paper organizational system. For day-to-day opera- 

 tions, he would penodically pull a small pile of recycled 

 scraps from his pocket, consult 2 or 3 of them, and 

 then make a phone call, ask a student to copy a re- 

 search paper, or do whatever else the notes remmded 

 him needed to be done. To my knowledge, Ron never 

 had a date book or notebook; he had stacks of recycled 

 paper scraps filled with his cryptic scrawl. 



He did have a relatively inflexible organization to 

 his year that probably contributed to efficiency; he could 

 more easily plan ahead. His field experiments would 

 be, for the most part, planned by the time we started 

 the twilight grower meetings in the spring. Ron looked 

 forward to those drafty bam sessions, talking with grow- 

 ers about the latest way to deal with tarnished plant 

 bug or leaf miner. He remembered going to them as a 

 kid with his uncle and seeing scientists from the Con- 

 necticut Expenment Station. Then, after getting his Ph. 

 D. in entomology at Cornell, he went back to the Con- 

 necticut Agricultural Experiment Station to take on the 

 position working with insects and mites in apples. The 

 happy homecoming only lasted a little while, and the 

 stories are vague. Evidently, Ron got involved in late 

 60 's radical politics in New Haven. Ron left the sta- 

 tion, traveling Europe with Linda, his wife, in a VW 

 microbus. Being Ron, traveling Europe meant going 

 behind the Iron Curtain rather than to the Riviera. On 

 his return, he tried starting his own research station in 

 Wisconsin and spent time in Texas working with semi- 

 nal figures in the IPM movement just as it was start- 

 ing. Then in 1975, he landed in Massachusetts. 



But I'm digressing. As I said, Ron's year began 

 with twilight meetings and grower visits, and it contin- 

 ued with 1 6 hour or longer days filled with field experi- 

 ments, circus-like tents over apple trees, and all man- 

 ner of contraptions designed to figure out why apple 

 insects behaved the way they did. Ron digested data 

 as it came in, on a daily basis, but by the end of the 

 summer, he would already be putting it together into a 

 bigger picture. The fall meetings would start in late 

 October with a gathering of apple IPM researchers 

 and advisors in Vermont, where the very latest results 

 from that year would be presented and shared. A little 

 later, more polished presentations would be made at 

 the national entomology meetings and as the New Year 

 began to growers at the New England Fruit Meetings. 

 At Amherst, Ron would teach his IPM course each 

 fall. In January, he would disappear to the library each 

 day, reading articles that would be assimilated into 



grants or papers, as well as the March Message. The 

 March Message included all the latest apple pest man- 

 agement information a grower could want, and Ron 

 created it because the standard pest management ma- 

 terial couldn't or wouldn't keep up with the pace he 

 wanted to set. Delivered just before the growing sea- 

 son started, Ron would joke that it was good bathroom 

 material. Wherever they read it, growers would make 

 sure that they had. By the time the March Message 

 was ready for press, Ron would be leaving for his an- 

 nual trip to Hawaii. Of course his New England heri- 

 tage wouldn't let himjust go and enjoy Hawaii though 

 he loved the place, so Ron had a long-running grant to 

 study fruit flies there. Anyone he took with him soon 

 discovered that the research agenda was just as 24-7 

 in Hawaii as it was in Amherst. As soon as he got 

 back to Amherst, the twilight meetings and grower vis- 

 its would start again. Woven into this annual fabric 

 were daily meetings with grad students, lab assistants 

 and technicians, post-docs, other faculty and visiting 

 scientists. And all this was punctuated by special meet- 

 ings and talks in which any successful scientist engages, 

 talks in China or Washington, or meetings in Europe 

 and Australia. Around this schedule Ron wrote the 

 huge number of grant proposals and publications that 

 mystifies me. 



I know that it made a few people feel better to 

 write-off Ron's publication record as the results of a 

 monomaniacal workaholic. It wasn't that, and Ron, 

 while he worked hard, didn't eliminate family, friends, 

 recreation or the arts from his life. Some of the other 

 parts of Ron's life seem totally at odds with his image 

 as hard-working, salt-of-the-earth academic. For ex- 

 ample, Ron played golf When I went a round with 

 him, he showed up carrying a battered, ancient set of 

 clubs, wearing his Larry Bird short shorts and a T-shirt. 

 It occurred to me that golf must be some concession 

 Ron had reluctantly made to recreation, that someone 

 had told him he needed a hobby, so he'd looked around 

 a thrift store, seen golf clubs and determined that he 

 would go play a round every week for Recreation. 

 About the 6h hole, I began to see a pattern that sug- 

 gested a different story. Short, but straight drives on 

 the fairway, uncannily accurate approaches to the best 

 part of the green, and consistent putting had Ron at par 

 or better, while everyone else in the group was at least 

 5 strokes over. Ron was playing winning golf, and thor- 

 oughly enjoying it. 



In fact, he had several athletic hobbies, done in 



Fruit Notes, Volume 69, Spring, 2004 



