John Roscoe Hendrickson Biography
A daughter's memories

At Dad's memorial service in Tucson last September, my brother Mark brought Peggy Turk-Boyer over to me and said "This is Peggy, she wants us to write a biography of Dad for their newsletter and I told her you would be the best one to do it since you know many of the people Dad worked with". Yikes. Peggy said, "Don't worry, I don't need it till the beginning of next year." It is now January 4th , 2003. Yikes. There is no way I can do this on my own, so I've recruited my family and borrowed extensively from the wonderful JRH stories and tributes that the family has received from Dad's colleagues and students. To all of you, the family sends our heartfelt thanks. To Dad, you were always our hero.

I have a family tree that Dad put together after his youngest grandchild, my son Daniel, was born. It shows that his maternal grandparents were both born in the United States, their forebears having emigrated from Europe before the Revolutionary War. His paternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway who had settled in Minnesota. His father, Ludwig (or Louie) Ole Hendrickson, met and married Hattie Claire Dean of Tipton, Iowa. They moved to Iowa where Louie worked in the Dean family hardware store in Tipton, a small town (pop. 2,998) to the NE of Iowa City -- the "Big City" of my Dad's childhood. The couple had two sons, Roger Dean and John Roscoe -- Dad always told us that the R of JRH stood for Rascal. By the age of 12 Dad had lost both parents and was raised, in Tipton, by his maternal uncle, Archie Dean, a dentist, and his wife Vivian Harris, "Aunt Polly". Roger, 6 years older, had already been living and working in Minnesota by that time.

Dad's interest in animals surfaced early it seems, as there are pictures of him in the family album with a variety of pets that he brought home from his boyhood ramblings. There is a photo with him holding a groundhog, another with an opossum. A third photo shows him with a butterfly net and a fourth, with a minnow trap. He also loved to fish. His brother, Roger, remembers getting reports from Tipton that John seldom came home from school without a frog or a bug in his pocket.

Moving to Tucson

Dad was a bright student, and was awarded a little gold Honor Society pin upon his graduation from high school. He skipped his graduation ceremony however, and set out West with a friend who was driving to a job in California. Dad's choice of university was most influenced by a yearning for adventure; Tucson, Arizona, seemed adventurous to a boy from the plains of Iowa. So he went West with much enthusiasm but little money and arrived in Tucson at the age of 18 with $18 in his pocket. He held a variety of jobs to pay his way through college and was not squeamish about where he slept, as long as it was free. He told us kids that he worked in a mortuary at one point, and to save money on rent he slept there at night. Sometimes, for lark, he slept in one of the coffins. I believe it.

He spent the summer of 1943 as a fire guard in the Rincon Mountains near Tucson. Part of the time he patrolled on horseback and his stories of his crafty old horse, Gin Rickey, were always a favorite with me. On other occasions he manned tall steel lookout towers scanning hundreds of acres, searching for smoke. During one large fire in June, he was stationed in one of these towers to report on the progress and direction of the blaze. This experience gave him material for one of his very first publications: a note to The Condor on the behavior of birds during a forest fire. He wrote: "My duties required a continuous watch but offered opportunities between reports and fire observations to notice the reactions of several species of birds." Observing. Dad was always observing. It must have been this particular summer job that left its mark on Dad, as it was during a forest fire that he was caught in a crown-out, and the intense heat, though not leaving scars, thinned his hair permanently - or at least that's what he always told us.

Berkeley and WWII

Dad got two very important things from the U of A: his Bachelor of Science Degree in Zoology (with Distinction) in 1944, and his future wife, Lupe Perez of Sonora, Arizona, youngest daughter of Beatriz Covarrubias and Isidoro Perez. He was her T.A. in General Zoology. With these two prizes attained, he made plans to pursue a graduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley, but the world was at war, and after only one semester, he joined the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps in 1945. His naval career was short and uneventful. His rank was Pharmacist's Mate Third Class, his ship never left port, and he spent his days in the pathology lab, helping with autopsies and preparing histology slides.

Things got a little more exciting when he came down with an attack of acute appendicitis. His curiosity, undaunted by the pain, led to his convincing his surgeon to do the appendectomy under spinal anesthesia so Dad could be conscious and observe the procedure by means of mirrors. However, the nurse injected the spinal block at the wrong level and he felt every cut the surgeon made and almost rose off the table. The surgeon did not believe him the first time he made objection, but with the second cut Dad almost climbed off the table, so they put him out. Much to his disgust, he missed his opportunity to see his own internal organs.

In June of 1946, after Lupe's graduation from the U of A, they married. In their wedding picture, Dad is wearing his sailor suit, he has hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Mom is beautiful and tiny in her size 0 wedding dress, black curly hair and dark eyes. After the ceremony and a very short reception they went directly to Long Beach, back to his duty post, where Dad, in unmilitary fashion, routinely went AWOL at night, joined the line on board ship the next morning to receive military justice, and was yanked out of line every time by his supervising officer to get back to doing a job that no one else on board could do - or at least that's what he always told us.

In November of 1946 Dad was honorably discharged and returned to Berkeley to pick up his studies where he had left off. He had the very good fortune to receive his Masters Degree (1949) and PhD (1951) under the guidance of the distinguished herpetologist, Robert Stebbins. In the course of his graduate studies Dad traveled up and down the west coast of the U.S. and Mexico, becoming an authority on the ecology and systematics of the lungless salamanders of the genus Batrachoceps, the subject of his dissertation. His first major international field trip took place in 1950 when Dr. Stebbins invited Dad to join him on a collecting trip to the Magdalena Valley of Colombia in South America. They sampled the reptiles and amphibians of 8 different localities over 25 days. Reading the published results of the amphibians collected on the trip, it is easy to see Dr. Stebbins' influence on his student's methods and degree of detail in his observations.

Moving to Singapore

Meanwhile, on the home front, daughters Sharon and Leslie had made their appearances. So here he was, it was 1951, he was a green PhD, father of two, soon to be three, where would he go next? Mom recently told us the story of how their move to Southeast Asia came about. Dad came home one day with a copy of a notice from the British journal, "Nature", advertising teaching positions in a number of British colonial universities, including Singapore. Dad showed this to Mom and said with great yearning, "I've seen the New World tropics, I would dearly love to see the Old World tropics. How about it Lupe, shall we go?" Mom was pregnant with their third child (Mark), Dad would have to go on ahead of her and leave her to travel across the world with three kids, one a new-born, so what did she say? "OK" - or at least that's what she told us.

Thus, Dad's first academic position was with the University of Malaya in the British colony of Singapore. This is where he began his explorations of jungles and rivers, oceans and off-shore islands, where he began amassing a huge collection of reptiles and amphibians as well as stories that would fascinate and repulse his family and students for the rest of his life, and where he first became fascinated with sea turtles. He still brought animals home and he filled his lab with them. We had frogs in the bathtubs, fruit bat carcasses in the freezer, orphaned otter pups suckled by our dog, a tiger in our garage on its way to the London Zoo and one day he came with a monkey for my sister. He kept a binturong in his lab and was the first to breed tree shrews in captivity. Through the 50's he had the time of his life traveling, exploring, learning, teaching. Everything interested him and when offered the opportunity to study and report on the green sea turtle populations of the area, he went for it.

Dad was a keen observer of nature, a true classical field biologist. Dr. David Owens, a JRH graduate student from Arizona says that to this day he still tells his own students that if they want to study one paper to help them understand both sea turtles and scientific field research methods, then Dad's "The Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas (Linn) in Malaya and Sarawak" is required reading. This paper includes extensive field notes on nesting and mating behavior, clutch development, hatchling dispersal, predation, breeding intervals, tagging and thermal biology, just to list a few. It also documents and shows great sensitivity to local Muslim cultural practices as they relate to conservation and utilization of "the most valuable reptile in the world" as JRH later quoted Archie Carr from the book "Handbook of Turtles". Dad's work was published in 1958. By that time the family had grown by one: I was born in 1954. I can barely remember, but the others clearly recall going to the turtle nesting beaches, seeing the leatheries and greens haul out at night, dig their holes and lay their eggs. We remember seeing the rows and rows of chicken wire enclosures erected around the eggs once they had been dug up, transported and reburied in a protected area of the beach. We remember seeing the little turtles flailing their flippers, frantically trying to get past the chicken wire to get to the water. We helped load them into buckets, and took them out in boats past the reef to release them into the ocean beyond the reach of their beach and near-shore predators. My sisters even remember riding on the females as they lumbered back down the beach to the water.

Dad's work on the Green Turtle in Malaya and Sarawak was the first truly comprehensive investigation on any population of sea turtle. Many scientists in other parts of the world later used these same thorough methods to understand the overall ecology of a species. With this study, Dad brought rigorous science to the field of conservation. He felt that in order to conserve a species you not only had to know the animal, but you had to understand its role in its ecological community. In this case, the ecological community of the Green Sea Turtle included man in a big way. Therefore, his investigation included the role people played in this particular part of the world -- their dependence on the turtle egg for protein rather than the meat due to prohibitions against killing adults in the largely Muslim population, the economic importance of the turtle egg industry to the local governments, their traditional and more recent conservation practices. He showed that human exploitation of eggs, even in numbers approaching 100% removal of all eggs laid, as was the practice in Malaya and Sarawak, was far less detrimental to maintaining healthy population numbers than the taking of adult animals as occurred in other parts of the world. He therefore advocated the continued focus on harvesting eggs rather than meat, coupled with an increase in the numbers of eggs transferred to hatcheries for later release of the young. His study brought to light several basic strategies that could be employed to boost both the harvest and the numbers of hatchlings released to ensure species survival: modifications of certain beaches to increase the area of suitable nesting sand, enlargement of the hatchery areas, predator control and avoidance, continued tagging programs to learn more about the Green Turtle's reproductive life span, and, even at this early date, he had some remarks on sea turtle captive culture.

Moving to Kuala Lumpur

When the Federation of Malay States (Malaya) established its own university in Kuala Lumpur, Dad was appointed first Professor and Head of Department of Zoology. His first responsibility was to plan and oversee construction of the building that would house his new Department. He took up this position in 1959, and the family followed months later after housing became available.

As Head of Department, Dad was in a position to find funding and international collaborators, allowing him to forge ahead on several projects about which he and his students were enthusiastic. He continued his work with sea turtles, sounding the alarm in 1961 that the Malayan population of the Leatherback Sea Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), the largest known concentration left in the world, may be the last stand for that species unless serious conservation measures were taken forthwith. He advocated the immediate inauguration of a hatchery program to ensure that at least some young turtles continued to be added to the population each year. To that end, he enlisted the help of the Malayan Nature Society, the government of the state of Trengganu, the licensed turtle egg collectors, and the Eastern Mining and Metals Company in starting the first-ever Leatherback hatchery.

In other endeavors, he and his students sampled high canopy, deep jungle reptiles and amphibians along with American entomologists sampling insects as forest giants were felled by a local mining company. They also carried out biological surveys of various areas of the mainland and off-shore islands in a continuing effort to work out the systematics and ecology of Malayan reptiles and amphibians. These studies resulted in the descriptions of Leptobrachium nigrops, a pelobatid frog from Singapore and Malaya (with P. Y. Berry), and of Ansonia tiomanica, a small toad from the island of Pulau Tioman.

Moving to Hawaii

We left Malaya in 1963, shortly before it became the Federation of Malaysia. Dad had been offered and had accepted the position of Vice Chancellor for Student Interchange at the East-West Center, at the University of Hawaii. This offer was made when the East-West Center was still in the planning stage and caught his imagination as a great unifying force in the Pacific Rim area. He held this administrative post for four years before admitting to himself that he really missed the world of academics and research. He had kept his hand in research, becoming an associate of the Bishop Museum and overseeing their herpetology collection, but he missed the active participation in science. His next move was to return to mariculture development as the Director of the Oceanic Institute in Waimanalo, Hawaii. During his two years at OI he worked on, among other things, the nutritional requirements, growth rates and diseases of captive sea turtles (Green and Leatherback) and the artificial induction of spawning in the Striped Mullet (Mugil cephalus). With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he studied shark migration patterns in an effort to monitor and possibly predict when sharks could be expected off hotel and resort beaches.

Hawaii didn't provide the same scope for wildlife as Malaya but Dad managed to find cool things to bring home: a short-eared owl with a broken wing that he set successfully, an abandoned tern chick from Rabbit Island that screamed endlessly for live fish, a Jackson's Chameleon from his pal at the zoo for which he devised an ingenious fly trap to feed its bottomless pit (that one was returned to the zoo after a time: too high maintenance).

Returning to Tucson

Dad enjoyed the return to hands-on science but the position at OI was still heavily administrative. He missed teaching. So, in 1969, my parents moved again, taking my brother and me, the only two left at home, to their old home, Tucson, where Dad returned to the University of Arizona as Professor in the Department of Biology, which later became the Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

The Department's marine biology program became Dad's baby. Allison/Peggy need to fill in here. I remember Dad talking about teaching the marine biology 101 class, and that it was very popular with the non-science majors. He gave me a copy of one of the books he used for the class - a coloring book! He took classes to the marine lab at Puerto Peñasco where they learned to use keys to identify marine invertebrates and at the end of the course they took the lab finals outside on the beach passing samples around a big circle (Allison told me that). I remember his working on artificial spawning and captive rearing of the Totoaba. His work with Chris Flanagan led to the Totoaba being the first marine fish placed on the endangered species list by the U.S. government, and to the Mexican government banning the fishery.

Saving the Mexican Sea Turtles

In 1972, in the face of an alarming crash in the sea turtle populations in Mexican waters due to unrestricted hunting of adults and harvesting of eggs, the Mexican government adopted strict legislation to restrict the taking of sea turtles. No permits allowing the legal taking of turtles or eggs were issued that year, and it was feared that poaching, which was becoming increasingly more aggressive, would seriously hamper the operations of the fledgling conservation camps. In particular, a young Mexican biologist named Rene Marquez was struggling in the early 1970s to obtain additional protection for the beach at Rancho Nuevo, Tamaulipas, Mexico where the remnant population of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles was still nesting.

The Mexican National Institute of Fisheries was struggling with an insufficient budget and although they had the armed marines to send in, they were not able to provide the four wheel drive vehicles necessary to get the men and supplies into the camps. Dad approached the Defenders of Wildlife; that organization quickly rallied to the cause, and funds were found for the purchase of two Jeeps, one of which was sent to Rancho Nuevo on the western Gulf of Mexico and the other to a beach at Tlacoyunque, Guerrero on the Pacific coast. At both sites these vehicles made the difference both in protecting the adult females by distributing the armed marines along the beaches, and in allowing large numbers of freshly laid eggs to be transported in timely fashion to the hatcheries.

In 1973 Dad described this tremendous effort in a popular article, "In Defense of Mexican Sea Turtles", which appeared in Defenders of Wildlife News. He was able to report that "on the Tamaulipas coast with the help of the Defenders' jeeps, 310 nests of the severely endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle were transplanted to hatcheries and about 13,000 baby turtles hatched out to crawl down the beach and enter the sea. It is not possible to estimate how many adult females lived to nest again in future years because of the armed guards who stopped their slaughter on the beaches."

This article was surely important in convincing The U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service, with the help of Archie Carr, to get the U.S. involved in an elaborate scheme to bring this species back from the brink of extinction. In 1978 the joint conservation venture between Mexico, Texas, the U.S. National Park Service, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally got underway with thorough beach protection, and experiments in head starting and artificial imprinting as their thrusts. Today, the international Kemp's Ridley program is a huge success, and is seen as one of the most successful of all sea turtle programs. There were more than 6000 nests last summer, up from a low of about 1000 in 1985.

During the '60s and '70s, many turtle biologists were becoming alarmed at the precipitous declines in numbers of many of the world's sea turtle populations. Captive culture and captive breeding of sea turtles were thought by some to be essential strategies for saving these over-harvested species. Dad had already prepared a working paper on sea turtle captive nutrition for the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group on which he served from 1968-1978, so when a group of American and English mariculture businessmen asked him if he could help with some of their nutrition and reproduction problems, he was quick to agree, with the understanding that he was not interested in their money but in the use of their facilities. In return for Dad's help, they agreed to provide animals and tanks for his graduate students' projects. The company was then called Mariculture Ltd. and their business was raising the Green Sea Turtle in the Cayman Islands. With grants from several organizations including the Janss Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Science Foundation, Dad obtained the funding for his students to study sea turtle nutrition (J. Wood) and reproduction (D. Owens) using the facilities at the Cayman Island turtle farm.

In so doing, Dad knowingly stepped into the middle of a brewing controversy over how best to save the sea turtle: total bans on turtle use in any form, ranching, or farming. Dad took the somewhat unpopular stand that farming this valuable animal would probably benefit the species more in the end as humans would never stop using them - and indeed, why should they? - so it would be both a benefit to man and turtle if humans raised their own stocks for consumption. Dad was not a sentimental conservationist, he was a practical one. All through his career he would emphasize that conservation strategies should take into account that man used all resources available to him, and there was no reason why he shouldn't do so as long as it was done in a responsible, sustainable fashion. If he had no patience with ignorant and irresponsible use of earth's resources, neither did he have any patience with emotional and impractical conservationism. Of Dad's stand on this subject, his former student, Dr. Jim Wood, wrote to him: "As a graduate student I respected you for your willingness to take an unpopular stand concerning the possibility of wise use of sea turtles by humans. After I got out into the real word, I realized this took more courage than I had imagined."

In 1979 Dad was invited to prepare a general comparison of sea turtle life history strategies for a symposium at the American Society of Zoologists' meeting in Tampa, Florida. Despite his taking issue with the assigned term "strategy" for his paper, this publication is probably his second most cited work, as many turtle students have found inspiration in his ideas and conclusions for research directions of their own. In particular, his provocative suggestion that oceanographic changes in the Gulf of Mexico during the Pliocene might have resulted in a "gigantic leak" of hatchling Kemp's Ridleys into the Atlantic Gyre caused a tremendous stir. He questioned, with tongue in cheek, if the hundreds of immature Ridleys seen on the Atlantic coasts of the U.S. and Europe were possibly "waifs, and reproductively speaking, "dead" to the species?". Several turtle students took issue with this suggestion and only a few years ago someone finally proved him wrong. He was delighted. Another thing Dave Owens tells his students is that if they cannot think of a project, they should read Hendrickson's publications, as they are chock full of observations that need investigating and ideas that still need testing.

Tagging the Turtles

After 30 years of turtle work, Dad and other turtle students were still stumped on some very basic questions of sea turtle biology: the often postulated but never proven hypothesis that sea turtles "imprint" on their natal beach and return there to nest as adults; growth rates and maturation time in the wild; and the distributions of subadult populations relative to their beaches of origin. Ambitious tagging programs had returned some data regarding re-nesting activities and migrations of adult turtles, but no tag devised to date - externally applied metal tags, mutilation markings, branding, magnet implants, radioactive tags - none of these methods, had been successful in marking a 20-30 g hatchling and be detectable for identification years later after it might weigh as much as 100 kg. Dad had introduced the use of the now-standard monel metal tag in his investigations on the Green Sea Turtles in Sarawak and Malaya, and as far back as 1969 he was thinking about and looking for a "living tag". By 1980, he had come up with an ingenious idea: to graft plugs of tissue from the more lightly pigmented plastron to the darker carapace and vice versa, providing, if successful, a living, growing mark of the animals own tissue that would be readily visible and would last throughout its life.

During the summer of 1980, with grants from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and with Mom for the first time as his official partner in the investigation, he tried out his idea on several batches of turtle hatchlings. Together, Mom and Dad carried out a series of elegantly simple experiments on four groups of turtles with two hundred or more individuals each: Chelonia mydas in Grand Cayman Island, Caretta caretta in Miami, Florida, Lepidochelys kempi in Galveston, Texas, and C. mydas in Honolulu, Hawaii. Results from this initial grafting program were most encouraging, with up to 90% grafting success depending on the method used. Then it became a case of waiting and watching for reports of living tag turtles to surface. Meanwhile, others carried on yearly marking programs using the Hendrickson living tag technique coupled in some cases with headstarting (captive rearing for a varying period of time before releasing) and imprinting (exposing a hatchling to the sand and water from a specific beach).

The first report that I can find of a living tag recapture was in 1982. A young Kemp's Ridley was found alive and in good condition on a beach near its release site 289 days after its release into the Gulf of Mexico (T. Wibbels, Marine Turtle Newsletter No. 24, March 1983, p. 16-17). The graft on the carapace was readily visible, and a monel tag verified its identity: it was one of the original experimental turtles grafted in August of 1980. Its increase in weight and size were documented, adding valuable growth data to our knowledge bank, exactly what the living tag was intended to do. Mature, nesting, adult Kemp's Ridleys with living tags have been recorded since 1998 on the Texas coast, and in the Cayman Islands, Green Turtles with living tags were recorded nesting for the first time in 2002. Actual maturation times for these animals are now known by the simple fact that the age of the turtle and the date they were grafted with a living tag is documented.

In 1981, shortly after concluding their living tag experiments, Mom and Dad collaborated again, this time going to Australia to prove once and for all that the Australian Flatback sea turtle, then known as Chelonia depressa - but suspected by several workers to deserve separate generic status - was indeed a different animal. They collected mature specimens, made notes on habitat and diet, and together with Dr. Rainer Zangerl published "A Redescription of the Australian Flatback Sea Turtle, Natator depressus". I had the privilege of preparing the skeletons for examination by Dr. Zangerl, as by that time I was working at the Bishop Museum where the specimens were deposited. Published in 1988, at the same time as an article by Dr. Colin Limpus and colleagues, the two excellent pieces of scholarship used very different data sets to prove together and convincingly that the Flatback is indeed a distinct genus of sea turtle. This was Dad's last major publication, and in 1987, he retired from the University of Arizona. Upon his retirement he gave his extensive collection of sea turtle books and papers - approximately 3,000 items, neatly cataloged by Mom - to the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research at the University of Florida.

John Hendrickson's Legacy

John Hendrickson's legacy to the world is knowledge. He wanted to know about life on earth, especially the amphibians and reptiles which fascinated him. He studied them and wrote about his findings and taught so that others would know. When he became aware of species in danger of extinction and he was in a position to do something about it, he did. The Green Turtles of Malaya and Sarawak, the Leatherbacks of Malaya, the Totoaba of the Gulf of California, the Kemp's Ridley of the Gulf of Mexico: he studied them, he shared his knowledge, he got in there and tagged, started hatcheries, aided in the development of captive breeding, advised governments, trained a next generation of scientists.

His main concern was that whole species of animals were in danger of being lost forever due to human interference. His second was that humans were damaging their own most valuable food resources. Of the Totoaba, he wrote "...each separate thing which is bad for the fish seems to be caused by something people are doing. As members of the human race, this concerns me personally and it concerns each of you personally. First of all, we have a responsibility not to cause the total disappearance of any living creature. Even from a purely selfish point of view, that is bad business because we can never know how the disappearance of another species might cause problems for ourselves...almost everything connects up eventually, and you and I and everyone else have some effect on problems like this matter of the totoaba, just by living." He wrote this in 1979 in an article in Oceans magazine entitled "Totoaba: Sacrifice in the Gulf of California - Letter to my Grandchildren." He ends his letter by saying to us all, "I want you to know that I cared and did my best to save [them]..." He has passed on his mantle. It's now up to us.

Life Travels in Circles

Life, like some stories, sometimes travels in circles. My brother was right about one thing, in the course of my own career, I have come into contact with many of Dad's colleagues. I never set out to follow in my father's footsteps. I entered university to major in languages so I could be an interpreter for the UN. Trouble was, I found that Biology was just so fascinating. I changed my major. I remember telling my favorite professor that I wanted to work in a museum, maybe the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, where my father had been an associate and where his collections of SE Asian herps had been deposited. I, however, was more interested in birds. I decided to try graduate school at the University of Hawaii and become an ornithologist. Dad said I reminded him of himself at the same age.

Unlike Dad, I soon became discouraged and dropped out to find a job. I landed one right away...at the Bishop Museum. It was in the Anthropology Dept. but I started volunteering a few hours a week for the curator of the vertebrate collection, Alan Ziegler...who knew my Dad. They had been at Berkeley at the same time. Alan took great pleasure in showing me the shelves and shelves of specimens that bore my father's labels. I'd had no idea. A year later, Alan got funding to hire an assistant. I don't think he even considered hiring anyone else. He told me he was grateful to have a chance to pass on a favor: Dad had been instrumental in getting Alan his job at the museum.

So I began my museum career, mentored by my father's contemporary, cataloging and labeling my father's huge collection of herps from SE Asia, meeting and corresponding with his colleagues from Berkeley (Dick Zweifel to whom I had been sending loans of frog specimens for years before he discovered at a Berkeley reunion that I was the daughter of his former classmate); from Malaya and Singapore ("...you mean John Hendrickson, the frog man?"); from Hawaii and Arizona. Now there is a new generation of JRH connections: younger researchers who have read Dad's publications and write to me for loans of his specimens. Life sometimes travels in circles - or at least that's what I think.

Addendum

Dad was actually in Tipton, Iowa exactly one year before he died. My older son, Matthew, was entering his first year at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 2001. Dad flew up there to meet Matthew and his father and took them to Tipton to show them the "Old Dean House" that his great, great, grandmother Dean built with the help of her 5 sons sometime before the end of the Civil War. He also found the houses of several other Dean relatives, including the house he lived in with his Uncle Archie and Aunt Polly. He had come full circle.

- by Carla Kishinami