordinate paper, and reading it off. Even then, you will find
that you should be doing it — I think the usual practice is to
run the planimeter at least three times around whatever and
average the readings.

So the first thing is the accuracy of the map you're
working with. Now, the lady didn't say when she got up and
first gave this testimony, and she sprung it about quarter to
five in the afternoon when things are looking very bad for the
water contractors. Some evidence was coming up that they didn't
like, and so they threw her in ahead of things.

Lage: Do you remember her name?

Hedgpeth: Yes, her name is J. Phyllis Fox. She wore a pair of gaudy,
dangly earrings, and square glasses at the time.

Lage: Is she a biologist or an engineer or — ?

Hedgpeth: No. She got her degree in engineering on the fractionation of
oil shales, a 444-page job, I believe. At least, the reference
says that. Even double-spaced thesis-style, it's still a pretty
long-winded thing. But it has nothing to do with this problem.

Lage: So I interrupted you, but she got up at quarter to five in the
afternoon?

Hedgpeth: Yes, and presented this case, and said that the area was such
that there might have been like twelve million acre- feet of
water transpired out of this system [by the tule marshes] that
now we have there.

There's one thing, the map she didn't mention until the
seminar, an open seminar was held, and then she mentioned the
map she used. But at that time, I didn't have — I didn't know
she was going to do this, or I could have come prepared, but I
wasn't prepared for that. The map is on the millionth scale,
and that's sixteen and a half miles to the inch.

Lage: Did you have to ask her about this, or did she bring it up?

Hedgpeth: She mentioned the map by its name, and the question occurred to
me immediately, which I didn't bother to ask her in public, was

259

Lage:

whether she had used a large unfolded wall display map, or used
the map that came with the book. She hadn't mentioned where she
got the map, by the way. It might make a difference, because
the folds on that map are equivalent to two or three miles at
that scale of height, and bumps and dips could have pulled a map
like that, and it's a map of California comes out about half the
size of this tabletop, at sixteen and a half miles — a millionth,
incidentally, is considered one of the standard scales. This is
one of the scales of the first major map of South America, was
made in the millionth. It's a fairly easy scale to work on.
However, it is not very accurate, to say the least.

There is a little chapter in this book by A. Will Kuchler,
the man who designed the map, stating he designed it only for
general display purposes, hypothetical areas, especially for
tules and other areas of that nature where they had no good
data, past or present. They didn't know really how much land
was involved. But she goes merrily on as if she knows all this.

Now, did you know this from reading the book before?

Hedgpeth: No. I came home and looked at her source of data.
Lage: Did you have the book here?

Hedgpeth: Yes, I have the book here. This is standard reference.

Actually, I don't know how I came by it. I think I got it from
Science. I used to go to Washington every so often, I'd go up
to the book review department of Science. They only review two
or three books a week, and they get hundreds of them. They give
most of them to some local needy college. Most of them are up
for grabs. So I grabbed — some of the books they didn't review
are marvelous things, on fauna and flora of the Adriatic, cost
eighty bucks. I missed that.

But anyhow, so I got this book. I had never really used it
much. It's Terrestrial Vegetation of California by Major and
Barbour from the university at Davis, a standard work. They've
got a new edition out now. They call it their door stopper.

So at the end of the seminar, she was asked from the floor
by somebody what her margin of error was. "Oh," she said,
"about 50 percent. That's only a factor of two," says she. I
think that finished her with most of the people who really knew
what this was about. Knew she was not doing very much, because
a factor of two when you're talking about a difference between
six and twelve million acre-feet, that's one hell of a lot of
water.

260

Lage: It sure is. [laughter] Well, she must have been aware of that.

Hedgpeth: She probably was, but engineers get carried away with these

numbers. They forget the implication of how far off you can get
by using a bad number to begin with.

Lage: Now, did you have a chance to rebut her testimony then?

Hedgpeth: I wrote a rebuttal, and it was kind of funny. It was a rebuttal
on oysters. Because what I said was that the major deposits of
oyster shells around San Francisco Bay are all in the south bay.
There are none in the north; there's hardly any oysters there.
Most of these are gone now. The Anthro Department for years was
studying these shell mounds in the 1900s, 1920s, and one of the
biggest ones is right in San Mateo in 1930 when I was there.
It's now completely obliterated by the Bayshore Freeway.
Freeways run through practically all the middens all the way
around the bay except the north bay, where there aren't very
many. They are set way back, like the little one north of China
Cove, just something up the hillside, and they really didn't
make big middens, and they don't have oysters there except one
or two.

Anyway, this rebuttal was prepared with a copy of the table
of percentages of types of shell found in the bay, pointing out
that because most of the fresh water that comes out of the upper
system flows down and goes out the Golden Gate near the surface,
only in very heavy rains does much of it get south. Therefore,
the southern part of the bay has already been more salty than
the northern part. It's probably been like that for 5,000 years
because oyster shell is a major source of limes for industrial
purposes in the south bay; there has been a regular dredging for
that. I cited all these references.

Well, something happened and we didn't get in on the
scheduled date. We had it already typed up. I guess a couple
of the copies got loose, because she got hold of the advance
copy. So she comes sashaying up and says that my testimony had
no value at all because, in spite of what I had said, my own
graphic material indicated that oysters occurred everywhere in
the bay. Well, the only record in Carquinez is about one-half
of one shell. The graph table very plainly states and indicates
that's the lowest value, too small to estimate.

Lage: I'm not getting the connection, somehow, between her testimony
about the amount of water that came out, and your testimony
about the oysters.

261

Hedgpeth: My testimony is the fact that the amount of water coming out of
the bay was as much as it is now or probably more, because it
kept the oysters in the south part of the bay. They didn't get
up in the north part of the bay.

Lage: I see, it kept them pushed down in the south.
Hedgpeth: Yes, and they couldn't raise oysters in the north bay.
Lage: Because there wasn't enough salinity?

Hedgpeth: There was too much fresh water. And at Tiburon, for example,
Victor Loosanoff came over there from the East to do some work
with oysters, and he had to move out to the ocean shore at
Dillon Beach, because the water was too fresh at Tiburon in the
winter and interfered with the experiments.

Lage: I see. So by tracing where the oysters were over time —

Hedgpeth: Yes. That's what I did, and it's straightforward. Well,

anyway, Jim Sutton, the biologist for the state water board and
his staff man said they knew it was all a bunch of malarkey in
the beginning. They thought it was sheer- -

Lage: That she was--

Hedgpeth: Yes, he said it had no meaning for them. But of course, these
people at the hearing board are lay people, not always quite as
up with things as the rest of them. But anyhow, that was that.
Later I dubbed her Nuestra Senorita La Reina de los Tulares.

Lage: Tell me about the hearing board. What kind of people are they?

Hedgpeth: They were all appointed; they were mostly agribusiness types.
They're private citizens appointed to the WRCB by the governor
and by Willie Brown, and two or three other people have choices
in this matter.

Lage: And they're not necessarily biologists or hydrologists or--

Hedgpeth: No, they're just people who are interested in—turns out most of
them are agribusiness types.

Lage: How well do they receive the testimony?
Hedgpeth: I don't know. They never say much of any--
Lage: Do they ask questions?

262

Hedgpeth: No, they don't ask many questions on these things. Of course, a
lot of it is a little too much for them, they don't understand
fish populations and that kind of thing. Fish and Game had a
lot of that sort of stuff.

Lage: Do you try to key your testimony—do you testify verbally as
well as in writing?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Usually when you get up to present a case, you give a
spoken summary.

Lage: And then you give them a paper.
Hedgpeth: Yes. The paper has more details.

Lage: When you were giving your spoken summary, do you try to think
about their level of competence?

Hedgpeth: I do, of course. You try to make it plain to who you're

speaking to, because this is the only time they'll ever get it.
They probably won't read this stuff that they're getting. Well,
actually, the thing amounted to about two stacks of this high
[gestures] by the time they get through with it. Some of it's
frightfully long-winded. [The total stack of paper generated by
this hearing reached a height of twenty feet! --JWH]

Striped Bass Population and the Flood of 1863

Hedgpeth: Then I wrote a little skit about the striped bass, pointing out
that we should have—we don't know the conditions under which
they managed to become established in the period of about one
and a half years. They exploded almost instantly; it was quite
a phenomenon. [laughs] For example, one of the silly things,
they were transported out here in porcelain-lined tanks —

Lage: What time period are we talking about?

Hedgpeth: 1879.

Lage: Oh, way back.

Hedgpeth: Yes. And so they kept the tank temperature very carefully, and
its salinity. These fish were esturine water types anyway. And
they brought them all the way out from New Jersey, and they went
out on the pier in Martinez and dumped them in the bay, and they

263

didn't take the temperature or salinity of the bay. [laughter]
It was funny.

Lage: After all their careful concern.

Hedgpeth: Right, yes.

Lage: So what happened to them?

Hedgpeth: They just exploded. They took off.

Lage: Did they destroy a native?

Hedgpeth: We don't know. One of the things we don't know — my reason for
saying this is that in 1862- '63, we had the greatest flood of
record. It flooded the entire northern part of the Central
Valley up to about thirty feet. The legislature had to adjourn
to San Francisco. Sacramento was flooded out. If that ever
happens again, think what all those big places like Marysville
and Oroville would be under water, and highways, they'd all be--
that would really be something if that ever happened again.

What they think happened was two big storms, one from the
south and one from the north, collided probably right around
Sacramento, and San Francisco Bay was fresh for about six days
or more. Of course, the academy was flourishing then, so they
kept some records on this.

That flood aspect is discussed in that Conomos book on San
Francisco Bay. They try to estimate the total flows from what
little they know of the thing. But they've never had anything
like that since. And of course, we may never have had a drought
like this before, so we don't know what's going to happen.
Sometime we may get something like that. Boy, run for cover.
If you think an earthquake can fix you up, a flood like that
won't help either.

Lage: And that wouldn't be controlled by all the dams that they've
built?

Hedgpeth: No. Dams only have a certain capacity. If they can't hold it
all, it would be going over the spillways before you know it.
See, the situation we have now is that the lovely Division of
Water Resources decided to take a risk on the possibility that
we might have some rain again, so they ran the water too far
down. The total amount of water now in the reservoir is not
enough to carry next year.

264

Lage: The minute we get that spring rain, they seem to think the
drought is over.

Hedgpeth: That's right. And they're silly. They should look at the tree
ring records. It shows this kind of fluctuation. Texas quite
often has had seven-year droughts. Of course, that's a
different system down there.

Lage: Let's see, let's finish the striped bass.

Hedgpeth: Oh, well, I just wrote this little skit about that, apropos of
nothing except somebody made some comment about it, and they
said the problem is in reference to what they have to decide
about striped bass. We don't really understand just what went
on to make it possible for them to take like that. We just
don't have the data. We don't know where they go. You see, it
may have been related to the flood of 1862. It wiped out a lot
of things, so there was a lot of probably unoccupied space
around for other things to flourish in.

Outcome of the Bay-Delta Hearings

Lage: What was the outcome of the hearings, those three-year hearings?
Hedgpeth: Zilch.
Lage: In what way?

Hedgpeth: Their decision was simply to allocate water, a little less
maybe, but that was all.

Lage: To allocate some water to the Fish and Wildlife?

Hedgpeth: No, irrigation only.

Lage: They are still focused on irrigation?

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. The chief attorney for the water contractors was a

character named Arthur Littleworth. I think he's still around;
I haven't heard that he died. Fellow I started under in this
business was Walter Gleason, that was in the '68- '69 affair, and
he was alleged to have been on all sides of all water fights in
the state sooner or later. Gleason, it turned out, didn't have
a family, he was a bachelor. His fee for the Contra Costa thing
was something like $675,000. There was a lot of squabble about
that, but he convinced everybody he really earned it.

265

Lage: He was really worth it.

Hedgpeth: Oh, yes. But he was kind of fun to work with, at least as long
as you're on his side. He coached us before we went on the
stand.

Hedgpeth: Anyway, old Littleworth got to me; I forget what I was saying at
the time about water. He said, "Are you discussing impaired or
unimpaired flows?" Well, unimpaired flow is a hypothetical type
of flow, as if things had never been changed. So I said, "Well,
sir, I was aware that water contractors have special meanings
for this term 'unimpaired,' so I really can't answer, except
that I would say it was before the stream was impaired by the
construction of a dam." He didn't like that answer at all, and
kicked me off the stand. [laughter] Anyway. So that's the way
it went.

Well, in some ways it was fun, and in other ways it wasn't.
Lage: But there was really no beneficial outcome?

Hedgpeth: But you see, you were asking about the other--! didn't hear much
of the other testimony, except the day I was there. Most of the
time it would be Fish and Game and stuff like that. But some of
the other things I didn't know anything about. Because we'd
have to drive up to Sacramento, stayed overnight one night I
think it was --some thing came up, we had to be there the next
morning .

Testimony by Scientists on Public Policy Issues

Lage: You made remarks about scientists that sort of sell themselves?

Hedgpeth: I didn't make that in public. That would be actionable. Then
the gentleman who had in mind to do most of this showed up, of
all places, here in Santa Rosa at a hearing on sewage water.
That was 1985, in the famous year of the turds. You see, the
city got overloaded and dumped everything straight into the
Russian River, and those people still remember it, and they're
fighting to the death any scheme. Now that their treatment is
so changed that the state Water Quality Board has said, "Well,
you can release it in the river now, it's fit to drink." Blech!
Well, anyway, nobody quite believes him, even though the chief

266

water engineer gets himself photographed on every occasion
drinking a cup of it .

Well, anyway, this guy got up, and he's a member of the
faculty of engineering at Berkeley, and says, "Hi, I'm a
professor of aquatic ecology" from the university. Well, that
title is not, as far as I know, at least the exact way he worded
it, is not on the roster at Berkeley.

Lage: Aquatic ecologist, especially in the Department of Engineering.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, he didn't say he was in the Department of

Engineering, but I knew that. But he said, "You can stand there
at the end of that big sewer pipe in the East Bay and you look
down, and all you see is nice, clear water. There's no baddies
in it." These people seem to have a knack for coming off with
these cracks just before lunch, because he disappeared.
Afterwards, I got up and I said, "I have to disagree with that
statement because there are many things in the water you can't
see. Those are the real baddies." Sat down, and Tom Lynch got
up and referred to him as "Your Judas goat consultant."
[laughter] I don't know whether he'd been back to town or not,
but at any rate, he has appeared at several places where he's
been roundly denounced for inaccuracies in testimony.

Lage: So do you have the sense that he's not necessarily testifying to
what he believes but what he gets paid to testify for?

Hedgpeth: Well, that's a rather awkward thing to say. He may actually
believe these things. He obviously doesn't understand the
scientific method. He doesn't know how to set an experiment up
so it really proves anything, in other words. What he wanted to
do, for example, to test the effect of pollution on mussels was
to- -you have a 5,000-gallon tank of water pumped from the bay,
into which he got mussels from the end of a pier and put them in
there, and said, "Lookit, they live here, so the bay's water is
all right."

Well, he pulled that in San Francisco at the American
Geophysical Union, or rather, one of his students did, and the
audience really gave him hell. There was no experiment, he had
no controls. Well, the fellow said, "Oh, we can control the
quantity of water, we know how much we're using."

Lage: It sounds like he's a little bit outside of his field.
Hedgpeth: Definitely. I don't know what he did to get his degree.
Lage: Is it somebody whose name you'd want to mention?

267

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:
Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

It's Alec Home. He was going to work up the Aquatic Habitat
Institute as a way to support his schemes, the Corps of
Engineering Department, and nobody wanted him to do this.
Somebody- -not me, I don't know enough about the university--
found out there were rules against funding a university
department directly by the state Division of Water Resources,
from one state purse to another. It was one thing to support
students as such, and research, but another thing to support a
whole department directly. So they kicked it about and now it's
quasi- independent, one of these several outfits around the bay
that more or less reinterpret other people's paperwork.

What's it called?

The Aquatic Habitat Institute, one of them. And then the EPA
has funded—they funded ABAC [Association of Bay Area
Governments], of all places, and they don't have anybody who
knows anything, I guess. They tentatively remarked that, "Well,
the tule hypothesis has been protested by some people, but there
still remains the fact there is less water now than there used
to be." So I accused them of trying to go to bed with Nuestra
Senorita la Reina de los Tulares [Our Lady the Queen of the
Tules--a take-off on the full name of Los Angeles], and I wrote
this letter to them about two months ago, and I haven't had a
response.

I wonder why?

I wonder why too.

Did you expect one?

I sent copies to the EPA directly, as well as to them, and quite
a few other people. But anyhow.

Now, you have not had any reluctance to get involved in
controversial public policy kinds of issues, as a scientist,
that standard in your field?

I don't know. I got asked to by Aquatic Habitat Institute. Of
course, that thing up here about sewage water, that was just
sitting there, and I decided I ought to say something, somebody
ought to say something about that kind of testimony, as soon as
you can--.

But do you find that scientists get engaged and use their
scientific knowledge to affect public policy? In the scientific
community, is there any hesitancy to do that?

268

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

I think there's some people—if you've got a reputation to
defend, you can't just go around taking up too many causes.
What they're doing, of course, and more significant, is they're
working for consulting agencies, so they present the line which
the consultants want, and the consultants are presenting the
line which the employers want, which is usually some branch of
the local government.

So from your observations, a lot of scientists sort of bend
their science to whoever they're hired by?

I think it's worse than that. I don't think they just have
enough knowledge to back up what they're saying half the time.
They haven't been to the right places to really get hold of the
subject, so they--

It's not good science.

Yes. Well, another young character, he was a student of Dr.
Home's, wrote a deposition which seems to have been drafted by
the city attorney — there's a lot more legal stuff in it than
there should be—pointing out that he defined a project area as
--for instance, a reservoir would be the upper shore of the
reservoir. So anything above that limit wouldn't be affected by
what you were doing. Well, he was commenting on a statement
made which he didn't read, saying that obstructions or barriers
would have to be installed to keep fish from swimming upstream
to get into other places where he didn't want them. So I
pointed out that the project area is the whole region, above the
reservoir and below it, all the way to the sea. Of course, the
stream's only twelve miles long, and you can't define a project
area that way. I think he's just naive and uninformed.

And being considered an expert.

Yes. I was asked to say something in a rather funny way: one
of the chief planners, the owner of the adjacent property, sent
me his legal brief and said that their attorney wanted to hear
what I had to say about it. So I wrote two pages, and I told
somebody else it was so much fun doing this, 1 wouldn't charge
anybody for that. [laughter]

Does the Bay Institute pay for testimony? Or do you think it
just--

I don't know. They paid me for a couple of these things. I was
taking off a lot of time, I charged $100 a day. But that's
nothing.

269

Lage: Have you done other consulting since you retired?

Hedgpeth: Of course, you see, that other thing, I hadn't retired. I was
at Oregon State as a faculty member and they brought me down
here. That was very funny in some ways, because I was
testifying about salmon migration — this was the water board
people. They'd brought in a fellow from the faculty at Oregon
State to advise them on how to handle people like me, and 1 was
talking about the latest paper I'd read on salmon migration. I
said, "Of course, this is preliminary data, but it's rather
suggestive. And by the way, it is written by Dr. Donaldson's
father." Dr. Donaldson was the guy who was brought down to
counter me.

And one of the attorneys started to fidget, I saw Jack go,
"Shh, shh--lay off of this." [laughter] It was funny. We had
a good laugh over it afterwards. I didn't even know he was on
it, and I don't think he knew I was on it, either, at that
point.

I know that several times he waved off the attorneys who
were about ready to jump off the deep edge. It's awful easy for
attorneys to do in these technical things.

Lage: You kind of have to train the attorneys?
Hedgpeth: Yes.

Questions for Future Bay and Delta Research

Lage: You mentioned in, I guess it was the article in the Conomos
book, is it, on the bay as urbanized estuary, that the
significant questions weren't being asked in the bay/delta
research. Is that still the case?

Hedgpeth: Well, they're getting there now, I think. Of course, it's very
expensive to ask some of the significant questions.

Lage: What are the significant questions?

Hedgpeth: See, they come up and they say they don't have any real clear
relation between salinity and so forth. I just turned up
something yesterday; I was a little shocked I had never read it,
It was written in 1970 by a colleague down in Texas, Curly
Wohlschlag, who I knew pretty well, on the incremental effects

270

in estuarian systems of how just a very little can build up to
critical effects on population changes.

Lage: Very little changes in the system?

Hedgpeth: Yes. And they build up on top of that, and before you know it,
you're sitting around looking and you've got no fish. Of
course, we knew we were going to have no fish if this kept up.
But agribusiness doesn't believe that.

Lage: What kind of research should they be doing, or are they doing
that you are encouraged by?

Hedgpeth: I think they are now, because they've set up this system of

funding, partly because of the Shubel report. These people from
the East including Shubel and Don Prichard and other folk, were
retained by the Fish and Game and the DWR and the federal
bureaus to come out here and study the matter, what was needed
to get the San Francisco Bay off its dead center.

They came out with it pretty clear. The first thing was to
get the universities involved. Of course, now they're going to
cut off the only courses they have on San Francisco Bay, because
they can't afford all that.

Lage: At UC?

Hedgpeth: Yes. Doris Sloan [UC Berkeley lecturer in environmental

science] has run off, taking early retirement, so I don't know
what's going to happen with—see, she had been handling 275
students or something, but they weren't going to give her any
T.A.s or any assistantship. Besides, she's a grandmother. She
had several strikes against her, being--! guess she's over sixty
now, and coming in very late in the system, would count against
her. So when they offered her a golden parachute deal, she
grabbed it, I gather. She says she'll hang around and
participate in things, but I guess she won't have that teaching
load, and I doubt whether anybody who's around is going to take
it over.

Lage: And she was teaching the course on the bay?
Hedgpeth: Yes. Among other things, I gather.
Lage: Well, that's not encouraging.

Hedgpeth: No, it isn't. But I don't know what happened here. A funny
letter from the Integrated Science folk, Integrated Biology
folk, about some schemes they had for the Richmond Field Station

271

property, which has got a considerable bit of real estate around
there. So I started my response with a quote from guess who. I
said, "Call me Ishmael; I'm the only one left to tell the tale."
[laughter] I don't know whether Bill Lidicker knows what that
means; I suspect he does.

Lage: Hopefully.
Hedgpeth: Hopefully, yes.

Lage: Is this ending on a more encouraging note, or a discouraging
note? You said you do think some of the proper research is
going to--

Hedgpeth: Well, I hope, but I don't know. The Integrated Biology people
seem to be a bit innocent in the way they started at it. But
then Lidicker is an upland rodent man.

Lage: Do they have good people in marine biology?

Hedgpeth: Should have a couple. They have Jere Lipps there as chairman.
He ought to know something.

Lage: Any former students of yours?

Hedgpeth: Not that I know of, unless you count Doris. I coached her on
her prelims, that's all. [laughs] That was kind of funny.

Lage: She went back to school as a mature woman, didn't she?

Hedgpeth: Yes, right. She'd been a sociology major at Bryn Mawr. And of
course, her father is a zoologist. She didn't make much of
that. I don't think she cares whether you know it or not, but
anyway, he's Viktor Hamburger at the Washington University at
St. Louis, Missouri. He came over to escape Hitler in those
days. She was about four, I think, when she was brought over.
I met her when she was our neighbor in Sebastapol.

But anyhow, she came around to me and said she didn't know
just what they would be asking for invertebrate zoology. I
think she knew I had been a guest of the Paleo Department for a
couple of years in a rather peculiar arrangement. They had
asked me to participate in their prelims so they wouldn't have
to have those characters from down in the swamps of LSB
mistreating their star students. Of course, students, all they
knew was about what they found in rocks, you know, in paleo. I
said, well, I would do that if they happened to attend my summer
course at Dillon Beach, not that I needed the trade, but at

272

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

least I would know something about them,
was set up.

So you sat on their prelims?

So that's the way it

Lage:

Yes. I remember one time I had a little box of gravel, very
small pieces of gravel; with paleontologists and geologists, the
size sorting and character of things like this is rather
important. So I asked the candidate to suggest the sorting
influence or sorting agent. Because they were all the same
size, and they were all irregular, rough shapes.

He looked at them and said, "Well, they're not water, and
not air. Seeing as you're asking the question, I guess they're
biogenic." I said, "Well, all right. What next?" He gave up.
I said, "They're sorted by ants." These are the pebbles on top
of the harvester ant hills up in Modoc County. I had gathered
them up for possible railroad ballast in a model railroad
project.

So after we threw him out in the hall to stew for five or
ten minutes, the first thing out of the hat was a mineralogist,
old Garniss Curtis himself. He said, "Well, I'm glad nobody
ever asked me that question." [laughter]

It does look like kind of a hard one to deal with.

Well, I think it was tricky, unfair. [laughter] But the main
thing is, you want to get the candidate in a position where he
can't fake anything, he has to give up. Then you're all right.
These characters who blithely make up something out of whole
cloth; you worry about them.

And they're fast talkers, and--

Yes. [We lost Doris. I told her to study her committee, and
not to try to bluff when she didn't know the answer to a
question, but to say she did not know and maneuver to change the
subject, and if she could get the committee to argue with each
other, she was in. She didn't have to do that, but she passed
easily. A couple of weeks later I was seated beside a member of
her committee at an evening dinner, and he said that they had a
very fine examination with Mrs. Sloan, and then he said, "I
wonder who coached her." As if he didn't know, because I was
sure he'd seen me around the department, so I answered, "I have
no idea." --JWH, October 1995]

In general, do you think the young people coming along in marine
biology are of good quality?

273

Hedgpeth: I don't know many of them right now. We turned out a few pretty
good ones at Dillon Beach, mostly from the high school and
junior college teachers. One of them went on to become a
specialist at the U.S. National Museum for a while, and then he
had to go into consulting because that wasn't paying enough to
support a family, which is true. One of them became the
chancellor of the entire junior college system, which wasn't
what we were intending to do for him, but--

Lage: But anyway. [laughs]
Hedgpeth: Yes. That was Dave Mertes.

The Roman versus Celtic View of Life

Lage: Let me ask you, I was looking at the list of your lecture

topics, and the one on the environmental movement as the latest
phase of the battle between Roman practicality and the Celtic
view of life was very intriguing. Tell me about it.

Hedgpeth: Yes. Well, just having a little fun. You see, you'd have to

look at my library to see that bunch of Celtic books there, some
of which I've read and some of which I haven't read, in most of
the Celtic languages. But anyhow, this lovely passage in a book
by a man who wrote under the name of Fiona McLeod, whose name
was James Sharp, I think, about the mothering, how a mother
takes her baby out as soon as she can after it's born and
touches its head to the earth. Called "the mothering." He said
that was carried out at least when he was writing, which I guess
was in the 1890s or somewhere along in then. But that's very
late for that sort of thing. That must have been in the
Highlands, where the custom would endure.

But there is that feeling, because very few of the Celts
wherever you go are big city dwellers, except maybe the Irish at
Dublin. Most of them do live fairly close to nature. And then,
of course, I point out that this poem about the squirrel going
to London to fight the cutting down of the trees is the first
environmental protest of record [ca. 1570J. I opened my talk
with the Eisteddfod invocation, just for the fun of it. Got an
old sword which was secularized by St. Vincent de Paul,
secondhand Joint, you know. [laughter] It was an old Knights
of Columbus sword. The chief bard starts the Welsh cultural
festival by asking, "Is there peace in the land?" "Oes
heddwch?" [Is there peace?] And asks this three times, and
finally the audience cries back, "Heddwch!"

274

Lage: And what does that mean?

Hedgpeth: Peace, yes. That's the opening part of the ceremony. They
dress up in fancy bathrobes and indulge in all kinds of
folderol, most of which was made up by a rather cynical Welshman
in about 1850 or so, as a bardic revival. But anyhow, that's
neither here nor there.

Lage: And then what's--

Hedgpeth: Well, you just get this feeling for nature from the Celts.

They're always fighting about it, protesting what is going on.
Part of it is also protesting the English.

Lage: Now, what's the Roman practicality?

Hedgpeth: The Roman law and all of that, yes. Building bridges, and all
those roads.

Lage: The engineering mentality.

Hedgpeth: Yes, right.

Lage: Do you think your Celtic roots have influenced your outlook?

Hedgpeth: I don't know. I think I had some fun with people; I don't know.
May have influenced me a little, but anyhow.

Lage: It's hard to sort those things out.
Hedgpeth: Yes.

Recognition for Work to Save the Environment

Lage: In 1976, you got the Browning Award for achievement in
preserving the environment. Who was that given by?

Hedgpeth: Mr. Browning, who left a sum of money to the Smithsonian

Institution to be administered for people who — he had a series
of categories, I forget what they all are now. I don't know
whether the brochure is near there or not; I used to have a
brochure about it up here.

Lage:

Was that sort of a lifetime achievement award?

Hedgpeth: No, it was just done once every year.

275

Lage: But I mean, for your recognition, was it for a particular thing,
or for —

Hedgpeth: That's right; no, it was just for general activity. I think in
all of them. It wasn't because I'd written for a special paper
or book or anything like that. Well, at that time, it paid
$5,000, and later on they were beginning to run low on money and
they dropped it a bit.

So you got it at the right time.

Yes, I got it at the right time. By the time they got to
Starker, it was only a couple of K or something.

Does it often go to scientists?

No, there's one category for "Conserving the Environment."1

Let's just mention also that you were awarded the Fellows Medal
of the California Academy of Science just recently.

Yes. Oh, they put on the back what they think it's for.

[laughs] Well, I have down here, "In recognition of outstanding
contributions to invertebrate zoology, marine ecology, and
responsible use of the environment."

Is there anything else you want to add?

Hedgpeth: [Since this interview began I have been elected a foreign member
of the Linnean Society of London, in recognition of my work as a
systematic zoologist. --JWH)

Lage:
Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:

Lage:

Hedgpeth:
Lage:

Transcribers: Chris DeRosa, Shannon Page
Final Typist: Shannon Page
Editor: Anne Apfelbaum

'"For the person who has made an outstanding contribution in enhancing
the quality of our physical environment. Nominees are proposed by the
Smithsonian Institution." --Browning Award announcement. [See Appendix
I.]

276

TAPE GUIDE--Joel Hedgpeth

Interview 1: June 25, 1992

Tape 1, Side A

Tape 1, Side B

Tape 2, Side A

Tape 2, Side B

Interview 2: July 2, 1992

Tape 3, Side A

Tape 3, Side B

Tape 4, Side A

Tape 4, Side B

Tape 5, Side A

Tape 5, Side B

Interview 3:

September

2, 1992

Tape 6,

Side A

Tape 6,

Side B

Tape 7,

Side A

Tape 7,

Side B

Interview 4:

October 1,

1992

Tape 8,

Side A

Tape 8,

Side B

Tape 9,

Side A

Tape 9,

Side B

Interview 5: October 15, 1992
Tape 10, Side A
Tape 10, Side B
Tape 11, Side A
Tape 11, Side B

Interview 6: October 29, 1992

Tape 12, Side A

Tape 12, Side B

Tape 13, Side A

Tape 13, Side B

Tape 14, Side A

Tape 14, Side B not recorded

Interview 7: November 19, 1992
Tape 15, Side A
Tape 15, Side B
Tape 16, Side A
Tape 16, Side B not recorded

34
35
45
58
70
80

106

117

122
133
143
153

156
166
175
186

196
206
217
228
238

243
253
265

277

APPENDICES- -Joel W. Hedgpeth

A. "A Boy's Life at Mather, 1921-1922" by Ted Wurm. 278

B. "Sea Spiders (Pycnogonida)", introduction to the
proceedings of a meeting held in 1976 at the Linnean
Society in honor of Joel Hedgpeth, and a listing of

Hedgpeth entries in "A pycnogonid bibliography." 282

C. "Ed Ricketts, Marine Biologist" by Joel Hedgpeth, from

the Steinbeck Newsletter. Fall 1995. 293

D. Letter from Aldo Leopold, 19 47. 295

E. "Progress—The Flower of the Poppy," by Joel Hedgpeth, in

American Scientist, vol. 35 (3) 1947. 296

F. Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology. 1957, Foreward

and Contents. 300

G. Family placenames: Tichenor Rock, Nellie's Cove, Nellie

Lake, Hedgpeth Heights. 302

H. Statement on San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary — An Ecological

System, 1969. 303

I. The Edward W. Browning Achievement Awards, 1976. 305

J. Curriculum Vitae of Joel W. Hedgpeth. 308

K. Commencement Speech to Class of 1970, Fresno State College. 316

278

APPENDIX A

THE QUARTERLY OF THE TUOLUMNE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Vol. 29, No. 1

SONORA, CALIFORNIA 95370

JUL.-SEPT., 1989

A Boy 's Life at Mather - 1921-22

Joel W. Hedgpeth's
Memories

(Hetch Hetchy Camps Part V)
By Ted Wurm

[KE DYE'S "Hog Ranch," as we have seen,
gave its name to a tiny settlement which for
a time served as the entrance gate to Hetch
Hetchy Valley. The valley itself, a smaller
version of Yosemite, was about ten rough miles by
horseback farther into the Sierra Nevada Range - a
bone-wearying four-hour ride. Hog Ranch had at
one time served as the outpost of a contingent of
U.S. Army soldiers guarding Yosemite.

In the second decade of this century the Hog
Ranch became an important locale in the dramatic
Hetch Hetchy story, with City and County of San
Francisco playing the lead role. Their first decision
here was to drop the old name. "Hog Ranch" was
inelegant, and they bestowed the name Mather in
honor of the first head of the National Park Service.
This would be an important stop on the City's new
Hetch Hetchy Railroad as the last space before the
damsite with room for sidings and for their major
sawmill. By 1918 the one-time pork center had
become a busy settlement, with railroad, post office,
strings of cabins for the sawmill workers, the
all-important cookhouse, a commissary, and the big
sawmill with its ponds.

Hetch Hetchy Railroad trains hauling cement
for construction at damsite seldom had business at
Mather, but all seemed to stop here for a "break"
because it was always chow time when the tired
trainmen arrived ana the cook was famous all up
and down the line. There was also a daily local
freight train picking up and delivering supplies and
construction materials at all stations. And there
were two passenger trains daily each way, but to
reach the Bay Area the same day, a traveler had to
catch the westward train at 4:10 a.m. The numbered
"passenger" trains usually had a few freight cars
coupled ahead of the coach, or they could be
"MOTOR" trains, gasoline railcars that trainmen
referred to as "track buses."

A small post office was maintained within the
station building, undoubtedly manned by the
station agent, whose "duties also consisted of
tending a large garden of petunias at the western
end of the building, a much-appreciated spot of color
in the evergreen forest. This was a cheery sight to
ten-year-old Joel Hedgpeth and his mother, arriving
by train in 1921 from Oakland, to join the head of
the family, who was employed as the blacksmith at
Mather sawmill.

— Counrty Ted Wurm

Ten-year-old Joel W. Hedgpeth smoking coffee in a
pipe of his own design.

— Caurtety Ttd Wurm

Hog Ranch as it appeared in August 1916. So named
because pioneer Ike Dye raised porkers earlier, it
afterwards became a guard station for soldiers
protecting the Yosemite National Park. The name
of the area was changed to "Mather" when it
became a vital link in the Hetch Hetchy Project.

Page 974

279
CHISPA

CHISPA

Published Four Time* Each Year

Founding Editor: Donald I Segeretrom

•CHISPA." the title of the quarterly publication of the Tuolumne County
rhetorical Society, n • word of Spanish origin which enjoys a special
association with the hiatory of the area. Although it haaa variety of meanings,
ranging from "•parka" or "embers" to "clevsrneaa" or "wit," locally it acquired
an additional colloquial meaning aa it waa alao used to describe any nugget or
epecimen of gold, and particularly one of great beauty or high radiance.
Tht term waa introduced to the diggings of Tuolumne County by pioneer
miner* from the State of Sonora. Mexico, and waa quickly adopted into the
vocabulary of the many nationalities who mined her*.

EDITOR: CARLO M. DE FERRARI

PRODUCTION EDITOR: Prances Germain

EDITORIAL BOARD: Richard L. Dyer, Joan Gorsuch,

Sharon Marovich, Jean McChsh, Lyle Scott,

Dolores Yescas Nicolini, Mary Etta Segerstrom,

Mary Grace Paquette

The Quarterly of the Tuolumne
County Historical Society, Inc.

P. O. Box 575 - Sonora, CA 95370

All rights to republication are reserved. Permiaaion to quota or uae malarial
herein should be obtained in writing.

Wall researched articles concerning local history are welcomed. However,
editors reserve the right to edit, accept or reject any articles or photographs
submitted for publication. The editors are not responsible for the loss of, or
failure to return any unsolicited article, articles or photographic materials.

Joel recalled in his "Tuolumne Memories" notes
that they had waited a long time at Oakdale for the
Sierra Railway connection, then camped a few days
at Groveland and other places along the way. The
family finally moved into a long, one-door cabin
near the sawmill at Mather. "It was not long after
that/' he writes, "when I encountered an old
gentleman with his burros, unpacking hymn books
in the grove in preparation for services . . . When he
found out who I was, he immediately looked up my
mother, for they had been fellow missionaries.
This was the Reverend Hugh Furneaux, in those
days known as "The Shepherd of the Hills." He was
a Presbyterian missionary working out of Columbia
or Sonora during the summer months. "He traveled
up and down the mountains on his mission, with his
donkeys 'Pipe Organ' and 'Bagpipes.' She invited
him to dinner, after which he baptised me as Joel
Walker Hedgpeth. I am reminded that I may be the
only person to have been baptised at Mather. [The
date is not recorded unless] Mr. Furneaux registered
the event somewhere in his records ... in Columbia
or Sonora.

"We returned the next summer (1922) and stayed

for some weeks in a tent near the road not far from
the Oakland Recreation Camp on Middle Fork. Mr
Furneaux had gone down to 'The City" and left hie
burros with us ... I rode one of them all over thai
country. That summer was when I found mj
father's I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World
card, a thick elegant affair with a screaming eagl<
clutching a red, white, and blue flag. There wai
quite a family scene about that and I never saw thi
card again. But I did learn a great deal about thosi
independent donkeys.

"Mather was a lively place for me although I wai
the only small boy in residence then. There wen
always trains going back and forth (betweer
Groveland and Damsite) and others from the shor
line which came across the hill from Peach Groweri
Mill. [Their locomotive] was the first Shay I hac
seen and it sounded like an enormously outsizec
coffee grinder, frightening me at first, but I became
fascinated by all the gears and pistons.

"Almost daily during the summer there were thi
excursion buses from Camp Curry, big, touring-ca:
style, dusty green Pierce Arrows, conveying groupi
of people from Yosemite to Hetch Hetchy to observe
the construction. They arrived at the lodge acrpsi
the tracks for lunch. I soon learned that mingling
with these people produced various tidbits frorr
their box lunches, and they persuaded me to stanc
on a stump and sing songs for them. I wonder how
many family albums have photos of me standing or
a tree stump. I also discovered that if I learned some
new bad words, the camp cook would give me a bi{
piece of pie.

"It was a lovely summer. The meadow wai
growing high and I would walk across it smellinj
the Calochortus among the grass and going up thi
rocky side past the old [Hog Ranch] corral ... 1 wai
in and out of every abandoned or unoccupied cabii
in the vicinity, including some I should not havi
[investigated]. . . I found some dynamite caps in on<
shed and had a bad accident. I was lucky not t<
blow my head off [though the left hand was badl;
damaged J." The ride to Groveland from Mather in i
box car "was one I never wanted to repeat The trail
took many hours, with long stops at several placet
It was evening before we got to the hospital a
which I was to spend three weeks.

^ -_ « — Courttiy Ttd Wurm

Mather's famous petunia patch located west of the
Mather railroad station and post office.

— Courttty Ted Wur

Arrival of a typical track tour bus at Mather in 1922
The lady standing on the rear step is Mrs. Williai
Long with young William Pearson, Jr. Others ar
unidentified.

CHISPA

Page 975

"The late Doctor John B. Degnan patched me up
so that I had a functioning left hand. As I was
•ecuperating and my wounds toughening up, we
stayed around Groveland for several weeks. I often
wandered into the saloon with its festoons of
-attlesnake skins from the center light to the
.vails ... at that time the bar was on the other side of
the room and there was large fly trap in the
middle . . . Except for the activity of the railroad,
Groveland did not seem to be much of a place then.
Abandoned mine shafts and empty places and other
signs of past activity. . . The expression 'all mined
out' was something I learned the meaning of then."

[When they were living at Mather] "I did not like
the trip to the dam construction at Hetch Hetchy.
Maybe it was all the noise of engines and cables and
the raw, freshly-blasted rock and sawed-off trees . . .
A lovely large pine tree, biggest within the camp,
was cut down near our cabin [for no apparent
reason] and as it fell on the slope it cracked, so a big
piece was left behind. But bigger trees were being
sawed up in the mill every day and my father
worked in the mill ... I am confused about the
timing, but we did stay into the winter, and I
remember the orders for winter supplies coming
in... boxes of all sorts, soap to big bars of
Ghirardelli chocolate, that were unpacked and
stored awav. And the snow!

"I was sent off to Palo Alto Military Academy in
February 1922, since I had already missed a half
year of school. [The family returned to Oakland in
1922, but] "I was back in 1925 as a Boy Scout,
staving at Dimond O Camp, the former Peach
Growers area. We often used the old mill pond at
Mather as a swimming pool. The mill was still there
then, but the house in which we had lived had been
hauled awav." (Conclusion of Joel Hedgpeth's
"Memories!' Today, Dr. Hedgpeth is a world-
renowned marine biologist, writer, lecturer, scholar,
with headquarters at Santa Rosa.)

The sawmill of California Peach Growers was
about one and a half miles south of Mather on the
road to Carl Inn, Big Oak Flat Road, and Yosemite.
Logs were brought to the two-band mill over several
railroad spurs. Finished lumber was loaded and
shipped out via Hetch Hetchy Railroad. There were
about five carloads per day, mainly shook material
for fruit boxes, during the cutting season for the
whole time Hetch Hetchy operated as a common
carrier railroad. Peach Growers also operated a
subsidiary mill, run by Mr. Fascio, which shipped
carloads of lumber out of Buck Meadows.

Merle Rodgers hired on at Mather sawmill in
1919. He remembered the big Peach Growers mill
and watching their train of cut lumber arriving at

-;> •- .<<fffl .-,;£*.

- • . , •*! • •fti* • ' ' - "4»;

-f---^M|p^

- TCWS Collection

Rev Hugh Furneaux, Presbyterian missionary "Shepherd of the Hills" with his two well-known traveling
companions "Pipe Organ" and "Bagpipes." Rev. Furneaux baptized Joel Hedgpeth at Mather in 1921, and the
following year his assistants educated young Hedgpeth in the nature of donkeys.

Page 976

281
CHISPA

the interchange each evening. In the early 20s a
young teenager, Del Gilliam. often visited his
brother, who was railroad hostler for the Hetchy at
Mather. They would run over to pick up Peach
Growers loads at the interchange, and sometimes
the Hetch Hetchy locomotive would venture all the
way to the "PG Mill" to get their loaded cars.
Things were quite informal in the mountains and
an occasional improvisation was not criticized.
During 1925 school vacation Gilliam rode a speeder
on the railroad as fire patrol, 20 minutes behind
steam locomotive No. 5 hauling lumber trains down
the Hetchy tracks for Peach Growers. The latter had
leased the 5-spot and a crew when Hetch Hetchy
ceased common carrier sevice to Mather and the
Damsite earlier that year.

O'Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1923 and
the rails removed back nine miles to Mather so the
right of way could be converted to a highway under
terms of the Raker Act. The sawmill was shut down,
having turned out 21 million feet of lumber, and the
City crews gradually converted the construction
camp into the family summer camp that enlivens
the area today. In 1948 the railroad was abandoned
and all tracks removed. The old station/post office
building remains beside the paved road that
replaced railroad tracks. And Joel Hedgpeth writes
that when he visited Camp Mather a few years ago.
he noted that the fine pine tree, the one that haa
been cut down without reason near their cabin in
1921, was still lying around in sawed-up hunks.
They had disappeared by 1988.

— Courteiy Ttd Warm

Peach Growers Sawmill in operation in May 1919.

_ — Courtety Ted Wurm

Locomotive of the California Peach Growers, Inc.,
hauling logs to the operation's sawmill located a
mile and a half south of Mather.

282 APPENDIX B

Sea Spiders (Pyciiogoiiicla)

Proceedings of a meeting held in honour of
JOEL W. HEDGPETH

on 7 October 1976 in the Rooms of the
Linnean Society of London

Edited by
W. G.FRY

Zoological Journal of ilie Linnean Society. Vol. 63. Nos 1 and 2 (1978)
Published for the Linnean Society of London by Academic Press

283

Introduction

The pycnogonids arc a small group of animals, of about 6GO species, obscure n
most biologists and given, at best, a superficial treatment in general and studen
texts. Yet, even the most cursory examination of a pycnogomd bibliograph'
reveals the names of numerous biologists who have achieved eminence in othc
fields and whose imaginations have been captured by these .musual animals.

hi some cases, the allure of pycnogonids has proved to in- only a brief .UK
youthful seduction. In other cases, sea spiders have provided a longer-lastin
attraction to which distinguished zoologists have turned from time to time a
a diversion from their major intellectual involvements.

Joel Hcdgpcth is a biologist of unquestionable distinction, most particular!-
well known in the field of marine ecology. In that field, his "I5ig Red Book"-
as it is affectionately known, his editions of ttenvccn 1'acific Tides, and hi
numerous incisive writings on a wide variety of ecological topics place him a
one of the foremost marine biologists which this century h.:.s produced.

However, Joel Hedgpeth also occupies a unique position in the minds and affec
tions of that relatively small group of people, scattered around the world, fo
whom pycnogonids are more than just an aberrant, scarcely seen form o
marine arthropodan life. Despite his heavy engagement in the wider fields o
marine ecology and despite the prohibitions of academic Ecological fashion-
described with characteristic penetrating and sometimes wry humour in Taxo
nomy: Man 's Oldest Profession, he has provided over some thirty-five years ;
series of papers which occupy a central position in the corpus of pycnogonk
literature.

That this is so is due, I think, to two phenomena. One is an unhappy acci
dent of world and zoological history. The other is a most happy accident o)
inheritance and culture.

When, in the late 1930s, he was able to divert the major part of his research
tune to pycnogonids, the number of their investigators and chroniclers had
Dwindled to a small handful. V. Schimkewitsch, H. Heifer, E. Schlottke, W. T
Cahnan, J. C. C. Loman, L. Giltay. W. A. Hilton and E. L. Bouvier had pub
lished or were publishing their last papers; for L. K. Losina-Losinsky, L. Page.

284

vi INTRODUCTION

H. Oshima and K. Stcphenscn the war brought a temporary halt to their
researches; I. Gordon had turned, as her duties demanded, from pycnogonids
to the Crustacea. In the fifteen years after 1939 sea spiders did not receive
more than a hundred mentions in print and, of the research papers which
treated of them, nearly one half were written by Joel Hedgpeth.

It is the very highest quality in his writings, as-well as the number of his
publications in that period, which ensured a continuity of interest in and
expansion of knowledge of the pycnogonids. In a very real sense Joel Hedgpeth
carried the torch of pycnogonid studies through a dark time to kindle the
enthusiasm of a new generation of biologists.

When, in 1953, I first encountered pycnogonids crawling on a trawl net
pulled up from the North Atlantic and was curious about their forms and
nature, there was readily available only The Pycnogonida of the Western
.\orth Atlantic and the Caribbean. That paper led, inevitably, to On the Evolu
tionary Significance of the Pycnogonida.

It was a shock to find that taxonomic writing could consist of such precise
and scholarly prose and yet be shot through with charm and a sympathetic
delight in the animals and in the human frailties which their past study had
evoked. Read one of Joel Hedgpeth 's papers and you will want to read them
all.

This, then, is the happy accident of inheritance and culture; that pycnogonid
studies were continued through a dark time by someone with a deep love of
scholarship, the courage to show his enthusiasms, a deft skill in prose and a
natural gift for graphic illustration.

1 have made an attempt to illustrate that latter gift by placing a selection
of drawings in the text of the volume. The drawings arc in ? variety of styles,
but no matter what the style, by economy and grace of line each is rich in
information and evident pleasure.

Every paper in this volume owes something to Joel Hedgpeth 's work and
some owe a great deal, for his writings have touched upon almost every aspect
of pycnoponid biology. It would not be extravagant to claim tli.it there is no
serious student of the group who has not been influenced by his work, not
merely through the practical necessity of studying his conclusions and data,
but also by an encounter with that literary elegance and humour which is so
rare in contemporary zoological literature. Perhaps the last word on this
point should come from his friend of long standing, Dr Jerome Tichenor, who
wrote of Research Funding:

We must improve our image
To show how good we are:
For in the scientific scrimmage
We won 't go very far
If our image is old fashioned
When the funds are being rationed.

Joel Hedgpeth has now relinquished his university posts, but his wisdom in
marine ecology and conservation places him in great demand all over
America and Europe whenever governments acknowledge the conflict between
industrial development and the conservation of marine environments. A

285

INTRODUCTION vjj

parochial, but nevertheless important, fear is that government agencies will now
keep him so busy as to stifle his pycnogonid researches. That would be a sad

day.

It was most fitting that a meeting to honour Joel Hedgpeth should have been
held at the foremost British natural history society. He has long had a warm
affection for Britain, and I am sure that he would not cavil at the suggestion
that a major aim of his life has coincided with that aim described in the Soci
ety's Charter as "the cultivation of Natural History in all its branches".

The Society began its publication of articles on sea spiders in 1800. Re
cently, it has sponsored more and important publication on the group. It is
appropriate, therefore, that this, the first symposium volume on the group,
should be published under the Society's auspices.

The preparation of any multinational symposium is inevitably fraught with
some difficulties. That they were minimal in this case was due in large measure
to the eagerness with which the speakers and chairmen wished to gather to
honour Joel Hedgpeth.

Many people assisted the organization. I thank the Society's President.
Council and Officers tor their encouragement anil, more particularly, I proffer
my thanks to the Executive Secretary and his staff for easing administrative
difficulties. Grateful thanks are due also to the British Council for a grant of
money towards the expenses of overseas speakers.

F.diting any collection of papers, however slim, brings headaches. I thank
Dr Humphry Greenwood and Dr Karen Hiiemac for ensuring publication
and I thank my wife for not merely tolerating the irritability engendered by
editing, but for dispensing coffee and encouragement.

Mrs Pamela Vffchon did mountains of typing tor me and I owe much to her
efficiency and good humour throughout.

It may seem strange to acknowledge the assistance of the very person xvhom
this volume honours, but his gentle comment that he was surprised to be
working so hard for his own festschrift is the very best indication of how
important is Joel Hedgpeth's position in pycnogonid biology.

Concerning publication, Dr Jerome Tichenor should, again, have the last
word:

We regret to inform the reader that
This book has been printed
With the aid of electricity.

WILLIAM G. FRY,

Luton College.

Park Square.

Luton,

Bedfordshire.

286

Contents

Introduction ... v

Contributors x

MANTON. S .M. Habits, functional morphology and evolution ot pycnoiionuls . 1

HEDGPF.TI1, JOKI. W. A rcnpprais.il of ihe I'alacopantopoda wttli ilcscription ot

a species Irom the Jurassic 23

FRY, WILLIAM G. A classification within the pycnoyomds 35

STOCK. JAN' II K\pcriments on food prctcrcncc ami chemical sense in

Pycnoj;oni-.!.i . 59

RICIIAKDS. I'I-:TL1< R .uul FRY. WILLIAM (I Digestion m incnop.m.ls .1
study of some polar forms .75

ARN'ALD, |- KANCOISI-.. A new species ot An'iirlivni'lnis (l'ycnoj;onul.i) fouiul

parasitic on an opistholiranchiatc mollusc 99

JARVIS. |. II and KINCi. I'. 1:. Reproductive liioluj;y of British px eno^nnids

(oouenesis ami the reproductive cycle) 105

CHILD, C. ALLAN Ci yandromorphs of the pycntig»n'n\Ani>pliHlact\'luspttrtllS 133

SCHRAM, FRKDHRICK R. and HEDGPETII. JOKI. W. Locomotory mecha
nisms in Antarctic pycnogonids 145

MORGAN, ELFED. The energy cost of off-shore migration in .\ymplion

gracile (P)cnogonida) 171

DE HARO. A. Ecological distribution of pycnogonids on the Catalan coast . . 181

FRY, WILLIAM G and STOCK, JAN H. A pycnogonid bibliography .... 197

287

Contributors

ARNAL'D. I7. Station Man/if J't'nJuume. Rue Jc la Baiterie-Ja-I.ums. Marseille I SOU ~.

/'ranee (p. 99)
CHILD, C. A. Department uj Invertebrate Zoulugy, Siiiitlisunian Jnsiilulion. h'ashingtun.

DC. :(>JMl. L.S.A (p. 133)
Dl. IIARO, A. Dcparlnieiltii Jc Zutilogu, iucnliaj Jc Cit'iii'ius. L'niveraiJaJ .\ii!t>n, niit: Jc

Itarccliina, Hiirccliiiia. Spain (p. 181)
I;!<V. \V. G. Depart menl tit Scifinr. l.nlun Cullcfc. I'ark St/iwrc. I. man. Hi-Jtu'ihlnrc. L' k

•pp- 55. 75. ll»7)

C.OKIHJN. I .•• llcj!lni,-H (,urjcn.\. LonJtm .S'li'/.^ JS7.. L A.. (Cli.iirm.ini
II! nC.I'l.TII. I \\ ftifiti Mi'tnciiiii Aicniic. Sjiitu l\osu. (.'alilunthi V^-tO-l. L.S.A (pp 23.

145)
KINCi. IV I-. l>cpannifnl .•' Xi;i;/<i.i'i . t.'ii/i-cr.t/;r (\i/lct;c »l SH.II;\,:I. Stni;li inn 1'urk.

.SV.;;ifri;. (A (p. 1O5)

.1 \K\ IS. 1 II li'r.v/i-/-i/i/A .i//v. /. ll,i,irn. Tli<- .\cliifi laiitl\ (p ll>5>
M. \\IUN. S M. l)c/>ariincnl <ij /.onlngv. Uritish Must-inn l.\attirjl Ilistmyl. (.'rumwcll

RouJ. London .VH'7 .i/j/;. {.'.A', (p. 1)
MOK(iAN, I!, f), -fart men t ») Ztn'.ltigy and Cinn/iarutnf I'hvtmlugv. I 'nirersitv »l

Hi'-ininxluiiii. I'O H,,\ .'V,.o Hirniinfhu'n Hit 2TT. ( K. (p. 171 )
KICIIAKDS. I' K Department <>t Mechanical i.nfineennv. ( inicrwn /•/ Snrrt \. C.iiilJlnrJ.

>i/rrci . ( K (p. 75)
SC'HRAM, !• K. Dc/'urnncnr n/ Xnologv. Lastcrn Illinois L:nnersn\. Cliurleituii. lllinnu

'<l»:<>. I'.S.A. (p. 145)
SiOC.K. I. II Illinium i mi' TuxiiiHiinische /.unliific. Xni>l"gi\rlii Mn\e:i'ii. I'luntagc

MitlJenltijii. Amsterdam. The .\ctltcrlanjit (pp. 59, 197)
^ ONGI.. C. ,M 13 Cumin 1'lacc. L'Jinhiirsli /.'//V 2JX. L.K (Chairman)

288

Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 63: 197-238

May/June 1978

A pycnogonid bibliography

WILLIAM C. I:RY

Department o] Science. Luion College. Park Square. Luion. Hi'Jfnrtlsliirc

AND

JAN H. STOCK

Institiuit voor Taxonoinische Zoologie, Zootogiscli Museum.
Universiteit ran Amsterdam. Amsterdam. The .\ctlierlamh

KV.\ WOKDS -I') cnoj:unida-Hantopoda-»ll literaturc-iuthors-ntlcs-journals-books-
co-julhors— editors - translators- zoological— ecolopca I.

CONTKNTS

Introduction 19/

Bibliography - - 199

Index of Joint Authors. Editors. Tran»lator> and Alternative Name-forms 235

INTRODUCTION

We have presumed to prepare a bibliography for the pycnogonids at this time
for several reasons.

First, a special volume of articles on pycnogonids presents an ideal vehicle

for such a contribution. Additionally we fear that, if left to grow for even a

few more years, a pycnogonid bibliography could find no printed resting place

except in a specialist bibliographic publication, where it would be inaccessible

jto many.

Furthermore we are delighted to display in this festschrift the rOle which

.Joel Hedgpeth has played in creating pycnogonid literature in the widest sense

and in consolidating a firm literature base from which we and others could

work. His own bibliographic work has been most important in furthering

"research on pycnogonid biology.

197

289

198 W. G. FRY AND J. H. STOCK

Finally, now that historians of biology are beginning to attract more of the
interest that they deserve, we should like to offer this contribution to them, in
the hope that it may solve some minor problems and offer some profitable
lines of enquiry. Because biology librarians are historians of science— inevitably
it seems to us, we include them in this dedication.

That we do presume in offering this bibliography we are sure. We have aimed
at completeness not only for all writings on pycnogonids qua pycnogonids but
also for those treating pycnogonids solely as ecological data. Perhaps, by select
ing more than one aim, we may have missed all targets. However, pycnogonids
are creeping noticeably in larger numbers into physiology and ecology. We
would like to hope that, with a basic synopsis of the literature available to
them, nascent pycnogonologists will flourish.

Certain possible sources of error should be noted. These arose from the
necessary attempt to give full journal titles. We have made extensive use of the
List of Serial Publications in the British Museum (Natural History) Library and
also of the World List of Scientific Periodicals (4th ed.). Unfortunately, neither
of these publications is perfectlv complete and neither discriminates consis
tently between plural and singular word endings. In addition, we have been
unable to examine 5% of the publications cited. Pooling these inadequacies, it
is clear that a small fraction of the publications may prove difficult to locate.
However, we hope that we have not created any "ghost" journals.

Another problem arises trom national differences in the use of capital letters
for "important" words. In this context we have acted multinational!)1 rather
than internationally, as far as possible. However, to aid distinction between
journal titles and book titles within a limited range of type-faces, we have
capilali/.eJ all "important" words in the latter.

Finally, we regret the necessity lor transliteration trom the Cyrillic alpha
bet. Inevitably, despite the brave attempts of the British Standards Institute
(No. 2979: 1958), and Royal Society publications, this produces some barbar
isms.

Manj' people have assisted us in this enterprise. In particular, we thank
Mr Gavin Bridson, who helped to turn many corrupted abbreviations into sense
in their proper languages and to track down some of the more obscure articles.
Joel Hedgpcth most kindly compared an early draft of the manuscript with his
extensive files and corrected a number of errors and omissions. Mrs Pamela
Vachon was a most efficient and helpful typist for us, turning heaps of scrawl
ed cards into legible texts. Our thanks are also due to Mrs Patricia Fry, who
helped to keep under control the great interlinear palimpsest whose growth
rate at times threatened the whole enterprise.

Despite all this assistance we fear that errors and omissions remain. For
these we are to blame. We also take responsibility for those personal interpreta
tions which may not please everyone.

290

A PYCNOGONID BIBLIOGRAPHY 21 ,

HALLEZ. P.. 19052. VII. Notes fauniques. Archives de Zoologie Experimental el Generate. (4) 3 (Notes
& Revue, 3): xlvii-lii. (Sometimes cited problematically is Daman (1905).)

HALLEZ. P.. 1905b. Observations sur le parasitisme des larves de Phoiichtlldium chez Bougainvillea.
Archives de Zoologie Experimentale et Generate. (4) 3: 1 33-144. VI.

HAMOND. R . 1963. A preliminary report on the marine fauna of the North Norfolk coast. Trans
actions of the Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists' Society. 20 (\): 1-31; 1-4.

HANSEN. H. J., 1884a. Fortegnelse over hidtil i de danskc Have fundne Pycnogonider eller Sespmdlcr
Narurhistorisk Tidsskrifr, Kjfbenhavn. (3) 14: 647-652. (?).

HANSEN. H J.. 1884b. Spindeldyr. Saspindlcr (Pantopoda eller Pycnogonidae). In Zoologia Danica
AfbildningerafdanskeDyrmedpopulaer Text. 4: 117-13 1; VII. Copenhagen. (? - 1885.1

HANSEN, H. J.. 1886. Vorlaufige Mitteilung uber Pycnogoniden und Crustaceen aus dem nordlichen
Eismeer. von der Dijmphna— Expedition mitgebracht. Zoologtsche Amelger, 9: 638-643.

HANSEN, H. J., 1887. Kara Havets Pycnogonider. In Dijmphna-Togtets loologisk-botaniske Udbytte:
157-181 ; XVIII. XIX. Kjubenhavn: Bianco Lunos.

HANSEN. H. J., 1895. Pycnogonider og Malacoscrake Krebsdyr. Meddelelser om Grontand. 19: 123-125.

HANSEN, H. J., 1930 Studies on Arthropoda. 3: 333-335. Copenhagen.

HANSEN, H. J. & S0RENSEN. W.. 1898. The order Palpigradi Thor. and its relationship to the other
Arachnida. Eniomologiska Tidskrlft. IS (3-4): 223-240; IV.

HANSTROM. B., 1919. Zur Kenntnis des zenrralen Nervensystems der Arichnoiden und Panropoden
nebst Schluisfolgcrungcn betreffs der Phylogenie der genannten Gruppen. Inaugural Dissertation.
University nf 1. und: 1-191:66 figs

HANSTROM. B., 1926. Eine gcnctische StuJie iiber die Augen und Schzenrrcn von Tubellanen. Anne-
liden und Arthropodcn. Kungliga Svenska Vetenskaps Akademicni Handllnfar, Stockholm. (3) J
? pp.

HANSTROM. B., 1927. Neuc Beobachrungcn ubcr Augcn und Sehzenrren von Entomosrracen. Schizo-
podcn und Pimopi-dcn. Zoologische A>i:einer. 70: 236-251 ; 7 figs.

HANSTROM. B.. 1965. Indications of neurosecretion and the structure of Sokolow's organ in pycno-
gonids. Sjrsia. /.S': 24-36.

HASWELL. W. A.. 1K85. PycnogoniJa of the Australian coast with descriptions of new species. Proceed
ings of the Unnean Society of Ne<« South Wales. 9: 1021-1033; L1V-LVII.

HEDGPETII. J. W . 1"19 Some pycnogonids found off the coast of Southern California. The American
Midland \aruraliM. jj (2) 45H-465. 2 plv

HEDGPKTH. J. \V . 19411^ A new pycnogonid from I'cNcadcro. (!alif.. and distributional notes on other
species. J'mnial <>l r/rV i\'j\fu'ntftnn .\cadcniy nf Sciences. JO (2): H4-K7; 1 fig.

HEDGPHTI I. j . W . 1 94 1 a. On a vpccicx of Kymphnn from the waters of Southern California The Ameri
can Midland .\aruralist. 25 (2) 447-»49. 1 pi.

HEDGPKTM. J. W.. 194 Hi. A key to the I'ycnogonida of the Pacific coast of North America. Transactions
of the San Diego Society for Natural History. 9 (26); 253-264; IX-XI.

HEDGPETII. J. W.. 1941c. A key to the pycnogonids of the Pacific coast of North America (especially of
central California) In S. F. Light (td.). Laboratory and Field Text in Invertebrate Zoology 119-124;
99-105. Berkeley S. LosAngclcst University of California Prns.

HEDGPETH.J. W.. 1942. Sea spiders. Nature Magaiine. |'l 413-414; 4 figs.

HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1943a. Pycnogonids of the Bartlett collections. Journal of the Washington Academy
of Sciences. 33 (3): 83-90, 2 figs.

HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1943b. Pycnogonida from the West Indies and South America collected by the
Atlantis and earlier expeditions. Proceedings of the New England Zoological Club. 22: 41-58; VIII X.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1943c. On a species of pycnogonid from the North Pacific. Journal of the Washington
Academy of Sciences. 33 (7): 223-224; 1 fig.

HEDGPETH, j. W., 1944. On a new species of Pallenopsts (Pycnogonida) from Western Australia. Pro
ceedings of the New England Zoological Club, 23: 55-58: XI-XII.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1947a. Pycnogonida. Encyclopedia BHnanlct: 2 pp.; 2 figs.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1947b. On the evolutionary significance of the Pycnogonida. Smithsonian Miscellane
ous Collections. 106 (18): 1-54; I. 16 figs.

.HEDGPETH, J . W.. 1948. The Pycnogonida of the western North Atlantic and the Caribbean. Procttdlnfs
of the United States National Museum. 97(3216): 157-M2;4-53, J charts.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1949. Report on the Pycnogonida collected by the Albatross in Japanese waters in
' 1900 and 1906. Proceedings of the United States National Mutrum, 98 (3231): 2)3-321; 18-51.
iHEDGPETH, J. W., 1950. Pycnogonida of the United State* Navy Expedition. 1947-48. Proceedings of

* the Unite! States National Museum, 700(3260): 147-160; 17-19.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1951. Pycnogonids from Dillon Beach and vicinity, California, with descriptions of

two new species. The Wasmann Journal of Biology. 9(1): 105-1 17; 3 pis.

^HEDGPETH, J. W., 1952. Class (or Subphylum) Pycnogonida. Sea Spiders. In E. F. RickettsSc J.Calvin
*. (Eds). Between Pacific Tides. 3rd ed. 430. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

^HEDGPETH, J. W., 1954a. Class Pycnogonida. In R. I. Smith et al. (Eds), Intertidal Invertebrates of the
it Central California coast: 201-210; 91-96. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

J. W., 1954b. Pycnogonida. In P. S. Galtsoff (Ed.), The Gulf of Mexico, its origin, waters

291

212 W. G. FRY AND J. H. STOCK

and marine life. Fishery Bulletin of the Fish <t Wildlife Service of the United States. 89 (55): 42$.

427; 69.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 1954c On the phytogeny of the Pycnogonida. Acta Zoologlca. Stockholm, 3s-

193-21 J; 9 figs.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1954d. 1. The Pycnogonida. Reports on the dredging results of the Scripps Institu
tion of Oceanography Trans-Pacific Expedition. July-December. 1953. Syttemaric Zoology, 3 (4).

147.
HEDGPETH, J. W.. 1955a. Pycnogonida. In R. C. Moore (Ed.). Treatise on Invertebrate Palaeontology

(f) Arthropoda, 2: 163-170; 117-122. New York: Geological Society of America.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 19$5b. Palaeoisopus. In R. C. Moore (Ed.). Treatise on Invertebrate Palaeontology

(P) Arthropods. 2: 171-17J; 123. New York: Geological Society of America.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 1956. On the phylogeny of the Pycnogonida. Proceedings of the XlVth International

Congress of Zoology. Copenhagen. 1953. Section XV: 506-507.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1957. Miscellaneous arthropods-annotated bibliography. In J. W. Hedgpeth (Ed.),

Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology. 1. Ecology: 1175-1176. Geological Society of America,

Memoir. 67. Boulder: Geological Society of America.

HEDGPETH. J. W., 1959. Pycnogonida. In Encyclopaedia Brittanica: 2 pp. -.2 figs.
HEDGPETH, J. W.. 19611. Pycnogonida. In Encyclopedia of Science and Technology 105-106. 3 figs

New York: McGraw Hill.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1961b. Pycnogonida. In The Encyclopedia of the Biological Sciences: 851-852.

New York: Van Noscrand Reinhold.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1961c. Pycnogonida. Reports of the Lund University Chile Expedition 1948-19.

Lands Univcrsitets Arsskrift, N.F. (2) S7 (3): 1-18; 1-11.

IIEDGPETH, J. W., 1962a. A bathypelagic pycnogonid. Deep-Sea Research. 9 4K7-191 . 1-2
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 19626. Taxonomy: Man's oldest profession. 1 1th Annual University uf the Pacific

f-'aculty Research Lecture. May 22. 1V6I . i + 18 pp.; 2 figs.
HF.nGPFTH, J. W.. 1962c Pycnogonida In Introduction to Sfashon- Life of tin- Sjn l-'nncisco Hay

Kegion and the Coast of \nrrliern California 74-75; VI. 2 fips. Herkclry iv Los Arpi-les University of

C.alilornu Press.

IIF.DGPFTII. J. W.. 1963. Pycnoponida of tl . North American Arctic Journal of n,r I lotteries Research

BoarJofCana<lu. 20 (5) 1315-I34K. 1-12
HKOGl'lvTH, J W . 1964. Notes on the peculiar cpp laying hatut of an nntarctK prosobraruh (Mollusci:

Gastropoda) The Velifer. 7(1) 45-»6. 1 (if.
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Hli'lllXY. J.' O'A

HKDGPin II. J. W.. IVftXa. Hycnoponi'l studies. Antarctic Journal of the United .Vtorn .* (4) 12'' 130;

2f,p.
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1968li. Pycnogonios. In E. F. Rickcttsgc J. Calvm.flr tween Pacific Titles 78. 102 104,

157. 170. 1K6. IKK. 202. 316-317. 349. 351-352. 366-368. 477-»7". 157. 256. I4tli ed.. rev J W.

llcdppcth). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
IIHDGI'KTH. J. W.. 1969a Introduction to Antarctic Zoopcopraphy. Antarctic Me;' hi>li<i Seriri nf the

American (geographical Society, Folio II: 1-V; i5 Tips.
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1969b. Pycnogonida. Antarctic Map Folio Series of the American Geographical

Society. Polio //. 26- 28. pis 13. 14.
HEDGPETH. j. W.. 1969c. Pycnoponida. In P. Gray (Ed.). Encyclopedia nf thr Hiolnfical Sciences:

780-781: 3 figs. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1969d. An intcrtidal reconnaissance of rocky shores of the Calapapos The H'asmann

Journal of Biology. 27(1): 1-24.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1969e. Preliminary observations of life between tidemarks at Palmer Station,

64°45'S.64°05'W. Antarctic Journal of the United States. 4(4). 106-107.

HEDGPETH, J. W., 1970. Marine biogeography of the Antarctic regions. In M. W. Holdgate (Ed.). Ant
arctic Ecology: 97-104. 1 fig. Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research. London & New York:

Academic Press.
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1971a. Subphylum Pycnogonida, Class Pantopoda. Sea Spiders. In K. L. Gosner.

Guide to Identification of marine and estuarine invertebrates-Cape Hatteras to the Bay of Fundy:

400-402; 20-22. New York: Wiley Interscience.
HEDGPETH, J. W.. 1971b. James Eights of the Antarctic. In. Research in the Antarctic. American

Association for the Advancement of Science.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1971c. Perspective of benthic ecology in Antarctica. In Research in the Antarctic:

93-1 36; 1-19. American Association for the Advancement of Science.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 1974a_ One hundred years of Pacific Oceanography. In The Biology of the Oceanic

Pacific: 137-155; 1-7. Oregon State University Press.
HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1974b. Phylum Arthropoda. Subphylum Chelicerata. Class Pycnogonida. In E. N.

Kozloff (Ed.), Keys to the Marine Invertebrates of the Puget Sound, the San Juan Archipelago, and
Adjacent Regions: 125-128. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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A PYCNOGON1D BIBLIOGRAPHY 213

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HEDGPETH. J. W.. 1975a. Pycnogonidi. In S. F. Light (revised R. I. Smith & J. T. Carlton). Interridal

Invertebrates of the Central California Coast. Berkeley: University of California Press.
HEDGPETH, J. W.. 1975b. Review of Pycnogonids and of British See Spiders. Quarterlv Review of

Biology. 50(3): 330-331.
HEDGPETH, J. W., 1977a. Paleoisopus. In .WcGrjw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. 9:

561.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 1977b. Pycnogonida. In McCraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technoloty. 11:

110-112; 3 figs.
HEDGPETH, J. W., in press. At sea with provinces tnd plates. In Biogeography. Biology Colloquium.

Oregon State University Press.
HEDGPETH. J. W., 1978. A reappraisal of the Palacopantopoda with description of a species from the

Jurassic. In. Sea Spiders (Pycnogonida). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London. 63

(1 + 2): 23-24:1-11; 1-4.
HEDGPETH. J. W. & FRY, W. G., 1964. Another dodecopodous pyenogonid. Annals and Magazine of

Xarural History. (13) 7. 161-169; 3 figs.
HEDGPETH, J. W. & HADERLIE. E. C.. 1978? Pycnogonids. In R. Morris. D. P. Abbott & E. C. Hader-

lie. Invertebrates of California Shores (?). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
HEDGPETH. J. W. & MCCAIN, J. C.. 1971. A review of the pyenogonid genus Pantoplpetta (family

AustroJccidae, emend.) with the description of a new species. In G. Llano & I. E. Wallen (EJs).

Bioloity of the Antarctic Seas. -I. Antarctic Research Series. I 7: 217-229; 6 fics.
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98-100. 121. 2.74-2.76. New York: Oxford University Press.
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New York: Macmillan.
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sclaj'i \iirurf,irichenJer h'reundt :u Berlin. 5 147.

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Kukenthal-Krumhach. llandhuch drr /.onlngie. J (2) (5): 67-72. 3 fipv
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Frcuii,lc :n llerlln 235 254

HELFICR. II.. 1935 Mccrcsspnuicn. l>i-r \aturf,, rtrlicr |?|
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tnercc ^ Industry. I'gypr. .V*irrt A Mcmnirv. N<l. /ft' !•<>. 3 ftps.

HtLI KK. II.. 19361). 1'antopoda. Die Herwelt Nord- und Ostsee. Jl (Xla3): 1-5; l-map.
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Sir:utigsf>rrictitf der <;?xcllscttaft \aturfrtrschendcr f-'reunde zu Berlin. 79J7(2): 162-185: II fipv
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reichs. 5(4) (2): 1-3 14; 223 figs.
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lichen Classe der K. K. Akademie der H'iuenschaften. Wen. 71 (1). 609-612.
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Expedition. Denkschriften der Kaiierlichen Akademie der Wiaeruchaften (Mathemarisch-Narur»>tuen-

ichaftliche Claae). Wien. 35: 25-*6; I-V.
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of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. S: 307-313.

HENRY. L. M.. 1953. The nervous system of the Pycnogonida. Microentomology. IS (1); 16-36; 15 figs.
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Sea. Fourth and final report of the Committee . . .. Report of the 66th Meeting of the British Aaocia

tion for the Advancement of Science: 442.

HERDMAN, W. A.. 18966. Pycnogonida. In 9th Annual Report of the Ltvtrpool Marine Bloioglcil Com
mittee: 19, 21.24.
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Liverpool Marine Biology Committee: i-)2. (Sometimes ched as CHADW1CK. H. C. 190J.J
HERDMAN, W. A., THOMPSON, I. C. & CHADWICK, H. C. 1900. Fauna distribution lists for the south

end of the Isle of Man. 14th Report of the Marine Biological Station at Port Erin: 36.
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Sciences Naruretles. Paris. (5) 7. 199-216; IV, 1, 9.

293

THE STEINBECK N

Ed Ricketts ( 1 897- 1 948)
Marine Biologist

EWSiETTE« 17

Joel W. Hedgpeth

Lajolla is something of a Mecca for
marine biologists, not only because of
Scripps, but also because of Us unique
collection of marine life-, it was here
that Ed Ricketts, the man on whom
John Steinbeck based his immortal
"Doc, " came to collect the specimens
that kept his ricketty laboratory in
business and Cannery Row in beer.

Stephanie Pain. \eu Scientist, 18 Sept 1986

Ever since John
Steinbeck metamor
phosed his friend
Ed Ricketts into
"Doc" and stuffed
him into Cannery Row, that
"poisoned cream puff" (as one
critic called it), too many read
ers have gotten the idea that a
person becomes a marine biologist by
just being one, without really doing
much of anything except guzzling
beer. Ed would have accepted this
misconception with his usual good
humor, but since the above descrip
tion of Ed as a resident eccentric of a
"ricketty lab" impugns his profes
sional status as a collector of speci
mens for research and classroom
study, he would probably have
demanded an apology: he knew
perfectly well that collecting in a
marine laboratory's area has always
been against the rules. Today, when
the shores near Scripps are protected,
he would have had grounds to sue
for libel. At the very least, the descrip
tion that lends "local color" to an
otherwise authoritative British journal,
is inaccurate — not the least slip being
the several hundred miles between
the "ricketty lab" (what a pun from
Ms. Pain!) at Pacific Grove and
Scripps Institution at La Jolla.

Just what is a marine biologist'
What do marine biologists do?

During the years that Ed Ricketts
thrived on the Monterey peninsula,
many students at the Hopkins Marine
Station knew him and learned from
him as an informal adjunct faculty
member, especially after the publica

tion of Between Pacific Tides in 1939.
He freely made available his unpub
lished papers on intenidal zones and
wave shock to both faculty and
students at Hopkins, as well as to
visitors from other parts of the world.
He was, in short, a part of the local
scene, a man respected as a learned
and qualified marine biologist in the
best sense: a scientist who studies
animals and their relations to each
other, as well as to the physical
environment in which they live.

Ed did not reach this stage of
knowledge overnight. He had very
little appropriate training. As a boy
raised in Chicago, Ed had little
experience with nature except a year
in South Dakota. He probably visited
the Field Museum, in those days a
gathering of bones, stuffed animals
and dusty seashells in cases. He
transferred to the University of
Chicago from Illinois State Normal,
where he had taken courses in
zoology and psychology. At Chicago,
his college record was undistin
guished, but he flunked no courses,
although he was docked three grade
points for persistent absence from
chapel. When he was a student
during the 1920s, there was no such
thing as a major in marine biology.
There was, however, the ecology
course taught by W.C. Alice, who for
several years had been conducting a
field course at Woods Hole and
compiling observations on the
changes in the fauna of the region. Ed
came away from the University with
memories of Alice's course — Alice
remembered him as one of "a group
of Ishmaelites" — and of Dr. Libbte
Hyman's stories of the fantastically
rich fauna and flora of the Monterey
coast that had to be seen to be
believed (those were the days before
precision lenses and color slides).
Alice, who, like Dr. Hyman, had
visited Hopkins, thought the abun
dance of life on the shore "appalling."

Without graduating, Ed left the
University of Chicago to establish a
biological supply business at

Continued on page IS

Appendix (

The Steinbeck Newslettei
Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 1995

18 THE STEINBECK NEWSLETTER

Marine Biologist

Conttnutd from pagt 17

Monterey. The idea to start the
business had come from another
student, A.E. Galigher, with whom he
had shared living quarters. The Pacific
coast of those days was not like
Woods Hole, where classes and
research since 1870s had established a
sound base of known animals and
plants. On the Monterey coast most
invertebrates had yet to be described
in monographs, and the only general
work, Johnson & Snook's Seashore
Animals of the Pacific Coast, was not
to be available until 1927, five years
after Ed arrived. He was thus con
fronted by a new and largely unstud
ied fauna, and he had to set about
learning something about them,
which meant careful collecting,
labeling, and if necessary shipping to
the National Museum in Washington
for identification and description. The
result of this activity is evidenced in
the impressive number of obscure
animals bearing the name rickettsi.
This work stirred in him an interest to
know more, and he spent long hours
building up information in libraries
and talking to people at Hopkins or
Berkeley in order to set up an exten
sive interlocked index file on various
sizes and colors of cards. None of this
professionalism shows in Cannery
Row (or in the unfortunate movie of
that name) or in John Steinbeck's
profile, "About Ed Ricketts." Yet all
these activities, as well as the pain
fully worked-up graphs of tidal levels,
are as much the stuff of marine
biology as is walking on the seashore
"in reverent contemplation of living
things" or trying not to get seasick on
a whale watching cruise.

And of course, and not least
important, Ed as marine biologist
wrote about things seen and experi
enced and speculated about. In this
he was influenced by W.C. Alice's
Animal Aggregations, published in
1931 and thereafter always in Ed's
library as one of his honored and
often-consulted books. He read
biological journals with a keen eye;
he noted, for example, a reference to
a man named Cabrera (in Argentina)
who articulated a law of ecological
incompatibility: "In the same. . .
locality, directly related animal forms

294

always occupy different habitats or
ecological stations." Ed recognized
this generalization as a fundamental
ecological statement at least twenty
years before it became accepted by
theoretical ecologists.

But however accomplished as a
marine biologist, Ed was sometimes
hurt by a lack of degrees. An uncom
prehending reader for the Stanford
University Press, to whom ecology
meant only temperature and pH,
recommended against the proposed
preface for the first edition of Between
Pacific Tides, and science was held
back twenty five years.

There is, of course, much more to
marine biology: we bring ourselves to
these studies. To borrow an expres
sion from an eminent writer on
environment ethics, Holmes Rolston,
in Philosophy Gone Wild (1986> "To
come alone to this [seashore] is to
travel into an isolation that no one
could support if he did not bring with
him, like a carapace, the whole
weight of his culture."

In the frame of this metaphor, Ed
fits like some bright, exotic littoral
crustacean, sometimes gaudy and
elusive like the Sally Lightfoot,
sometimes brooding. This quotation
of Rolston has a distinctly
Thoreauvian (6ne, and for what it is
worth, Ed's tippy toe mouse dance
was a maneuver not unlike Henry
David Thoreau's dance, when he was
seen "spinning airily around, display
ing most remarkable lightness and
agility" (Walter Harding). Thoreau
himself brought with him wherever
he went a remarkably varied cara
pace. Indeed, there was a strong
flavor of Zen in both lives; both
followed the "watercourse way" of
Alan Watts, literally stated by Ed: "If
you are caught in the current, don't
fight it, but drift with it." As stated of
Alan Wans, Ed was "a true human . . .
not a model of righteousness, a prig
or a prude, but [one who] recognized
that some failings are as necessary to
genuine human nature as salt to
stew." Some people have labored too
long over the mundane implications
of this view of life in reference to Ed,
forgetting that above all he was a
student of life, especially on the
seashore, and that his highest ambi
tion was to write "good and true
manuals" about marine invertebrates,

and that his idea of heaven was to
on a rich shore on a good low tide
was a man who once wrote on the
tide page of one of his many note
books, "all the good, kind, sane liti
animals."

All marine biologists hope to s
coral reefs at least once in their liv
but Ed never did. The great adveni
of his life was traveling to the Gull
California, to the "Sea of Cortez,"
financed for him by John Steinbecl
He made the most of it, both in
observing the collecting, and in
writing up the findings. In record t
he got the specimens out to the
authorities so that he had the nami
that were essential, and he wrote t
technical appendix that to him wa;
significant part of the book. He ke
journal, which Steinbeck did not, 2
contributed one of his famous phil
sophical essays that became the £2
Sunday chapter of the book. Many
critics were confused and puzzled
the book, but at least Joe Campbel
understood it and that was enough
The trip was Ed's experience with
strange, awesomely empty landsca
and a sea teeming with creatures h
had never seen before. As a projec
with John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez
gave Ed hopes for more, eventual!
voyage beyond the northern latitui
He hoped first to finish pan of his
trilogy of books about the Pacific
Coast, and he was well on with th<
northern pan of it, to the Queen
Charlotte Islands. But it was not to
He met his fatal accident in the mi
of preparations for the northern tri
And so it was left to others to writi
books about Coral Reefs; Between
Pacific Tides remains as a worthy
monument to a unique and devote
marine biologist.

Joel Hedgpeth gave a longer version
of this lecture at the first annual Ricke
Memorial Lecture in Monterey,
15 November 1986.

Logo, Pacific Biological Laboratories.

295 Appendix D

Letter from Aldo Leopold, 1947

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
Madison 6

DEPARTMENT OP WILDLIPE MANAGEMENT HOVCClber 29, 19^7. *2i UNIVERSITY PARM PLACE

Joel W. Eedgepeth

Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission

Austin, Texas

Dear Mr. Hedgepeth,

I pricked up my ears when you came out on "progress" in the
American Scientist, but your "Ugn Against the Land" has now
brought me to full attention. I an pleased that this is the
fore runner of a book. Please do not let anybody talk you
into a discreet silence. Eeep right on rriting at any cost.

When you get through with California, please do Texas.

Yours sincerely,

Aldo Leopold

P.S. Do you have reprints? If so, please send ont to Starker
Leopold, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley; and one to me.

296

"Progress — the Flower of the Poppy,'
American Scientist, Vol. 35(3), 1947.

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300 Appendix F

The Geological Society of America
Memoir 67

TREATISE ON
MARINE ECOLOGY AND PALEOECOLGGY

Volume 1

ECOLOGY

J.,rl AY. lloclgpeth. Editor

1 i:!i- -r.-'iti/ ,-,f Cnlifurnia, Scripps Inftitvtion nf Oceanography
La Jolla, Calif.

Prepared un.k-r the direction of a Committee of the Division of Karlh Sc. cures

National llescarols Count-il, National Academy of Sciences

\Yasliington, D. C.

December 80, 1957

o
w

FOREWORD

specialists was enlisted, each of whom prepared one
• field. To this large group the Committee extends its
if the contribulors are not given but the held of interest
vilh his address al the lime of going lo press.

press ils thanks to the Office of N'aval Research, whose

ice-Chairman Gunter lo make an exlended stay at the

:>ps Institution of Oceanography and a short visit lo

ic Institulion in 1948-1949. Laler, through a similar

veen the Scripps Instilulion of Oceanography and the

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les Geological Survey for encouragement and support;
e and many of the other contribulors lo the Treatise
;ical Survey. Many members of the slaff of ihc Gco-

titution, the Xalional Museum and of olher organiza-
ittee in the critical review of manuscripts; this help is
also wish to thank Karl P. Schmidt for iranslalingl
lied in German.
V. W. Rubey, Arlhur Sevan, Ernsi Cloos, and Francis

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Gunter'i Archive*, No. 10. June 1992

303

Appendix H

Summary of Statement to the Natural Resources Subcommittee

off the Committee on Government Operations,
Congress off the United States, House off Representatives,

on the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary —
an Ecological System, San Francisco, California,

August 21, 1969.

by
Joel W. Hedgpeth

Much has been said about obtaining the maximum
benefits from a natural system, as if a body of water
could be partitioned to serve all the possible purposes
that man could think of. The multiple purpose concept
is not as simple as it sounds when applied to a dynamic
environment. Because of our scale of values and the
different timing of our demands, our purposes may not
coincide with the operations of the natural system. In
other words, man's talk of "purpose" means the pur
poses to which he would put nature, not nature's use
of itself. So far. all the plans for water diversion,
wastewater disposal and modification of the natural
system of rivers, bays and nearshore ocean in central
California have been an attack on nature, not a design
to live with nature, and we have lost sight of the pur
pose or purposes that man should gain from this
system.

If we view the system from the historical perspec
tive it is obvious that the first purpose of San Francisco
Bay (in its broadest sense) was to provide food. This
is amply attested to by the more than 400 shell mid
dens left by the Indians on the shores of the Bay. In
Indian time as now the San Francisco Bay area was
one of the most populous regions in California, but the
base for this population was the ecologically natural
base of abundant food supply. Perhaps only a few thou
sand Indians were maintained in this natural system
under a sustained yield basis, but it appears to have
been a stable culture that endured for more than 3,000
years. This culture came to an end, at least symbotcal-
ty. with the establishment of San Francisco in 1776.
five days before the Declaration of Independence. Now.
only seven years before the second century of occupa
tion of the Bay area by the destructive, anti-ecological
culture of allegedly civilized man. there is serious con
cern by many that we may not last the next hundred
years. Probably we wffl out live the gloomier prophets
of doom.'but it is inconceivable that we can endure In-
this locality for 3,000 years at the present rate of violent

environmental exploitation.

In any event, man's first purpose for nature, as a
resource for food, was served in San Fraadsco Bay to
significant degree after displacement of the original
culture for at least a hundred years, until 1876 or
perhaps until 1900. However, even by 1876 there were
indications that pollution from sewers was locally of
fensive, and the reliance oa the resources of the bay
proper declined, although such resources as fish whose
well being depended on the estuarine and delta reaches
of the bay continued to be important, and **• are.

The second purpose that man found for San Fran
cisco Bay was to serve his commerce. The Indians
paddled across the narrower parts of the Bay on rafts
of tules, but the use of the bay for commerce was
negligible until mid 19th Century. Although the shell
mound cultures may have exported as much as a third
of their harvest to the interior. It was probably carried
overland. In terms of human history the sequence has
probably been the same everywhere — man first settl
ed on the shore for food, then he ventured upon the
waters, first for fishing, then for exchange of goods with
other cultures.

In San Francisco Bay fishing came after com
merce, and oyster culture, developed last of afl, had
the shortest run. In the older, more estab&shed
cultures, cultivation of the spadous tidal flats of the bay
would have been one of the first purposes developed.

The third purpose to whkh we have put Saa Fran
cisco Bay has been the most short sighted and destruc
tive one of disposal of mining wastes aad later of
sewage. At first little notice was taken of the use of San
Francisco Bay as a cesspool but the steady shoafing
of the bay from hydraulic mining debris dUI receive
notice. However, the prime reason for stopping this
rapid shoaling was not that It was filling the bay but
that It was destroying prime agricultural land. There
to too much talk of "response" of waters to introduced
materials, the capacity of the bay to "accept" waste

-33

materials and dilute them to concentrations that are
inoffensive to man or not overtly deleterious to aquatic
life. This purpose, which is considered a "benefit" in
the lexicon of the sanitary engineer, is an anti-
ecological approach to the environment. It says
essentially that man's purpose is to abuse nature. In
a multiple-use scheme for exploitation of the
environment it is the anti-ecological purpose that may
have the most effect on the environments, bring into
action a sort of Gresham's Law for ecology — that bad
environments will drive out good environments. Filling
the bay would of course destroy the bay entirely, and
can hardly be considered a legitimate purpose in terms
of the natural environment.

This brings us to a purpose that was not realized
or understood until fairly recently, that is, the bay serves
as a moderator of our climate because of its surface
area. It seems tautological to say that the Bay area
without the bay would not be the Bay Area, but such
proposals as the Reber Plan to dam it off completely
and fill most of the shallow areas were certainly made
in ignorance of the importance of the surface area of
the present bay. whose characteristics as an
ameliorating influence on local climate depend directly
on its circumstances as a body of water subject to tidal
fluctuation.

Even the Kaiser engineers, in their elaborate
reports on the cloaca maxima the Bay area, concede
that San Francisco Bay is a "unique natural resource,"
yet their proposals are made either without reference
to the effect of other engineering designs for the total
system, or on the assumption that they will inevitably
be constructed. The reassurances that as many
purposes as possible will be served by the proposed
alterations in the natural environment may sound like
good engineering, but such a plumber's apocalypse is

304

bad ecology. The problem overlooked here is that
reduction of environment to the lowest common
denominator of multiple engineering purposes (and
protection of fish and agricultural lands appear to be
after thoughts in the plans) may have a synergestic
effect — aO of these modifications may act together to
produce an effect greater than the sum of the separate
parts, and the Gresham's Law of ecological
environments could operate to produce the most
unfavorable environment (or every purpose of both man
and nature.

We would better serve our future if we reversed our
priorities for the San Francisco Bay and delta area, if
we dedicated our engineering skill to achieving first the
maximum production of fisheries resources,
maintenance and improvement of established
agricultural lands and amelioration of the climate, and
secondly to diverting water to other areas already out
of ecological balance with their environment, and lastly
to developing lands of dubious productivity. Perhaps
we do not know all we need to know to achieve these
ends, but our present pell-mell collision course with the
environment will not be solved by more knowledge
unless we also change our course. There may simply
not be enough water to serve our highest needs and
purposes and to serve those of another drainage basin
as well. If so, we should not seek means to act upon
the decision we will have to make eventually, namely
that uncontrolled growth of cities is not in itself a good
to be encouraged and fostered, but that it must be
controlled and where necessary limited. Certainly we
cannot treat the Bay area as an afterthought and expect
it to survive as a uniquely different region, or to
maintain its natural resources in a system of
engineering works designed for another purpose.

305

Appendix I

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In 1965, Dr. Hedgpeth accepted the position of
Professor of Oceanography and Director of Oregon State
University Marine Science Center at Newport. From

Newport, he roams the world teaching, lecturing and
serving as scientific consultant.

The Oregon Academy of Science, citing Dr. Hedg
peth for outstanding achievement, says "Because of his
knowledge and communication skills, he is often asked by

legislative bodies, planning commissions and citizens'
groups to assist in solving marine and estuarine environ
mental problems. His influence in these matters is recog

nized nationally and internationally."

Author of hundreds of books, book reviews and
commentaries, Dr. Hedgpeth's writing style is as attrac
tive as it is accurate. "There is," says Ward, "an infectious

enthusiasm about Hedgpeth's writing that makes it irre
sistible." He laces his scientific abstracts with literary ref
erences — Thoreau, Robert Burns — suggesting his wide-

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to illustrate a point.

Dr. Hedgpeth has received the highest scientific
honors, both in America and abroad. Yet he says, "The
motivation for studying the seashore is not to produce
scintillating ideas that win prizes or gain admission to
academies, but to gain fresh understanding, further in
sight into the orderly jumble of processes and interac
tions on the world's most significant interface, the edge of
the largest of living spaces on our globe. And so we hope
that the seashore will still be worth visiting when all the
lands are filled with people and machines."

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307a

OREGON ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, CITATION FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
AWARDED FEBRUARY 23, 197^ to JOEL W. HEDGPETH

Joel W. Hedgpeth, Professor of Biological Oceanography, Oregon State
University, has been a recognized leader in the development of marine
biology on the Pacific Coast for 25 years. As a research scholar, he
has contributed significantly to the literature of Pycnogonids,
Crustacea, Mollusks and marine ecology. He has written extensively in
the fields of marine and estuarine ecosystems and is the reviser of the
standard intertidal biology book for our coast, Between Paci fi c Tides.

He completed his degrees at the University of California, Berkeley
campus. He held positions with the U. S. Engineer Department, U. S.
Bureau of Reclamation, Texas Game Fish and Oyster Commission, University
of Texas, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and was Director of the
Pacific Marine Station of the University of the Pacific before joining
the School of Oceanography staff of Oregon State University in 19&5-

Because of his knowledge and communication skills, he is often asked by
legislative bodies, planning commissions and citizens' groups to assist
in solving marine and estuarine environmental problems. His influence
in these matters is recognized nationally and internationally. The
Oregon State University Press will soon publish a compilation of his
entire environmental writings.

His book reviews and commentaries are highly valued by other authors,
publishers and colleagues alike. In addition to his professional
scientific contributions to our society, he also is widely known as
writer, poet and Irish harpist. Inspiration and enjoyment is provided
to many through his contributions in the literary and musical arts.

He is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, and a past-
president of both the Western Society of Naturalists and western section
of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.

Through his energetic and stimulating leadership, marine programs in
schools have become important curriculum additions. The groundwork he
had laid with teachers has provided a solid foundation for the education
of a citizenry aware and appreciative of the significance of the marine
environment. His impact by activities continues to spread from Oregon
and California throughout the land.

Joel W. Hedgpeth is a dedicated scholar, scientist, lecturer, editor,
poet, educator, mentor and perhaps most importantly, a friend to all who
are concerned with man's relationship with the planet Earth.

308

Vita or Curriculum Vitae

of
Joel W. Hedgpeth

(as of December 31, 1972)

Marine biologist, systematic zoologist (Pycnogonida), environment
alist (since 1921), lecturer and writer.

Born: September 29, 1911 at k in the morning at his grandfather's house,
929 Chestnut Street, Oakland,, California.

Father: Joel Hedgpeth, 1875-1956, born on Little Dry Creek near Academy,
Fresno County, California, (a blacksmith).

Mother: Nellie Tichenor McGrav, I87l»-1956, born at 1126 - 21«t Street,
San Francisco, (a Presbyterian missionary, teaching California
Indians).

Wife: Florence Warrens, born October 2, 1911, north of Cedarville,
Modoc Co., California

Children: Sarah Ellen, born 1950 at Berkeley, Calif.; Warren Joel, born 1952
at San Diego, Calif, during campaign parade for Eisenhower.

Education: -

Pre-scbool. My grandfather's library and the family attic (including
accumulated back magazines to 1889) -

Grade 1, Linclon School, Stockton, Calif. 1918; Grade 2, Haight School,
Alameda, Calif., 1919 i Cole School, Oakland, promoted to L3 Jan. 1920;
Grades 3-fc, Lincoln School, Berkeley, Calif., 1920-21; Grades U-5, Palo
Alto Military Academy, 1922-23 i Grades 6 through 8, Washington School,
San Leandro, Calif., 192U-25 ;. Grade 9, Lockwood Jr. High, Oakland, Calif.,
1925-26; Grades 10-12, Fremont High School, Oakland, Calif., 1926-29;
San Mateo Jr. College, 1929-31; University of Call forni a, > Berkeley, 1931-
33: 1933-3*1; 1938-39, M.A. in Zoology awarded 19UO, Thesis, "Factors
limiting the distribution of Diaptomid Copepods," Committee in Charge:
S. F. Light, H. J. Kirby and W. B. Herms; University of Texas, 19U8-119,
not advanced to candidacy because of internecine dispute, returned to
University of California, Berkeley, 19*»9-51, Ph.D. formally awarded in
1952, Thesis, "Ecological and distributional relationships of marine and
brackish water invertebrates of the coasts of Texas and Louisiana,"
Committee in Charge: Ralph I. Smith, J. Wyatt Durham and Willard D.
Hartman.

Languages: English, written and spoken. Reading knowledge of German and
French. Can decipher, with codebooks, Russian and Welsh..

309

Places lived in for at least six months:

Oakland, Calif. (929 Chestnut St., 1911-12; 1919-20; 1015 Hollywood Ave.,
193U-35); Clippergap (near Auburn, Calif.) 191U-16; Stockton, Calif. 1°17-
18; Alameda, 1919; Berkeley (1919 - 1/2 Fair-view St.) 1920-21; Mather,
Yosemite National Park, 1921-22; Palo Alto, Calif, (at Palo Alto Military
Academy) 1922-23; San Leandro, Calif. 1923-29; San Mateo, Calif., 1929-31;
Berkeley, Calif. 1931-33; Ridge (near Willits) summers 1933, 1931*; Wash
ington, D. C. 1935-36; Walnut Creek, Calif. 1936-39; in field, Sierra
foothills, 1939; Baird (near Redding) 1939-^0; Sacramento, Calif. 19Ul;
Walnut Creek, Calif. 19U2-1»5; Rockport, Texas 19l«5-1t7; Port Aransas,
Texas, 19^7-50; Berkeley, Calif. 1950-51; La Jolla, Calif. 1951-57
(with summers at Dillon Beach, Calif.); Dillon Beach, Calif. 1957;
Sebastopol, Calif. 1957-65; Hevport, Oregon 1965- •

Countries and places visited:

England, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Rev Zealand, McMurdo Sound,
Palmer Peninsula, Chile, Japan, British Columbia, Baja California and
Sonora, Devon, Cornwall, Cardigans, Merioneth, Northumberland, Argyll,
Helgoland, Hesse, Provence (La Camargue), La Paz and Guaymas, Vancouver,
and Queen Charlotte Ids., Hawaii (Oahu), Canal Zone, Ecuador, Galapagos,
Alaska (Pt. Barrow).

Environments :

San Francisco Bay and delta; rocky and sandy shores of California and
Oregon; Tomales Bay; coast and bays of Texas; coastal ranges of northern
California; Surprise Valley, Calif.; Antarctic and Galapagos shores.

Employment :

Current position: Professor of Biological Oceanography, Oregon State
University. Since 1965-

Previous employment: Lab. Asst. (part time, student), San Mateo Jr.
College, Aug. 1930-June, 1931; Odd Jobs and student during depression
years, including scientific artist for S. F. Light, etc., 193U-36;
Printer and proofreader, Piedmont Press, Oakland, Calif., 1936;
CAF-2, Div. Loans & Currency, Treasury, Washington, D.C., May 1936-
April 1937; Clerk, Calif. State Compensation Insurance Fund, San
Francisco, Sept. 1937-June 1938; Jr. Aquatic Biologist, U.S. Corps
of Engineers, Sacramento, Calif., June 1938-Hov. 1938; Jr. Aquatic
Biologist, U.S. Bur. Reclamation, Redding, Calif., Sept. 1939-Dec.
19UO; Lab. Asst., Div. Animal Industry, Sacramento, Calif., April
19Ul-Dec. 19U1 ; Freelance writing and independent self-supported
research culminating in major systematic monograph on Pycnogonida,
at Walnut Creek, Calif., 19Ul-l»5; Marine biologist, Texas Game Fish
& Oyster Comm., Rockport, Texas, Feb. 19U5-June 19^7; Asst. Res.
Scientist, University of Texas, Marine Science Center, Port Aransas,
Texas, June 19U7-June 19U9; Visiting instructor and professor, Pacific
Marine Station, University of the Pacific, summers 19W, 19^9, 1950,

310

1951, 1955, 1956; Teaching Assistant in Zoology, University of California,
Berkeley, 19^9-50; Assistant Research Biologist, Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, 1951-57; Professor of Zoology and Director, Pacific Marine
Station, University of the Pacific, Dillon Beach, 1957-65; Professor of
Biological Oceanography and Resident Director then Head Yaquina Biological
Laboratory of Marine Science Center, Oregon State University, Newport,
Ore., 1965- ; Visiting Professor, Stanford University (TB VEGA Cruise 17),
Spring 1968; Visiting Professor, University of Arizona at Puerto Penasco,
Sonora, June-July 1972.

Consulting experience:

Editorial consultant for various publishers at college textbook level
and editorial advisor for school science series; various advisory panels
for the National Science Foundation and Office of Haval Research on
systematic biology, oceanographic facilities and marine biology; ex
pert witness in defense of environment on San Francisco Bay delta sys
tem , consultant on environmental impact analysis for nuclear power
plants; analysis of master plan for Tomales Bay. Committee to analyze
oceanographic manpower for National Science Foundation; Board of
Visitors, Invertebrate Zoology, U. S. National Museum; Marine Biology,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Grants and contracts (all now expired):

For systematic zoology (Pycnogonida), National Science Foundation;
long term studies of the near shore environment, Office of Naval Re
search; Research Participation for High School and Jr. College
Teachers, National Science Foundation; Antarctic biology, National
Science Foundation.

Courses taught:

General Ecology; Marine Biology; Invertebrate Zoology; Introductory
Entomology; Marine Zoogeography; History of Marine Biology and devel
opment of ideas therein; The Death of Progress (an environmental col-
loquim).

Lecture subjects:

The Pycnogonida; Historical Aspects of Marine Biology; Radioactivity
in the Sea; The California Water Plan; Life of Intertidal Zones;
Philosophy on Cannery Roy (Ed Ricketts & John Steinbeck); The Re
cycling of Excalibur — Environmentalist as a Celtic Revival; Poetry
of the Sea; The Estuarine System; My life as an environmentalist, etc.

Editorial experience:

Treatise on Marine Ecology for Geological Society of America; member
of various editorial boards, including Pacific Discovery, Ecology,

311

Limnology and Oceanography, and editorial referee for Science, Marine
Biology, etc. Currently member editorial board of The Veliger, Quart
erly Review of Biology, and Oceans magazine; advisor on Invertebrate
and Marine Biology, McGraw-Hill Co.

Professional society memberships:

Founder, Society for the Prevention of Progress, 19M; Sigma Xi; Fellow,
California Academy of Sciences ;;Charter Member, Society of Systematic
Zoology and American Society of Limnology and Oceanography; member,
Ecologica, Society of America, AAAS, Marine Biological Association of
the United Kingdom, Western Society of Naturalists. Offices: Pres
ident, Western Section of ASLO, 1966; Western Society of Naturalists,
1970.

Professional recognition:

Delegate for U. S. Geological Survey, Colloquim on Nomenclature,
International Congress of Zoology, Copenhagen 1953; Member Inter
national Colloquium on Classification of brackish and estuarine
waters, Venice 1957; Convener, First International Congress of
Oceanography, 0. N., New York 1959; Fellow, California Academy of
Sciences, I960; Faculty Research Lecturer, University of the Pacific
196l; California Conservation Award 1961; Member, organization com
mittee for Association of Tropical Biology, Barro Colorado Canal
Zone 1963; Invited speaker and summarizer, Colloquium on Estuaries,
Jekyll Island, Georgia 196U; Surtsey Research Conference, Iceland
1965; Convener, Symposium on Estuaries, AAAS meetings, Berkeley
1965i Life Fellow, International Oceanographic Foundation, 1967;
Visiting faculty, Stanford University TE VEGA cruise 17 to the
Galapagos 1968; Contributor, National Symposium on Thermal Pol
lution, Portland 1968; Member, SCAR Symposium on Antarctic Biology,
Cambridge, England 1968; Participant, Conference on Ecological As
pects of International Development at Airlie House, Va. 1968;
Visiting lecturer, University of Wyoming 1969, Participant, Conference
on Environment i:No Deposit-No Return" of U. S. National Commission
for UNESCO, San Francisco 1969; Invited speaker, California-Nevada
Wildlife Conference, Fresno 1970; Participant, Conference on John
Steinbeck, Corvallis 1970; Commencement speaker, Fresno State
College, 1970; Member, Congress on Population and Environment,
Chicago 1970, Invited speaker, Air & Water Pollution Workshop,
Boulder, Colo. 1970; Convener, Ocean World Conference, Tokyo
1970, Summarizer, Northwest Estuarine and Coastal Zone Symposium,
Portland 1970; Visiting lecturer, Brighan Yound University 1971;
Conference on Conservation Problems in Antarctica, Blacksburg, Va.
1971; Second Coastal and Shallow Water Research Conference, Los
Angeles 1971; Antarctic Medal 1971; Sumnarizer, Symposium: The
Fate of the Chesapeake Bay, College Park, Md. 1972; Visiting scholar,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute 1972; Coastal Zone Workshop, Woods
Hole, Mass.: 2nd Congress of History of Oceanography and CHALLEN
GER Centennial, Edinburgh 1972; Helgoland Symposium: Man in the

312

Sea, 1972; Law of the Sea Conference, Seattle 1972.
Publications :

Over 100 titles, exclusive of book reviews, short commentaries,
abstracts, verse, etc.

Books:

Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology , Vol. 1, Ecology.
Geol. Soc. America 1957 (editor).

Between Pacific Tides by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin,
Stanford University Press. Latest edition, 1968 (reviser and
contributing author) .

Introduction to Seashore Life of the San Francisco Bay Region,
University of California Press, 1962.

Other: (selection of typical titles):

Livingston Stone and Fish Culture In California, Calif. Fish & Game
27(3), 191*!; Reexamination of the Adventure of the Lion's Mane,
Sci. Monthly, 60, 19^5; On the Evolutionary Significance of the
Pycnogonida, Smiths. Misc. Cons., 106(l8), 19*»7; The Pycnogonida
of the Western North Atlantic and the Caribbean, Proc. U. S. Nat.
Mus., 97, 19U8; An introduction to the Zoogeography of the
Northwestern Gulf of Mexico with Reference to the Invertebrate
Fauna, Publ. Inst. Mar. Sci. Texas, 3(1), 1953; Some preliminary
consideration of the Biology of inland mineral waters, Arch.
Oceanol. Limn. Venezia 11, Suppl., 1959; Pycnogonida of the North
American Arctic, J. Fish. Res. Bd. Canada, 20(5K 1963; Bodega
Head - a partisan view, Bull. Atomic Scientists, March, 1965;
Ecological Aspects of the Laguna Madre, a hypersaline estuary,
AAAS Symposium, Estuaries, 1967, The Atyid shrimp of the genus
Syncaris in California, Int. rev. ges. Hydrogiol., 53(M, 1968;
An intertidal reconnaissance of rocky shores of the Galapagos,
Wasmann J. Biol., 27(1), 1969; Philosophy on Cannery Row in_
Steinbeck, the Man and His Work, Ore. State Univ. Press, 1971;
Perspectives of benthic ecology in Antarctica in Research in the
Antarctic, AAAS, 1971-

By Jerome Tichenor: Poems in Contempt of Progress, The Clandestine
Press, 1965.

313

J W Hedcpeth ~5
Addendum, Vita, 1973-74. (as of March 17, 1977)

Joparted from Oregon otatc University, Sept. 30 1973; currently
emeritus professor.

Adjunct Professor, Pacific Marine Station of the University of
the Pacific, 1974 —

Visiting professor, Ucripps Institution of Oceanography, Soring
Quarter, 1976 (Lectures on the history of marine biology)

Consultant, National Science Foundation, on problems of impact
ofn science or scientific and logistsics support activity
on Antarctica, 1974-75. Visited Antarctica (McMurdo and
.iouth Pole, November 1974)

Conoiltant, otate of Victoria (at Melbourne) on studies of
fort i hilip nnd WAsternport bnyrj, Nov. -Dec. T.97'1 .

various other consultant activities including with otatc Water
Resources Duality Control Board on oan Francisco Bay.

Attended Helgoland Marine Biolof^ oymposium 1972, presented

paper on Impact of Impact Studies (publ. Hel^ol. Wiss. Meeres-
unters. 1973); Attended Challenger Centenrary Symposium,
Edinburgh, 1972; paper on De rairabile marls publ. Proc.
Hoyal Soc. Kdinburng, etc.

Attended Helogellnd Marine Biology Symposium 1976, delivered paper
on Models & Muddles (in press); participated in first
annual Symposium on Pycno«;onida, Linncan Society, London,
October 1976; proceedinss in press. Honoured at the dinner
as dean of pycnogonodists.

Received Browing Award for Achievment in Preserving; the Snvironmen'
(Simthsonian Inst.,) Oct 1076.

recent pi/blications:

One hundred years of Pacific oceanography, in- Biolosy of
the Oceanic Pacific, OSU press, 1974.
The Living I2dge. Geoscience and l-ian, 1975 (a review of inter t

research).

In Press: Man on the oeashore: An exponential force against
finite limit in Wildlife in America (CEQ; Govt Printing

dQHnillve

iidited i«±±hiiK edition of Jerome Tichenor's Poems in Contempt of
Progress (Boxwood Press, Pacific Grove 1973, 32.95)
The Outer Shores: From the papers od Erfward F. Ricketts. Mad River Press,

current address: Part !• ^75; Part II 1979

5660 Montecito Ave

Santa Rosa Calif. 95404

314

JOEL W. HEDOJPETK

INVKONM I NTAl AMD IDfrOdAl

January 1 1983

LECTURES AND PERFORMANCES
I. History of marine biology. A short lecture series.

1. Forebodings and beginnings. Aristotle, Ooniao and all
to J. Vaughan Thompson.

2. Victorians at the seashore and at sea- Forbes, Gosse
Huxlev & the fisheries, and stirrings on the continent.

3. The rise and chance of theories of ecology of the sea.
Moebius and the community (especially of oysters); Petersen

and food chain models; The Soartina syndrome.

II. 1 The estuarine way of Iffe. (sone overlap with 1.3). "Dependency",

retention and opportunisc.

2. San Francisco Bav. A tangled tale of • acadenic negligence, sanitary
engineers and water nolitics. (and some anal'pous episodes elsewhere).

III Han on the seashore- coastal problems of use, destruction and
social activist. ([since the days of Justinian]) Emphasis on

the California exaraple.

IV The pycnoconida: an excurlson in zoology.

V. Philosophy on the seashore- Ed Ricketts with a dash of Zen.

* * *

The Recycling of Excalibur. The environmental movement as the latest
chase of the battle between Roaan practicality and the Celtic view
of life. The noral of cvcling as exeaplified by Sir Bedir'veres failure to
return Arthur's sword to the lake, etc. (Similarities to Indian view
of man's,1^ nature' considered when lecturing on reservations)

* * -x "J

The Toetrv of the Sea. Readlncs fron poetry exemplifying Ban s interaction with
and interpretation of the sea — an "antidote to tl>e Kipling-Masef ^ield

school of talll ships and rustv ttauv seaners etc.

315

Update of C V, September 1992;

Joel W. Hedgpeth, Ph D, F.M.L.S.*, FCAS etc

ve
1980 Elected honorary A member of Estuarine Research Foundation.

1982. Attended International Symposium on Utilization of Coastal
Ecosystens at Rio Grande, Brasil, 21-27 November 1982.

1982-83 (uncertain date) listed on EPA honor roll of consultants
who never would be missed, categorized as "excellent scientist but
complete misanthrope."

June 1983- Attended herring conference at Nanaimo, British Columbia
1983- December, honored by Western Society of Naturalists as Neptune
wrestling with giant sea cucumber on their annual program and T-
shirts.

1985. Prepared document on Pacific Coast barriers and other coastal
features as related to potential dangers to coastal property under

contract for U S Fish & Wildlife Service; result had very short press
run and distribution was limited. I was given only 15 copies for
personal distribution.

1987. Attended IV International History of Oceanography Congress,

at Hamburg & Kiel, September.

1987-1990 Participated in evidentiary hearings before the State

Water Resources Board in behalf of The Bay Institute of San

Francisco.

1990-1992. Involved in testimony and analyses of Sonoma county

gravel wars, wastewater controversies, critiques of EIR's etc.,

writing letters to editors, and numerous book reviews, mostly for

Quarterly Review of Biology

1991. Elected Foreign Member, Linnean Society of London.

May 1992. Attended and participated as panelist in State Lands
Commission on Public Trust and biodiversity in Sacramento.

May 14-17 Participated as invited keynote speaker in a Steinbeck
and the Environment conference on Nantucket.

* Unfortunately I have mislaid the charming letter from the Linnean Society
apologizing for inadvertently placing me on the list of the deceased and departed and
lamenting that it would be two years before they could get out a revised membership list
I must assure them that I expect to survive that long.

316 Appendix K

SINCE THE DAYS OF ACADEMY

Commencement address, Fresno State College, June 3, 1970
Joel W. Hedgpeth

There is a strong flavor of good old Methodist ministers in my background,
so naturally I must use a text. My text is from Leviticus:

The land shall not be sold forever: for the land is mine;

for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the

land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the

land. (Leviticus 25:23).

If you go out east of here a few miles, where the land begins to rise
toward the mountains, you will find a large boulder by the roadside with an
inscription that tells you the town of Academy once flourished there. Not far
away from there is the cemetery, where, as it says on that boulder, "many of .
the county's earlier families and their descendants now rest nearby."

Among these are my people: my name is on those stonas since Joel seems
to be a favorite in our line of Hedgpeths, and my father was born on Dry Creek
nearby and my great uncle was pastor of the little Methodist church at
Academy .

In the year 1858 my father's people left Missouri for California. They
manumitted their slaves, sold their land in Nodaway County, outfitted heavy
wagons hauled by teams of six oxen and on the 22nd of April they "crossed the

wide Missouri" and struck out across the broad rolling prairies of Kansas.

U'«t
At Albuquerque they turned their wagons eouth, to use for the first time the

road surveyed by Lt. Edward F. Beale the year before. This is the route that

is now part of Highway 66, so vividly described by John Steinbeck in The

Grapes of Wrath. They passed by El Morro, the inscription rock, on July 7, 1858

317 2

and left their names upon the rock, along with many others. Disaster befell
them on August 17, 1858 when the party was attacked by Indians at the
Colorado River. They lost their stock and many of their wagons and they
had to go back to Albuquerque to winter over. In 1859, escorted romantically
enough by Lt. Beale and his camels, they completed their emigration to
California. They were assisted across the Colorado River by Major Armistead,
commandant of the newly established Fort Mojave, who became a general in the
Confederate Army and died in Pickett's Charge. My people settled first in
Visalia and then moved to Dry Creek just after the Academy was established.
In those days it was an important settlement, for it was on the main road in
the San Joaquin Valley between Los Angeles and Stockton. The road was along
the foothills because the lowlands were often impassable in winter. Academy
was the big town of the area and had the first high school in this district,
which was its pride. The school boasted of its fine building, blackboard,
and all that, and especially of its "well selected library of 56 volumes
enclosed in a black walnut bookcase." But Academy withered away after the
railroad came in 1872 and Fresno became the big town and county seat. Now
there is nothing left at Academy but a subdivider who has laid out some lines
and is trying to sell "Academy Ranchitos." I am not surprised to hear that
they are not selling very well.

Progress passed Academy by, but its ideals for higher education have been
abundantly fulfilled here at Fresno State, and some of the descendants of
the old pioneers still live around here. Academy, I would think, would be a
very suitable place for the headquarters of the society I founded some years
ago, called the Society for the Prevention of Progress. But there are not many
houses left there suitable for headquarters, unfortunately.

My father's people tried to solve a difficult problem of their times by

selling out and moving west. Of course they were the kind of people that
moved west anyhow, and ever since they got to North America they had moved;
they moved with Daniel Boone into Missouri. Today quite a few young people
will turn their backs on our social problems for a while and join a commune.
This is a symbolic group emulation of Thoreau's year at Walden. We cannot
all do this even if we wanted to because this kind of use of the land is
simply not possible for all of us. There is simply not enough land for
this non-exploitive way of life for our population. We are on the horns of
a dilemma here. And of course here in the San Joaquin Valley we are in the
vast land of agribusiness. An unlovely word, invented by people I am
fortunately not acquainted with. This then is the vast world of the rail
roads and agribusiness. Some of you have read no doubt of the times past as
described rather dramatically by Frank Norris in the Octopus, and of course
in more recent times by John Steinbeck in his books In Dubious Battle and
The Grapes of Wrath. This idea of agribusiness of course would be foreign
to the Old Testament philosophy of my Methodist forebears. But it was on
the way even in the 1870 's and it was in 1880 that some ranchers were shot
down by railroad men at Mussel Slough. It is ironic to remember today that
this same octopus receives a substantial federal subsidy for keeping land
out of production in the San Joaquin Valley. History has strange quirks.

Frank Norris concluded The Octopus with an optimistic paean to the
wheat that would always be here in spite of the greed and troubles of men,
that would feed the starving of India, yet in his story the survivor of
these troubles turns away and goes to sea. We were already in trouble with
the land then, as indicated by this story and its ambiguous conclusion.
Really, the trouble is our imperfect stewardship of the land. We were in
trouble long before Highway 66 became what John Steinbeck called "the mother

road, the road of flight." The trouble really began, if we must fix a
date, 201 years ago when James Watt took out the first patent on his
steam engine.

Two centuries ago is no time at all, even in human history (as a
country we have still six years to go to complete our first 200 years) ,
but we now find ourselves in the dilemma of the Chinese proverb: "he who
rides a tiger cannot dismount," yet we must dismount and subdue the tiger.
It is remarkable how little of this danger was foreseen by the prophets of
progress in the rational, utilitarian age which still influences so much
of our political and sociological theory of our world. Despite a sonnet
to a polluted stream by Wordsworth:

"Was the intruder nursed
In hideous usages, and rites accursed
That thinned the living and disturbed the dead?"

and such demurrers as Dickens' description of the building of the railroad
across the unspoiled countryside of England in Dombey and Son, there was
little concern for what was happening to the earth. True, George Perkins
Marsh as early as 1847 and in his book Man and Nature in 1864, when this
valley was pastorally naive, warned that the earth was "fast becoming an
unfit home for its noblest inhabitant."

Nevertheless men have found it pleasing to listen to the utilitarian
sirens who have lured them toward the dangerous rocks of progress - the
doctrine of serving the greatest happiness of the greatest number may spring
from a philosophy "deficient in imagination" that threw "the mantle of
intellect over the natural tendency of men in all ages to deny or disparage
all feelings and mental states of which they have no consciousness in them
selves" — so one of them, John Stuart Mill, said of Jeremy Bentham, the
patron saint of utilitarianism. He ignored, said Mill, "the whole unanalyzed

320 5.

experience of the human race." But there is some consolation in all this -
men can change their ideas and philosophies and the doctrine of progress is
vulnerable: after all, it is an idea, not a fact. As J. B. Bury pointed out
50 years ago (The Idea of Progress, 1920), time is the very condition of
progress - it is obvious that idea would be valueless if there were "good
cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or
2100. The doctrine of progress would lose its meaning and would automatically
disappear ."

But the utilitarians are still with us, especially the Atomic Energy
Commission. They tell us that they know what will be good for us, and that
is power generated by atomic energy, and still more power. They seem less
concerned for the real future of mankind than they think, or would like us to
believe, they are. For the present policy of developing atomic power is
"after us the deluge" with a vengeance. Because the high activity wastes
generated by these plants — not the mild stuff that leaks out — is laying
against the future a terrific deluge. What is going to be done with this
stuff? It will not decay for 200 years or more, some of it not for thousands
of years .

Of course here in California we are embarked — or at least our politicians
are — (it is being fought behind the scenes by lawyers energetically) upon the
State Water Plan. Another example of profound anti-ecological ignorance.
There has never been an adequate ecological study of this plan or its impact
on the environment. Water, to be sure is a problem in California and is
needed in this valley, but is more and more of it needed for more and more
people? Here is the problem that everyone is preaching loudly. We just can't
go on having more and more people.

The choice is looming up: perhaps we should cut off the possibility of

321

o .

having more and more people. But really this will not be achieved in my
opinion until it is the philosophy of everyone that too many people are
undesirable.

Mary Austin had a very unfortunate experience in the Owens Valley and
she said the diversion of water to Los Angeles and the destruction of that
valley would bring retribution, that the earth would speak out. She was a
pretty good prophet, but she couldn't have predicted the way it has hap
pened: the pine trees are dying and people are advised to leave Los Angeles
at the rate of 10,000 a year. This is the sort of thing we are making pos
sible with this kind of activity.

Of course we cannot go back to the good old days of Academy, we are
going to have to look forward to the bad new days. Not long ago we had a
national day of observance for the earth. A day of ecological awareness.
Many things were said about the peril that confronts us and what we must do.
I was among those who like my staunch Methodist forebears, took to the
circuit and preached the gospel. We did not expect, and still do not
expect, the world to be redeemed overnight, or men to change their ideas
immediately. The moral of Earth Day was that we were concerned for the
future, and that we were asking ourselves why we are on this earth at all.
We cannot expect to solve this problem of our survival by magic or by words
alone, especially when we are not sure just what the minimum environment for
the continued life of Homo sapiens is on earth, to say nothing of what the
optimum environment might be.

So we need everyone's help and we hope that Earth Day started some
people at least on a lifelong commitment for these bad new times that are
coming up. Of course some of us are still basically optimistic and we hope
things won't be quite that bad. We have some Jeremiahs in our midst who

322

are saying things a little too extremely so they have no way to back off.
We could be wrong in some degree but not in the basic predictions, because
these are based on the carrying capacity of the earth.

But only a few weeks after the euphoria of Earth Day we see in the
papers that our politicians and economist are getting worried about the
costs of cleaning up the environment. This would cut into the economic
structure, we might lose jobs and this would cut down industry so we'd
better keep on going the way we have. It's not easy for mankind to under
stand that he like the individual can die. We all know we must die so we
put the thought aside. For the whole species, the whole society, to
realize that there are certain things we must do, is very difficult. So
the obvious thing from the reactions of some politicians is that the real
issue is not pollution or the cost of cleaning it up, but the desirability
or the undesirability of our present social and economic structure, that
is so destructive to the environment. Time is simply running out on progress,

Now a lot of words have been said about how we can get all we need
from the sea once we have exhausted the land, that the resources of the sea
are inexhaustible and there will always be fish in the sea. But we are
terrestrial beings and the land will always be our chief resource. At this
time we get about 2 or 3 per cent of the world's protein needs from the sea,
represented by a fisheries catch of perhaps 60 million metric tons. To keep
up with the population explosion we should count on ten times this or 600
million metric tons by the next 50 years, but this is beyond the limit the
sea can yield and we might get at most about half or a fourth, or 250 to 300
million metric tons. The reason for this is that people have been confused
about the total volume of the oceans and the parts that are usable. To be
sure, there is some sort of life nearly everywhere in the ocean, but it's

pretty thin and the activity goes on in the narrow coastal areas and the
comparatively shallow areas near the surface. But these are tne areas we
treat most thoughtlessly, that we overfish and that we pollute by dumping
things in at the shore or by fallout from the air. And fallout doesn't
necessarily mean radioactive materials. Detergents, pesticides and other
things when applied may go up in aerosols and be transferred into the
atmosphere so that they are carried even to the Antarctic regions where they
are concentrated in penguins and Antarctic seals for example. Indeed we will
have to be even more careful about what we do on the land to save what we
can of the resources of the sea.

In ten years — so I have heard somewhere — something like less than half
of you will be doing what you planned or studied to do in the last four
years. I hope that percentage is even less as far as Indo China or any
other remote part of the world is concerned. At the same time I hope an
even greater proportion of you than now committed will be in the environ
mental ranks.

You will be needed — you are now — to protect this valley from becoming
another Los Angeles slum, for even out into the hills are these people who
would subdivide all the hills in Tulare County in a mad urge to make money,
who boast of the state's largest subdivision near Visalia, and send their
agents out to buy off university critics and three times their university
salaries. Would you like to be a tame ecologist for Boise Cascade? Every
one concerned for the future of this valley should examine this scheme and
seek to change the policies of this company — by direct action, appearances
at hearings, as stockholders, or whatever you may happen to be, for if ever
there was an organization that deserved the scorn of Isaiah, this is it:

324 9.

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till
there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the
earth! (5:8).

I noticed in the Fresno Bee this afternoon that Supervisor John Krebs
said Fresno County planning commission members should have the decency to
resign if they cannot attend meetings. I hope that if any of you rise to
such lofty positions as members of planning commissions you will go to the
meetings. This kind of direct personal action must be the part of every
one of us to protect what we can of the environment.

What happened to all the beards? Are they outside picketing us? I
don't object to whether you come with a full beard or come stark naked like
the ancient Celts went into battle, but I would only ask that those of you
who take up the arms of words please use them with reasonable coherence and
consistency. Nothing wearies the patience of the people in governmental

boards and hearing commissions and the like as much as aimless, unprepared

»YW
harangues that consume a great deal of time and never get -nowhere.

But the lawyers, the merchants and the chiefs and everyone else will
be needed. Especially the lawyers, and 1 think this is the principal direc
tion we must go in changing our laws, getting better substance, environ
mental awareness, into our legal system. Surprising, for instance I have
been involved in fights about beaches and water rights, and from the
viewpoint of the ecologist our legal structure is very strange and non
sensical. The good judges who decide what a beach really is do not seem to
know what the tide is and you can't understand the nature of the beach
without understanding the tide. We have a great deal to learn because of our
delusion with the god of progress and our belief that we are the chosen of
this earth.

325 10.

And so, we hope to see you in the ranks, the ranks of thoughtful
action, not of Quantrell's raiders or burners of computers. I too have
a distrust of our modern technology and I am convinced that our salvation
does not lie with our machines, but I think we will need the help of some
of these gadgets, because we must work out a whole new system. The environ
mental cause does not need and does not want martyrs in the streets and on
the campuses nor soldiers fallen on battlefields — it is a cause for living,
for people and their survivors. Of course we assume, those of us who are
called environmentalist, that man's tenancy of the earth is worth pro
longing and that it is best for ourselves now living and for our descendants
to avoid the terrible consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of
the earth. We are asking of all men that we do not forget that we are
strangers and sojourners on this land.

326

INDEX- -Joel Hedgpeth

Alexander, Josephine, 174

Antarctic Medal, 222

Antarctica research program, 76-
77, 207-222

Hedgpeth Heights, 222
Hero research vessel, 210-211
Lindblad tour, 213-215
report of scientific

activity's effect on the
environment, 216-220
studying pycnogonids, 208

Aquatic Habitat Institute, 267

Army Corps of Engineers, United
States

American River proposal, 114
Bodega Head project, 192-193
San Francisco Bay model, 256

Arnett, Ray, 183

Astro, Richard, 108-109, 227-228

Axelrod, Dan, 88

Azov, Sea of, 236-237, 248-249

Barnes, Grant, 110, 118

Bay Institute of San Francisco,

247, 268

Berolzheimer, Charles, 158-159
Bertrand, Jerry, 219
Between Pacific Tides, 92, 93, 95,

97-98, 104-106, 108, 110, 122-

123

Bigelow, Michael, 18
Bodega Bay proposed nuclear power

plant, 171, 173-191, 193

University of California's

role, 181-186
Bodega Head, 192-193
Bolin, Ralph, 120
Briley, DeWitt, 61-62
Brower, Anne Bus, 9-10, 234
Brower, David, 233-234
Browning Award, 274-275
Bureau of Reclamation, United

States, 45, 246, 249
Burt, Wayne, 196-199, 202
Buzzatti-Traverso, 146
Byrne, John, 117, 198

Caen, Herb, 189

California Department of Fish and

Game, 232, 241, 270

Calvin, Jack, 105-107

Campbell, Joseph, 106, 108-109,

111, 124-125, 228
Gaspers, Hubert, 143-144, 236
Child, Al, 120, 130
Clegg, James, 186
Collier, Albert, 235, 253
Cone, Donald, 175
Constance, Lincoln, 87-88
copepods , 79
Creagh, Agnes, 146-147
Curtis, Garniss, 272

Daniel, J. Frank, 65-66

Dasmann, Ray, 116-117, 184

Davoren, William T., 247

Dayton, Paul, 212

Denton, Richard, 251

Dillon Beach, 150, 157-160. See

also Pacific Marine Station
Dunning, Harrison, 246

ecological concepts, 90-92, 96,

101-102, 123

Environmental Defense Fund, 247
environmental impact reports, 242
Environmental Protection Agency,

241, 267
environmentalists vs.

agribusiness, 74, 244-247, 264,

270
estuarine studies

in Russia, 236-237, 249-251.

in Texas, 235-236, 252-253
See also San Francisco Bay-Delta
environmental issues

Fahrenbach, Henner, 208
Fellows Medal of the California

Academy of Science, 274-275
Fish and Wildlife Service, United

States, 247
Fischer, Hugo, 254-256

327

Fisher, Walter K. , 123
Flower, Enola, 47-48
Flynn, Errol, 18, 211-212
Fox, J. Phyllis, 251, 257-261
Frederick, Aaron, 42-43
Freeborn, Stanley, 72
Fry, Bill, 129, 204-207, 213
Furneaux, Hugh, 37-38

Gaffney, Rose, 191-192
Cause's Principal (competitive

exclusion), 122-123, 124-125
Gifford, Edward W. , 66-67
Gilbert, Grove Karl, 238-239, 254
Giles, George, 132
Gilliam, Harold, 191
Gleason, Walter, 238, 264-265
Grendon, Alexander, 178-179
Grinnell, Joseph, 78-79, 101-102,

164
Gunter, Gordon, 74, 80, 115, 132-

134, 144, 145, 152, 235

Hamby, Bob, 180

Hand, Cadet, 163, 181, 184-186

Hart, James, 18

Hatfield, Mark, 198

Hedgpeth Heights, Antarctica, 222

Hedgpeth, Florence Warrens (wife),

79, 151
Hedgpeth, Joel (father), 1-2, 10-

15, 32-36, 42-44, 48-49, 52, 58
Hedgpeth, Joel Walker, other

family, 2-6, 8-9, 11, 16-17, 19-

21, 23, 27, 32, 50, 54, 59, 83,

161-162. See also McGraw,

Edward Walker; McGraw family

aunts
Hedgpeth, Sarah Ellen (Mrs. Paul

Boly) (daughter), 151, 200
Hedgpeth, Sarah Ellen (Nellie)

Tichenor McGraw (mother), 1-22,

25, 34-36, 41, 43, 47, 52-53,

56-60, 69, 127
Hedgpeth, Warren Joel (son), 28-

29, 151
Hemphill, Henry, 23, 72-73, 83,

102-103

Hilton, William A., 120-121
Homes, Geoffrey, 18. See also

Mainwaring , Dan
Home, Alec, 266-267
Hosmer, Jennie (Bee), 23
Hubbs, Carl, 148, 149, 150, 211

Jinglebollix, 120-121
Johnson, Ralph Gordon, 166-169

KPFA radio station, 178-181

Kashevarov, Father, 106

Rashevarov, Xenia, 106-107

Keen, Myra, 84

Keep, Josiah, 83

Kortum, Bill, 188

Kortum, Karl, 167, 187-188, 203

Kozloff, Gene, 105

Krone, Ray, 251

Ladd, Harry, 133-134
Leopold, Aldo, 115-116
Leopold, Luna, 115-116, 182
Leopold, Starker, 182-184
Lldicker, William, 240-241, 271
Light, Sol Felty, 70, 72, 77-79,

88, 91, 93, 99, 102, 157
Littleworth, Arthur, 264-265
Llano, George, 216-217, 222
Loosanoff, Victor, 170, 261
Love joy, Ritchie, 106-107
Lund, E.J., 80, 81, 151-153

Mainwaring, Constance, 17, 93, 94
Mainwaring, Dan, 18-19, 108-109
McGraw family, aunts of Joel

Hedgpeth, 2-6, 16-20, 27, 32
McGraw, Edward Walker

(grandfather), 2-7, 19-25, 27,

31-32, 42, 49, 62, 69
Marine Science Center, Oregon
State University, 196-203,
225, 228

Mertes, David, 167-168, 202
Meyer, Amy, 38-39
Meyers, Samuel, 171
Miller, Alden, 70-71
Moss Beach, 157

328

Murphy, Al, 102-103
Murphy, Dennis, 23, 99
Myers, George S., 239-2AO

Needham, Paul, 182
Neilands, Joe, 189-191
Nichols, Fred, 241
Noble, Alden, 156-158, 160, 166,
171

Office of Naval Intelligence,

United States, 137-141
Oregon State University, 196-203,

224-230
Outer Shores, The, 94, 98, 109-110

Pacific Gas and Electric Company

[PG&E], proposed nuclear power

plant, 173-191, 193
Pacific Marine Station, Dillon

Beach, 159-163, 166-171, 194,

204-206, 229
Painter, Theophilus, 79
paleoecology, 119, 133, 167
Papenfuss, George, 161, 181
Peltier, Jason, 245
Pesonen, David, 44, 183, 188
Pesonen, Everett, 44-45, 188
Peterson, Carl G.J., 91
Port Aransas, 80, 151-152. See

also University of Texas.
Prichard, Don, 232, 255, 270
pycnogonids

characteristics of, 76, 85, 128,
130, 208-209

interest in, 73, 75, 85-86, 127,
130, 170

studies of, 75-76, 102, 115,
129-131, 204-205, 211-213

Racanelli, John A., 243-244
Reber plan for San Francisco Bay,

256

research and publications, Joel
Hedgpeth, 73-76, 79-80, 90-93,
96-99, 102, 104-106, 109-120,
122, 127, 129-130, 133, 179-180,
204-205, 207-210, 212-213, 216-

220, 231, 235-236, 244-247, 252-

253, 256
Revelle, Roger, 133, 135, 142-143,

145-149, 172

Reynolds, Malvina, 180-181
Ricketts, Ed, 92-97, 99, 104-111,

113, 120-125, 129, 157, 227-229
Robilliard, Gordon, 219
Rowland, Ed, 50
Russian scientists, 137-141, 170,

173, 221, 236, 250

Salmon preservation studies, 73-

74, 114, 244-246
Sampson, Arthur W. , 64
San Francisco Bay, oyster

distribution in S.F. Bay and
Delta, 232, 260-261

scientific research on, 238-243

striped bass population, 262-264

tidal hydrography, 255-256

tule hypothesis, 257-260
San Francisco Bay-Delta

environmental issues, 231-273

passim

Sauer, Carl, 82
Schmitt, Karl Patterson, 143
Schmitt, Waldo, 71, 73, 129
Schopf, Thomas, 166, 169
Schramm, Fred, 130
scientists and public policy, 265-

268

Scott, Tom, 198-199
Scripps Institution of

Oceanography, 119-120, 135, 142-

143, 145-147, 150, 172-173, 231
sea spiders. See pycnogonids
Shasta Dam environmental impact

studies, 73-74, 114
Shubel report on S.F. Bay

environmental problems, 270
Singer, Charles, 70
Sloan, Doris, 270-272
Smith, Felix, 247-248
Smith, Ralph, 164-165
Society for the Prevention of

Progress, 113-117
Stanford University, 110, 240

329

Stanford University Press, 110,

125

Steinbeck, Carol, 94-95, 228
Steinbeck, John, 18, 94-95, 104,

106-110, 112, 227-228
"Steinbeck and the Sea"

conference, 108-110, 112
Steinberg, Joan, 163, 165
Stephenson, T.A. , 131
Stewart, George, 67-68
Stock, Jan, 129-130
Sutton, Jim, 261

Texas Game Fish and Oyster

Commission, 74, 80, 94, 115,

151, 235, 252-253
Thorson, Gunnar, 91
Tolmazin, David, 250
Tomales Bay, 169-170
Treatise on Marine Ecology and

Paleoecology, 131-137, 141-149,

165, 236
Trinity River, 246

United States Bureau of

Reclamation, 246, 248
United States Fish and Wildlife

Service, 248
United States Geological Survey,

133, 238-239, 241
United States Office of Naval

Intelligence, 137-141
University of California, Berkeley

evaluation of students and

faculty, 65-68, 70-72, 77-79,
82, 87-88, 102, 181-186, 240,
266-267, 270-272

marine studies, 157, 163, 240,

255, 270-272
University of Pacific, 149, 157,

161-162, 170-171, 176, 193-194,

196, 204-206
University of Texas, 80-82, 151-

154

Vaughan, Thomas Wayland, 133-134
Warren, Earl, 44

water issues and studies

See environmentalists vs .
agribusiness, San Francisco
Bay-Delta environmental
issues, Shasta Dam
environmental impact studies

Windscale, England, nuclear

incident, 174, 176-177
Wohlschlag, Curly, 269-270
Wood, Charles Erskine Scott, 233
Wright, Sir Charles, 220-221

Yaquina Biological Laboratory,
196-203, 225. See also Marine
Science Center, Oregon State
University

Zenkevitch, L.A., 137, 236

ANN LAGE

B.A., and M.A. , in History, University of
California, Berkeley.

Postgraduate studies, University of
California, Berkeley, American history and
education.

Chairman, Sierra Club History Committee, 1978-1986;
oral history coordinator, 1974-present; Chairman,
Sierra Club Library Committee, 1993-present.

Interviewer/Editor, Regional Oral History
Office, in the fields of natural resources
and the environment, university history,
California political history, 1976-present.

Principal Editor, assistant office head, Regional
Oral History Office, 1994-present.

I 048 75

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Full text of "Marine bioligist and environmentalist : oral history transcript : pycnogonids, progress, and preserving bays, salmon, and other living things / 1996"

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