Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work

Ch. 14: Consulting Forester (1932-1933)

14 Consulting Forester (1932- 1933) THE R E WAS scarce demand for any sort of work in the spring of 1932, much less for that of a consulting forester. The Depression held Madison, a small city with its economic base in agriculture, education, government, and small businesses, in a dull grip of stagnation. At the government's end of State Street, politicians tried to legislate a way out of the crisis; at the university's end, economists tried to theorize a way out. In the Greenbush, the concentration of ethnic neighborhoods on the south side of town, old world resourcefulness carried the city's newer immigrants through the hard times. At hobo camps along the shores of Monona and Waubesa, the dispossessed waited for trains to leave the downtown yards, eastbound to Chicago, westbound to the switches at St. Paul, and thence to points west. Leopold's credentials, impressive though they were, would not bring him work for some months to come. Few states, industries, private groups, or individuals had dollars to spend on such luxuries as conservation. Undeterred , Leopold returned to work on Game Management. In May, he began to revise the manuscript, hoping to ship it off to Scribner's by the end of the summer. Meanwhile, he had to provide for a family. He had invested an inheritance of $7,000 that his father had left him, and he still held stock in the Leopold Desk Company. Returns on these, plus whatever savings he and Estella had accumulated, were enough to see them through the toughest months, though not without sacrifices. They always managed to find eight dollars per week to keep Ida and later Martha, their live-in maids, employed. Neither Aldo nor Estella, it seems, considered turning to their families. In fact, Clara Leopold had lost her financial security when the banks collapsed. Only quick manipulation of her accounts by her children kept the remnants of the Starker estate intact. Paul Errington later described this period of personal crisis, when Leo- WISCONSIN pold was "without income for months during 1932 and 1933 in the worst of the Depression. He took this punishment most creditably, kept up the standard of living of his family as well as circumstances allowed, worked on the manuscript of Game Management, and made plans with courage and realism. He was offered desirable positions, including a professorship at a prominent state college, but those would have entailed moving his home from Madison, which he was reluctant to do."l Leopold wanted to stay in Wisconsin for several reasons, chief among them the fact that both Starker and Luna were now attending the university , and extra room and board costs would have been prohibitive. The boys had inherited their mother's handsome Spanish features and their father's sharpness of mind and love of the outdoors. The similarities ended there. Starker and Luna were two quite different young men. Easygoing and cheerful, Starker had a ready sense of humor and his father's sartorial tastes. He was sixteen when he enrolled at the university in 1929. Luna was more serious, no less spirited or tastefully dressed than Starker, but tremendously self-disciplined, especially when it came to his studies. Luna entered the university prior to his fifteenth birthday, aiming at first for a career in civil engineering, but ultimately following a natural interest in geology. Aldo and Estella did not push the children into any particular field. In fact, Aldo seems to have made a conscious effort to avoid instilling biases in them. All the children eventually gravitated toward personal and professional involvement in the natural sciences, but they were not led there blindfolded. If Aldo did lead them, it was not through outright coercion, but through the subtler arts of campground and dinner table conversation . "He treated us with considerable dignity," Starker recalled. "I suppose that had as much as anything else to do with our being so intensely interested in what he had to say."2 Always an eager listener, Aldo inevitably began conversations by asking the children what they thought about this or that. At the dinner table, he would routinely inquire of each of the five in turn, "What happened today in your life that was interesting?" The discussions veered unpredictably into the subject of the day- boats, horses, books, archery, history, birds. If Aldo did not prod the children along, neither did he express undue worry about their difficulties. Estella was the family worrier. Aldo simply assumed that...