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Introduction
- University of California Press
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I. Early Writings, Between Pacific Tides, 1923–1939 Edward F. Ricketts’s passion for zoology began when he was a child in urban Chicago during the first years of the twentieth century, well before he was a fledgling collector on the shores of Monterey Bay in California in the 1920s. In a letter, he recalls, “At the age of six, I was ruined for any ordinary activities when an uncle who should have known better gave me some natural history curios and an old zoology textbook. Here I saw for the first time those magic and incorrect words ‘coral insects ’” (to Harcourt, Brace, and Company).1 In her unpublished notebook , Ricketts’s sister, Frances, emphasizes her brother’s early attractions to science, noting he was “interested in zoology from birth” (2). Both statements may be exaggerations, but there is little doubt that Ricketts developed an early and enduring fascination with marine animals . When he was ten years old, his family moved from Chicago to Mitchell, South Dakota, after his father, Abbott Ricketts, accepted work as a traveling salesman-auditor. Frances recalls that the children adopted rural South Dakota, but their mother, Alice, preferred city life, and so the family returned to Chicago after one year. Frances writes, “But for that year we children had the time of our lives, . . . were outdoors constantly, and grew healthy and noisy. During this year Ed had many interests. He raised pigeons, collected butterflies and birds’ eggs and enjoyed every aspect of small town life” (4–5). Introduction 1 The pleasures and curiosities he discovered during that year in South Dakota stayed with Ricketts for a lifetime, and when he entered Illinois State Normal University in Chicago in the fall of 1915, he began his formal education with three courses in zoology. There is scant information available about Ricketts’s brief stint at the university (a teachers’ college at the time), but it is clear he was dissatisfied with the typical academic routine during 1915–16. He left the university and Chicago in 1916 and headed to the Southwest. He yearned for new people and new places— a restlessness that would spark many of his future travels and expeditions . Working first in El Paso, Texas, as an accountant at the Oak Park Country Club, and in a surveying party in New Mexico, Ricketts seemed content to lay aside his scientific studies, at least temporarily. He was drafted into the army in 1917, to serve just less than one year in the Medical Corps at Camp Grant in Illinois. Enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1919, Ricketts took courses in philosophy, Spanish, and zoology. From the outset, he planned to focus on the sciences. During his first quarter, he studied elementary ethics in the philosophy department, general geology, and evolution and genetics in the zoology department. Despite his intellectual interest in his classes, he was not emotionally committed to academic life. Six months after entering the university, he moved out of his parents’ home and into an apartment with two classmates, Albert E. Galigher and J. Nelson Gowanloch. He soon reduced his studies and began working full-time at the Sinclair Refining Company. But Ricketts grew restless, and he left both school and Chicago again in 1920. In November, he traveled by train to Indianapolis, where he set out on a walking trip across the southeast. Inspired by John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, he trekked through Indiana, Kentucky , North Carolina, and Georgia. He mostly walked alone, though at times he accepted rides and found shelter, food, and company with locals. The account of his trip, “Vagabonding through Dixie,” his first publication, appeared in Travel (November 1925) and documents his experiences in detail. Significantly, much of the essay focuses on Ricketts ’s interactions with local people he met and reveals his affinity for individuals and groups on the fringes of society. In later travelogues and essays, he records his encounters with Indians in Mexico’s Gulf of California and along the outer shores of British Columbia, Canada, as well as his interactions with the local vagrants in Monterey whom he employed throughout the 1930s and 1940s to collect marine specimens for his biological supply house. 2 Introduction [54.164.53.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 08:58 GMT) Figure 1. Inscribed portrait of Edward Ricketts, circa 1910. Courtesy of Ed Ricketts Jr. Ricketts returned to Chicago in early 1921, and the two years he spent there between his walking trip...