ML141208
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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: John Fitzpatrick. Timecode In: 00:01:14. Timecode out: 00:34:05. Notes: Richard Archbold. Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Dual-Channel Mono. NPR/NGS RADIO EXPEDITIONS Show: Geographic Century Log of DAT #: John Fitzpatrick Date: 7/15/99 ng = not good ok = okay g = good vg = very good AC 4:04 Okay, let me go ahead and start here by asking you to identify yourself, okay? JF 4:09 I¿m John Fitzpatrick. I¿m currently the Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. AC 4:16 And what was your connection with the station? JF 4:21 I began studying birds, Florida scrubjays, at Archbold Biological Station in 1972 as a college student during which that year and several other years afterwards I got to know Mr. Archbold and I¿ve worked there ever since in a long-term scientific project with Glen Wolfington on the life history of this endangered bird. In 1989 I became the Executive Director of Archbold and moved there in May of ¿89 and we stayed there until August of 1995. So I¿ve had a long time relationship with the station and was its director during the early 90s. AC 5:05 You suggested to me that, just in conversation, that we feature Mr. Archbold as one of our explorers. Why did you make that suggestion? JF 5:16 Well, I, Richard Archbold is one of the most colorful explorers of the 20th century and the amazing fact about this man is that very few people have ever heard of him in the United States or abroad. And this is a feature of his personality. He was a shy, very retiring person, particularly by day and somewhat self-effacing, even, and never, even during the heyday of his explorations in New Guinea, never was wont to aggrandize his own accomplishments and then later became, in a sense, an explorer of the US in ways that didn¿t ever get very popular, so contrary to the big explorers of the first part of the century, Archbold, who did some truly amazing things, revolutionary, pioneering things in the 1930s with aviation and with explorations of some of the most remote parts of the Earth, is largely unknown, so I thought in a series heralding the great pioneer explorations of the century, one would have to include this amazing man. AC 6:28 Let me ask you, you¿re a formally trained scientist and he was not. What kind of a scientist was he? JF 6:35 He was a naturalist. He always was interested in nature from very early in life. He was kind of a, sort of a troublemaking kid and did not do particularly well in school. In fact, left formal schooling after only grade 8 or 9 and was privately tutored, but always was in love with nature. He, his father had a beautiful plantation in southern Georgia where he loved to explore and so he fell in love in nature and wandering the woods very early in his life and his father also had an association with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, this great, one of the world¿s greatest natural history museums, of course, and this aided and abetted Archbold¿s curiosity in nature so that by the time Archbold was in his 20s, he was a known figure around the museum, in part because of his father, and so he was, he enjoyed the idea of exploring and began to talk about accompanying an expedition and in part with his family¿s wealth funding and expedition to Madagascar. And this really is what, what started his major career in scientific exploration, but as a trained scientist, he just, he wasn¿t one. What he knew very early in his life is that he loved to live around them and fell in love with helping scientists do their thing logistically and financially. AC 8:10 You go off on expeditions now, don¿t you, or you have from¿ JF 8:13 I have done some expeditions myself. I¿ve had the privilege of working in some of the most remote parts of the New World tropics and in Peru particularly and discovered a fe... (Notes truncated)
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- 24 Aug 2009 - Ben Brotman
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- 24 Aug 2009 - Ben Brotman
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- 24 Aug 2009 - Ben Brotman