Every free moment in Ecuador was spent in the field. He made trips to 

 isolated villages and would rent space at the local cabarets. While the 

 evening crowd was making merry, Jim would be out collecting frogs and other 

 critters. He would return as the revelry broke up, often to make his bed on 

 a bench or behind the bar. Such behavior was not unexpected from a crazy 

 gringo who chased snakes and other creepy things. Here also he began 

 transect studies by traveling the supply trails on mule or horseback. Once 

 he was accompanied by the unlikely pair of E.H. Taylor and C.F. Walker. He 

 recalled stopping after several days of collecting, and Ed finally stopping 

 his frantic collecting long enough to reconstruct data and tie tags on his 

 specimens. 



Upon returning stateside, he had a brief stay at the University of 

 Southern Illinois before assuming his new position at San Fernando Valley 

 State College. San Fernando provided him more time for research and a core 

 of students interested in herpetology. However, his life's goal was to work 

 in a museum, and when he was offered a curatorship at the National Museum, 

 he grabbed it even though it meant a salary cut. 



He arrived at the museum in time to prepare for the move from the cramped 

 quarters in the central building to the spacious collection range in the just- 

 completed west wing. No more would the collection have to be arranged by 

 bottle size; now the specimens could be place in taxonomic order. The collection 

 was moved cafeteria-style. Everyone participated. The mover would take a 

 set of cards from the species file, search through the old range, find specimens 

 of his species scattered here and there, and then carry the completed set to 

 the new range. With more than 200,000 specimens, the move was arduous, but 

 it was rewarding to be able to go to one shelf and find all the specimens of 

 a species together. 



The museum years were good ones for Jim. He was able to extend his research 

 and organizational energies in many directions. Latin American herpetology 

 and computer storage and analysis of biological data always remained high in 

 his active research. Jim had first used the computer to statistically analyze 

 his dipsadine data at Michigan, but his interest blossomed in the late 60 s 

 with the advent of time-sharing computers. While statistical computation was 

 useful, he was attracted to the computer's potential for the storage and 

 retrieval of taxonomic and museum data, and their transmission and exchange 

 through a museum network of time-share computers. This interest led to his 

 establishment of MUDPIE - an acronym for Museum and University Data, Program 

 and Information Exchange and a typical example of his delight in word play 

 and puns - in order to share his ideas and interest with others. He became 

 engrossed in developing interactive programs for the identification of taxo- 

 nomic specimens. His joy was an interactive program that Pf"^;^"ed museum 

 visitors to a special reptile exhibit to ask questions about reptiles. Every 

 afternoon, he would review the questions asked that day and add additional 

 data to make the "machine" smarter. By the end of the exhibit s stay, few 

 visitors could stump the machine. 



A fortuitous remark at an international conference permitted the establish- 

 ment of the Neotropical Squamata project. Jim's compilation instinct had lead 

 to the growth of a small file/catalog on neotropical snakes and lizards. 



