“…Man has a natural
right to a beautiful home, a beautiful city, a beautiful world…”
-Thomas Huston
Macbride
***
“Let’s brainstorm,” I say suddenly to Ryan, who sits at my
right behind the front desk. It is a command, more or less. Now that I’m
wearing a freshly-minted Education Staff nametag, I figure I’ve earned the
authority to dictate such orders to a volunteer—never mind the fact that he has
logged twice the number of working hours as I have, and that he would surely
have my job, were he of age.
Ryan looks at me quizzically, mostly because I have outright
interrupted his long-drawn exposition on the proper utilities of Facebook and
Twitter. He was about to set forth in detail why he keeps an account with the
latter site for the purpose of safeguarding his online identity.
“Is this one of your philosophical mind games?”
“No, it’s for this article. I’m stumped on what to say. Why
write about Thomas Macbride?”
“The building we are sitting in is named after him…” says
Ryan, blunt and befuddled as to how I could require further justification.
“But you can pay to have your name on a building,” I reply.
“There’s a name for every building in town. Why does Thomas Macbride deserve an
article? Why should we care?”
“Let’s see. What exactly did he do?”
I am well prepared to answer. After I was assigned to write
on Macbride it only took me a day to hunt down his biography and a day after
that to read it from cover to cover. But Ryan’s question is rhetorical; he intends
to answer himself, so as to illustrate just how simple it should be to spot the
virtues in a university forefather. And so, lifting open the countertop to exit
the desk, he moseys to a display on the opposite side of the lobby where, below
a black and white photograph of the pensive, long-whiskered Macbride, there is
a brief description of the professor’s work.
A minute passes as Ryan reads, and the birds chirp from
above the Pikes Peak diorama.
Then, “I know why we should care about him,” he announces
assuredly, turning from the display.
I am doubtful. “Why?”
“Because he started to get people thinking about the
environment here in Iowa. That’s why we have all of the natural areas that we
have today.”
“He was known as the ‘Father of Iowan Conservation,’” I
admit, entertaining the lad. “Here’s a nice quote of his on the topic: ‘…Man
has a natural right to a beautiful home, a beautiful city, a beautiful world….’”
“Start with that,” Ryan states, reentering the desk and
dropping down the counter with a proud, conclusive thud. “Start the whole thing
with that. The only reason we have places like Lake Macbride and other state
parks is because he started the idea. He was the revolutionary who said, ‘Hey
guys, we’ve got to take care of the land we still have here unless you want to
see it gone.’”
But I am not enticed. Perhaps he was the father of Iowan
conservation, but they do not call Macbride the “Father of Conservation.” He was
not Roosevelt, nor was he Muir. That Macbride was the first president of the
Iowa Park and Forestry Association is not the stuff of an essay. I offer my
rebuttal to Ryan.
“Someone would have done it eventually—out of necessity if
nothing else—because otherwise we would be living in a garbage dump. Does that
really interest you enough to read an article about Macbride? Sure, he had his
merits. But what makes him interesting?”
The point hits home. Ryan stares blankly at the neon green
patches on his Babolat tennis shoes, and groans a soft sound of perplexity.
“I don’t know,” he concedes. “I guess I’d have to know more
about the guy before I could tell you what’s interesting about him.”
He’s reached my same stumbling block.
“Well, let me introduce some facts,” I say. I’m not sure that
an entire encyclopedia of facts could make a long-dead botanist any more
enthralling, but it’s worth a shot. Flipping open my computer, I begin to read
down my list biographical notes. “Thomas Huston Macbride was born in Tennessee,
1848, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His family crossed the river and
settled in the prairie of southeastern Iowa in the early 1850s. Young Thomas
grew up on the prairie and was fascinated by its diverse flora and fauna. He
learned to read by age five, attended local lectures, and was substitute
teaching in Latin by fourteen.”
Ryan interjects. “There you go—a professor, who, at age
fourteen, was already teaching. That’s interesting.”
“Sure, good,” I remark halfheartedly. “Perhaps we can turn
that into something. Keep it coming.”
I continue my monotonous recitation.
“He was schooled in the languages and mathematics, first at
Lenox College in Hopkinton, Iowa, and then at Monmouth College in Illinois. At
Lenox, he was a student of Samuel Calvin, who would grow to be his closest
friend. The two encouraged each other to investigate the natural sciences, a
mutual interest. They would make weekend field trips to surrounding areas to
collect plant specimens and search for fossils. After college, Macbride began his
teaching career, mainly in math and language. But his passion was for natural
world. When Samuel Calvin was chosen to occupy the chair of natural science at
the State University of Iowa, he called upon Macbride to be his assistant.
“Thus, Macbride enters ‘Old Gold’ as Assistant Professor of
Natural Science in charge of Botany in 1878. It is during his time as a
professor that the new Hall of Natural Science—our building—is constructed. One
of the items placed in its 1902 cornerstone was a picture of Macbride, as if
fate had already determined that the structure would one day bear his name. Ironically
though, botany classes would not be held in this building during Macbride’s
life; the university required a library, auditorium, and classrooms for other
disciplines more urgently.”
Ryan lights up. “That’s interesting too—the fact that botany
was rejected from the new building. It just goes to show that Macbride had a
passion for something that people didn’t care much about at the time.”
He is right in this respect. The discoveries of Darwin and
Mendel were just decades young at the close of the nineteenth century, and the
study of natural science was only beginning to gain widespread traction as a
veritable university discipline. I am pleasantly surprised.
“I think that maybe you’re beginning to strike at something
important.”
“That’s right,” he says. Ryan has rebounded, assured once
more in the magnificence of Macbride. “He wanted to teach people that nature mattered, and that’s why he pushed for
conservation of Iowa’s natural resources.”
“He also founded the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory,” I add,
scrolling to find my notes over the facility, “which was and is an ecological
learning center on Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa. Macbride said that ‘Lakeside
Lab is a place where students study nature in nature.’ Add to this the fact
that he initiated the university’s extension program, which was aimed to bring
academic research to the population that made it possible. For Macbride, this
meant lecturing on natural science in small town settings statewide. One year,
he delivered 60 lectures in 50 weeks. He was a celebrity of a speaker—with his
background in the liberal arts, it is said that Macbride’s talks were just as
eloquent as his essays.”
Our coworker Kelsy slips behind the desk, returned from her
lunch, and stands with a confused expression, curious in our conversation at
the mention of Macbride.
“Ryan’s helping me brainstorm for that article,” I explain.
“I’m co-writing it,” he interjects plainly.
“You know about the slime molds, right?” asks Kelsy.
“I’m looking for something a little more moving.”
She shrugs. That Macbride was a scientific leader in the
identification and classification of mold is a fact hardly more interesting
than mold itself. (Granted, his specialty was in myxomycetes, a class of fungi
that look like the plants of an alien planet.)
“We’re trying to discover what it is that’s interesting
about Macbride. Ryan’s been on the trail of this brilliant idea…” Brilliant was a big word let slip. Too
big a word, perhaps. I cringe inwardly for admitting that Ryan is the brains of
our brainstorm. But I have to hand it to the kid, even if he does plan to be
picked up by his mom at the end of his shift. “So far, we’ve traced his
conservational efforts and their enduring impact on Iowa’s modern landscape
back to his passion for natural science education and the prairie roots from
which that passion bloomed.”
Kelsy’s interest is lost in my verbose thesis statement.
Again I continue, turning back to Ryan. “Let’s see if we
can’t squeeze anything more out of these last few facts: Like I mentioned,
Macbride fostered a strong friendship with Samuel Calvin. It is said that ‘one
of the finest things to be said of either man is that he loved the other.’ When
Calvin died in 1911, Macbride seriously contemplated resigning from
professorship, though he opted to remain and would soon go on to serve as
president of the university from 1914 to 1916.”
“You could say that the only reason he stayed in the
profession after Calvin died was because of his love for teaching and natural
history,” Ryan offers. “Make it really sappy.”
I chuckle at his suggestion. But maybe it’s not sappy at
all. Maybe that’s just the truth. Macbride was productive and energetic
educator, and persisted to be into his late age. In 1907, a twenty-year old
worker at the Lakeside Lab resigned because he “just couldn't keep up with
Professor Macbride,” who was then 61 and still actively overseeing the work at
the field station. When the professor finally left the university in 1916, he
kept speaking and writing on botany, conservation and a miscellany of other
topics. His last article was published in the Des Moines Register in 1934 just
three days before he died.
“I forgot to mention what I found yesterday when I was
looking through some of Macbride’s papers in the university archives,” I tell
Ryan, reaching below my seat for my notebook. “I’ll just read the poetic blurb
that I wrote about it. Don’t laugh: Thomas
Macbride’s legacy as an instructor is
best seen in the ornately-bound book stowed in the university archives, its
some hundred or more gold leaf pages each offering an inset letter of appreciation
to Thomas Macbride, hand-written from former students and colleagues, lawyers
and teachers and prominent officials countrywide.”
“That’s amazing. Obviously he was made to teach people about
nature. He changed their whole perspective about the natural world—that’s what
those letters mean,” says Ryan, this time a little more awestruck than
speculative.
“Yeah, he did.” I lower my voice to an emphatic whisper, not
so much for sake of the visitors who have just entered the lobby as for the
fact that I can feel the climax our discussion approaching. Ryan may have
started this thing but I’m going to sell it. “I read that no other professor
has had so many dinners held in his honor. The man was adored by his students,
commended by his colleagues, heralded nationally as a scientist—he was a
naturalist with evangelical zeal, moved to teach not for any other reason than
the subject of his teaching. That’s what it means to be a professor, in the
truest sense: not to work a classroom gig on the side of your research
projects, but to make a priority of pedagogy. To profess. And you can see that it worked; you can count the fruits
of his educational labors. There are 85 state parks in Iowa today. Before
Macbride, there were none. He spoke, and Iowa heard.”
“I think you’ve found the point of your article,” Ryan says.
I close my laptop and look up at him, and then over his
shoulder at the Thomas Macbride exhibit. Two young parents with their
stroller-strapped child stand before the case, investigating the professor’s fossilized
plants on display below his contemplative visage.
“Yeah, maybe there’s something to work with there.”
-Nathan Kooker, Education Staff
Materials
referenced during research for this essay:
"About
Iowa Lakeside Lab." Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. N.p., n.d. Web.
Schertz,
Mary Winifred Conklin., and Walter Lawrence Myers. Thomas Huston
Macbride,. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa, 1947. Print.
Shimek,
Bohumil. "Thomas Huston Macbride." Mycologia 26.5
(1934): 379-83. Print.
Thomas
H. Macbride Papers, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.
