Photos from the WFIWC Archives:
Personnel
Photo of John M. Miller,
given to M. Furniss by J.M. Miller, 1951
John M. Miller (1882-1952) is my candidate for #2 after A.D. Hopkins on the list of those most influential in the formative years of American forest entomology. John's interesting life is told by Wickman (2005), enhanced by material provided by John's surviving family ... highly recommended. Download at http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/publications/pnw_gtr638/. My purpose here is to provide some personal recollections. From1950-1952, I knew him as an office mate at the Berkeley Forest Insect Lab in the basement of Mulford Hall on the U.C. campus, and in other ways. A few anecdotes come to mind.
In 1951, I was assigned by Paul Keen to conduct a bark beetle hazard survey on 95,000 remaining acres of old growth pine on the Lassen N.F. Purpose was to direct sanitation-salvage logging into stands expected to suffer severe loss from bark beetles. I, and my Bureau of Entomology crew, worked out of Blacks Mtn. Experimental Forest headquarters (a Forest Service facility). It was customary for Bureau of Entomology employees to "cooperate 110%" as my boss, Jack Bongberg would say. One way we could repay our presence there was to help lay-in the winter wood supply. While stacking wood in the storage shed, one crewman stepped on a nail necessitating filing a CA-1 accident form. Paul Keen received the form and, after I got back to Berkeley, he came into my shared office, stood before me with a stern look, and asked: "Was this official business?" Before I could answer, John said: "Well, it may not have been official business, but it was damn good business." With that, Keen turned and left. I was one year into my employment and only in grade GS-5; you can't imagine my relief at John's response!
Photography. John was a master of large format black & white photography. I have prints of his photos of dead lodgepole pine in Tenaya basin, Yosemite N.P., early in the last century and had the extraordinary experience of re-photographing them in 1953 and 1984 (Furniss 2007). In 1951, I had some exposed 4X5 film that I wanted to print. He took me up to the third floor darkroom of the Forest Experiment Station, which occupied that floor and set-up trays containing developer, etc. Then, he turned on the enlarger and counted seconds(!) to expose the image. He left me to wash the prints which was said to take perhaps an hour. I decided to go downstairs and do some work in the meantime. When I went back, there was much commotion. The sink had overflowed and flooded through the floor to the ceiling of the forestry library below!
Urban wildlife. John was a financial supporter of the Berkeley YMCA and he rented a house owned by them. My family (Irene and 2 children) had been living in the WW II Kaiser shipyard housing in Richmond and my ears perked-up when I heard John mention that he would be moving out. He agreed to put in a good word for me and we were accepted as tenants. However, John thought it appropriate to tell us that the place came with some "wildlife." They turned out to be a very large population of mice. In our first day there, we set traps and could barely sit down before a trap would snap.
Early in 1952, John took on an entomology assignment in Mexico with the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization. The folks at the Lab gave him a big send-off at a local restaurant. I was surveying mountain pine beetle-infested sugar pine on the Sierra N.F. that spring when I received a phone call notifying me of his passing. I brought some pine boughs for his casket at the funeral. Even now, typing this brings tears to my eyes. John was a very special person. -- Malcolm Furniss --
References
Furniss, M. M. 2007. Forest entomology in Yosemite National Park: Creation of the Tenaya Ghost Forest and glimpses of forest renewal, 1903-1984. Amer. Entomol. 53: 202-207.
Furniss, M. M. 1953. Inventory of current bark-beetle hazard in yellow pine stands of the eastern Lassen area, Lassen National Forest - California. Forest Insect Laboratory, USDA, BE & PQ, Division of Forest Insect Investigations. Mimeo. 10 p + map.
Wickman, B. E. 2005. Harry E. Burke and John M. Miller, pioneers in Western forest entomology. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-638. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 163 p.
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