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Crossosoma 34(2), Fall- Winter 2008 
Oscar knew many of the active botanists in southern California during the 20 th 
century, including Peter Raven, Phil Munz, Robert Thorne, Dennis Breedlove, 
Mildred Mathias, Annetta Carter, Dieter Wilken, Carl Epling, John B. Feudge, 
Dave Verity, and many others. Oscar knew Munz well and periodically took 
specimens to him for identification. He remembers that when he was still fairly 
inexperienced in the ways of botanists, probably in the mid 1950s shortly after 
he’d first met Munz, he took a large bouquet of wildflowers to RSA for help with 
identifications. Munz patiently but pointedly explained that those who work in 
herbaria prefer to identify pressed specimens. 
Oscar is well known for his iconoclastic independence and wide-ranging interests. 
Coming of age during the Depression, he decided to be as self-sufficient as 
possible. In about 1947, with help from friends and hired labor, he constructed his 
own large house, including a full basement, on Spruce St. in Riverside. Over the 
years he learned to build and repair things, make use of cast-off materials, grow 
his own food, and keep bees, among many other skills and avocations. For years 
he kept a milk cow on the back “pasture” behind the Spruce St. house. At a recent 
90 th birthday celebration, his children recalled their unconventional childhoods, 
growing corn instead of lawn in the front yard and riding in a then unheard-of 
VW microbus. It was an economical and utilitarian substitute for Detroit’s typical 
family car of the day, but an embarrassment to the socially-conscious teens. 
Since his retirement in 1979, Oscar has traveled and collected plants in many 
countries around the world, including 3 months in Europe and Africa in 1982- 
83 (particularly in Kenya and South Africa), 12 months traveling throughout 
Australia in 1986-87, 6 months traveling in the U.S. and Canada in 1989-90, and 
6 months in Chile and Argentina in 1990-91. Most recently Oscar and his second 
wife Marsia Alexander-Clarke visited Thailand with Greg Ballmer of the UCR 
Entomology Dept, in 1998. These travels have sustained Oscar’s interest and 
enjoyment of botany and generated a great many specimens for study by others. 
The trip to Chile and Argentina alone produced over 740 plant collections, plus 
many duplicates. The first set of these South American collections is housed in 
the UCR Herbarium that Oscar ran for so many years. His African and Australian 
collections are mostly at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden Herbarium in 
Claremont. 
Also following his retirement, Oscar purchased a large parcel of rough and rocky 
land near Bisbee, Arizona on which he constructed a small campsite and which he 
used for a number of years as botanical field station. He subsequently conveyed 
it to a conservation organization and it is now a nature reserve. Many collections 
were made from this site in the 1980s. 
