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Correspondence [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-01

I decided to post a very personal essay in this time of uncertainty. I doubt that many will find it of interest, but it is my idea of promoting actual writing and contact between like-minded people and it was one way that I was able to stay at least somewhat sane in a difficult time.

In my teenage years I discovered one way I could gain friends (I had virtually none, especially after my father moved us out of the apartment attached to the farm shed near Somerton, Arizona, to the edge of Somerton itself and soon after to Yuma) was through correspondence (yes, with paper and pen and stamped envelopes!) Somehow I picked up the addresses of several other young men in the eastern part of the country as correspondents. I believe that I found them in a junior Audubon publication to which I subscribed. I mostly contacted those who had similar interests to mine. Among my early pen pals was one in Ohio, who unfortunately died in a car accident within a year, but the rest continued for a while. One of my natural history pen pals lived in Jacksonville, Florida and he aspired to become an artist. Unfortunately the whole Jacksonville High School system had lost accreditation at the time and a certificate from there did not mean much. He was trying to get into the Ringling School of Art, and by some of the drawings he sent me, he had talent. I don’t know if he succeeded, as I lost contact.

Another lived in New York City and he was caught up with keeping live arthropods (sometimes with the opposition of his mother!) Many years later I met him several times at invertebrate conferences. He had parlayed his interest in keeping live arthropods into a career in designing enclosures for insect zoos!

In 1961 I had the gall to write to Alice Gray of the American Museum of Natural History (See: www.amnh.org/...). I was just an amateur. College would be five more years in the future, and at that time quite unlikely. Despite that, Ms. Gray was very helpful and courteous. I asked if she knew of anybody I could write to in regard to insects, and as a side note I added “jumping spiders”, as I had seen a male of Phidippus apacheanus in the Yuma desert and was entranced by this spider with bright red and orange hairs on the dorsum and it was black ventrally and had black legs, along with metallic green chelicerae! She wrote back that she knew of a young man, who bothered W. J. Gertsch, the curator of Arachnida, all the time with questions about these fantastic spiders. This started a correspondence that has continued to this day! He also got me in touch with a friend of his and that contact has continued as well. Sixty-four years! I’ve met both in person and with my first contact’s friend I co-authored several papers and a book chapter!

My association with the American Museum of Natural History continued throughout my professional career, with Dr. Gertsch becoming an ex-officio member of my M.S. committee at the University of Arizona. I borrowed many specimens from them for revisionary work. In the process I also got to know later curators and became a trusted unofficial associate. Interestingly, I have never been to the AMNH, but they covered my expenses for a expedition to Big Bend and I was good friends with the director of their Southwest Research Station in the Chiricahuas (also an ex-officio member of my M.S. committee) and co-taught a field course in spider identification there.

However that was all in the future. During my early years as an amateur naturalist I eventually started to pick up contacts outside of the U.S.- Canada, Australia, and Malaysia. All of these were male, in part because in my teenage years my mother was dead set against my ever contacting girls (she quickly put a stop to my one correspondence with three girls in Brazil!), and in part because then there were few females involved in such activities.

My Australian correspondent worried me considerably. When we first started corresponding in 1967 he was living in Hobart, Tasmania, and was just recovering from the Black Tuesday wildfires (See: en.wikipedia.org/...). He then moved to Victoria on the mainland, had a motorcycle wreck, got married and suffered a heart attack on his wedding night. He survived and went to work collecting Tiger Snakes for a local venom institute. He had just captured a pair of Sydney Funnel Web Tarantulas, when his letters stopped and I never heard from him again!

Eventually, as I became a professional biologist, I expanded my contacts to New Zealand, Russia, Germany, Poland, and the UK. One of the results of that was that I was invited, under Glasnost, to submit a review paper on jumping spider behavior to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Siberian Journal of Zoology. At that time I had a correspondent in New Zealand who was one of the world’s authorities on the subject and so I demurred, unless I could co-author with him. All finally agreed and we began the laborious process of mailing manuscript versions from New Mexico to New Zealand and back, and finally to the USSR to have it translated into Russian. At this point my co-author realized that almost nobody would read the article in Russian and we finally republished, with the editor’s approval, in a British journal. In a really weird turn of events, that paper became the most cited of any publications of either one of us! To this day I may well be the only member of my department who has published in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately my correspondent has sided with Putin in the war with Ukraine and I am no longer in contact with him.

I do think that there is something special in putting pen to paper in cursive, even though most of my later correspondence was first with a typewriter and now with email. The invention of languages, and then writing to express those languages, and of being able to read that writing is, in my opinion, the greatest invention of all! Libraries and bookstores are sacred to me! Next to the natural world of course, which is, in its own way, a special book for those of us who can read it, at least in part! I am not so arrogant that I think we humans will ever know it all and become as gods, like some seem to think. One should enjoy the journey instead, and the few insights that we are privileged to get, and I have done so, despite a few bumps.

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