less-than-conventional ways that fit his schedule. He 

 probably swam in every orchard pond in the state, fol- 

 lowing a day counting insects in apple trees, and maybe 

 a short jog. On his own farm, he kept a muddy pond 

 that doubled as a hockey rink. I remember one game 

 when Ron had magnanimously taken a few of the 

 weaker skaters, among them my wife, on his team. 

 Because we had a shortage of real hockey sticks, Ron 

 volunteered to use a broom. Not surprisingly, Ron's 

 team quickly slipped behind. Ron's frustration grew 

 more visible as the debacle played out, and as one of 

 his sons threatened to score against Ron's group yet 

 again, Ron swooped over to my wife, grabbed her stick, 

 stole the puck from his 10-year-old, and skated the 

 length of the ice to score himself He followed that 

 with enough goals to satisfy himself that he would not 

 be humiliated. I suspect Ron's competitive nature also 

 had a significant effect on his research record as well. 



I can't fit his love of opera into an explanation of 

 his publishing record, except that it was probably one 

 of those releases any intense person needs to keep from 

 imploding. Not being an opera aficionado, I failed, on 

 several levels, to understand Ron's trips to New York 

 to see Carmen or some lesser-known production. I do 

 like non-musical theater, and music without theater, and 

 Ron, knowing this, would be the one who organized 

 evenings to see a summer play at Smith or a jazz per- 

 formance in Northampton. Releases though these may 

 have been, I still wonder how a man doing the grant 

 writing, experiments, analysis and publication work 

 necessary for 15 or so publications a year could have 

 time for any of this? Or the baseball trips to Fenway 

 Park. Or the hikes. Or the dinners with students, col- 

 leagues and friends. Or singing with the local chorus. 



Teaching a course sets limits on research, and 

 many successful scientists consider teaching a burden. 

 Most have no idea what it means to work with people 

 outside the university, people like New England apple 

 growers. For many of the most successful scientists, 

 their exclusive priority is the production of research 

 papers. In contrast, Ron reveled in his role as advisor 

 and colleague to the apple growers of New England, 

 and devoted himself to teaching IPM to university stu- 

 dents. He never considered ignoring the growers or 

 students so that he might focus on more on research. 

 Ron loved apples, the people that grow them, the places 

 they grow, the insects that feed on them, all of it. Just 

 as important, and less obvious, he knew that his work 

 in the orchards led to better research and teaching. 



He knew that teaching growers how to manage apple 

 pests taught him how to develop ecological theories 

 that worked in the real world. It made his classroom 

 more relevant and real to his university-based students. 

 The time it takes to do all this, of course, makes those 

 450 papers even more astounding. 



Ron uniquely bridged the space between academ- 

 ics and apple growers. I think it's difficult for purists in 

 either group to appreciate how well he did it. For ex- 

 ample, he and a colleague discovered that Rhagoletis 

 pominella (the apple maggot fly) had moved from its 

 native American host, the hawthorn (Crataegus sp.), 

 to an imported host, the domestic apple (Malus 

 domestica). They held this up as an exciting example 

 of sympatric speciation (one species diverges into two 

 separate species in a single geographic location) by 

 publishing in the world's best scientific journals and 

 speaking at major academic meetings. It's still a clas- 

 sic example in ecology. At the same time Ron showed 

 that the apple maggot's predilection for round, red ob- 

 jects could be useful to growers, telling them when the 

 damaging flies were present in their orchards, and just 

 as importantly, when they were not. For a few years, 

 I'm sure Ron totally disrupted the market for croquet 

 and bocce balls, buying them up, painting them red, 

 covenng them in sticky goo, and hanging them in apple 

 trees to determine whether growers needed to apply 

 an insecticide. 



I'm still not sure how Ron sold LPM to apple grow- 

 ers. He came into the job with some pressure, as the 

 previous two apple entomologists at UMass had been 

 fired. When he started his Extension work, Ron still 

 had most of his long hair from the 60's and carried his 

 ever-present paperwork and field equipment in a wo- 

 ven Guatemalan shoulder bag. It's hard to remember 

 now, but at that time EPM ran counter to standard pest 

 management dogma. For years. Extension and pesti- 

 cide salesmen had been telling orchardists that they 

 needed to spray chemicals weekly, sometimes more, 

 to eliminate any possibility of pests and disease in 

 apples. Along came Ron, asking them to hang colored 

 sheets of sticky cardboard and bocce balls in their trees, 

 count bugs, and above all, not to spray pesticides until 

 the pests actually started their invasion. I know many 

 growers, looking at Ron and the colored bocce balls, 

 were worried that this ivory tower hippie from the 

 University was trying to lead them into disaster. 



But Ron, having grown up on a fruit farm, was not 

 an ivory tower scientist. He may have been an idealist 



8 



Fruit Notes, Volume 69, Spring, 2004 



