Ed Ricketts

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Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (May 14, 1897 - May 11, 1948) commonly known as Ed Ricketts, was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher.

Ricketts studied zoology at the University of Chicago and was influenced by his teacher, W. C. Allee, but Ricketts dropped out without a degree.

He was fictionalized by his friend John Steinbeck as the character, "Doc", in the novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, as "Doc Burton" in In Dubious Battle, "Casy" in The Grapes of Wrath and "Doctor Winter" in The Moon is Down. Steinbeck also co-wrote the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez with Ricketts, and later wrote a short remembrance of Ricketts in an introduction to the Viking edition published as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951, reprinted by Penguin and cited below).

From 1927 to 1948, Ricketts Pacific Biological Laboratory at 800 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey was a salon of sorts, where writers, artists and other luminaries would gather. Bruce Ariss, Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lincoln Steffens, and Francis Whitaker were just some of the visitors who flocked to Doc's lab.

Contents 1 Biography and family 2 Philosophical essays 3 Biological contributions 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

[edit] Biography and family

Ricketts was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he spent most of his childhood (except for a year in South Dakota when he was ten). His parents were Abbott Ricketts and Alice Beverly Flanders Ricketts. He had a younger sister, Frances, and a younger brother, Thayer.

After a year of college, he traveled to Texas and New Mexico. He was drafted into the Army Medical Corps in 1917. Ricketts hated the military bureaucracy, but Steinbeck wrote, "He was a successful soldier."

After being discharged from the army, Ricketts took classes at the University of Chicago for a short while, then dropped out and spent several months walking through the American south, from Indiana to Florida. He returned to Chicago and studied some more at the university. He met and married his wife Nan - Anna Barbara Maker - in 1922. A year later, they had a son, Edward F. Ricketts Jr., and moved to California to set up Pacific Biological Laboratories with Albert E. Galigher, a friend from college who had run a similar business with Ricketts on a smaller scale while they were in school together. Ricketts became sole owner of the lab the next year, in 1924. Ed and Nan also had two daughters: Nancy Jane, born November 28, 1924, and Cornelia, born April 6, 1926.

His sister and both of his parents moved to California between 1925 and 1927; both Frances and Abbott worked with Ricketts in the lab.

Nan left Ricketts in 1932, taking the children. It was the first of many separations.

Ricketts and Nan separated for good in 1936, and he took up residence in his lab. On November 25, 1936, a fire spread from the adjacent cannery and destroyed the lab. He lost nearly everything - including an extraordinary amount of correspondence, research notes, manuscripts, and his prized library, which had held everything from invaluable scientific resources to his beloved collection of poetry.

In 1940, Ricketts and Steinbeck journeyed to the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) in a chartered fishing boat to collect invertebrates for the scientific catalog in their book, Sea of Cortez. Also in 1940, Ricketts began a relationship with Toni Jackson. Jackson and her young daughter, Kay, moved in with Ricketts and lived with him until 1947.

During World War II, Ricketts again served in the army, this time as a medical lab technician; he was drafted into service in October 1942. During his service, he kept collecting marine life and compiling data. His son was drafted in 1943.

In 1945, Steinbek's novel Cannery Row was published. Ricketts, the real-life model for the character Doc, became a minor celebrity, and tourists and journalists began seeking him out. Steinbeck portrayed Doc (and, thus, Ricketts) as a many-faceted intellectual somewhat outcast from intellectual circles, a party-loving drinking man, and closely in touch with the working class, prostitutes, and bums of Monterey's Cannery Row. This caricature was largely true, but incomplete and sometimes misleading. ^[1]

In September 1946, Nancy Jane had a son, making Ricketts a grandfather. That same year, Kay's health deteriorated due to a brain tumor. She died on October 5, 1947. Toni, overwhelmed with grief, left Ricketts.

Just a few weeks later, Ricketts met Alice Campbell, a music and philosophy student half his age. They "married" in early 1948, though the marrige was not valid because Ricketts had never become legally divorced from Nan.

On May 8, 1948, Ricketts was crossing the railroad tracks when his vehicle was hit by a train at the Drake Avenue crossing just off Cannery Row. ^[2] He lived on for three days, conscious at least some of that time, before dying on May 11.

[edit] Philosophical essays

In addition to his writings on marine life, Ricketts wrote three philosophical essays; he continued to revise them over the years, integrating new ideas in response to feedback from Campbell, Miller, and other friends. The first essay lays out his idea of nonteleological thinking - a way of viewing things as they are, rather than seeking explanations for them. In his second essay, "The Spiritual Morphology of Poetry," he proposed four progressive classes of poetry, from naive to transcendent, and assigned famous poets from Keats to Whitman to these categories. The third essay, "The Philosophy of 'Breaking Through'," explores transcendence throughout the arts and describes his own moments of 'breaking through', such as his first hearing of 'Madame Butterfly'.

According to his letters, conversations with composer John Cage helped Ricketts clarify some of his thoughts on poetry, and gave him new insight into the emphasis on form over content embraced by many modern artists.

Even though Steinbeck presented the essays to various publishers on behalf of Ricketts, only one was ever published in his lifetime: the first essay appears in Sea of Cortez. All of his major essays, along with other shorter works were published in The Outer Shores, vols. 1 and 2, edited by Joel Hedgpeth, and with additional biographical commentary also by Hedgpeth. Much of this material is slated to appear in a forthcoming book, edited by Katharine Rodger, to be titled "Breaking Through : Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts."

[edit] Biological contributions

Ecology was early in its development in Ricketts's day. Now-common concepts such as habitat, niche, succession, predator-prey relationships, and food chains were not yet mature ideas. Ricketts was among a few marine biologists who studied intertidal organisms in an ecological context. He has become the most famous among these early marine ecologists in large part because of his partnership with Steinbeck.

Ricketts's most important scientific work is Between Pacific Tides, first published in 1939, co-authored with Jack Calvin. Ricketts revised the text for a 2^nd edition, published shortly after his death. Since then, it has been edited by others and is still a standard and classic work on California intertidal marine ecology now is in its 5^th edition. Between Pacific Tides was written in a time when most biologists worked at discovering, describing, and classifying the world's plants and animals. Ricketts's contemporary, S. F. Light (of UC Berkeley) published a substantial book of California intertidal marine life along traditional taxonomic organization in 1941. Light's Manual is another standard classic work and is still in print, now in its 3^rd edition (Smith and Carlton, 1975). Ricketts's approach to marine science, often described as "pioneering," is seen by comparing the two books.

Light's Manual is thorough, dense, technical, difficult for the uninitated, but essential for the specialist. Between Pacific Tides is chatty, readable, full of observations and side comments, readily accessible to anyone with a genuine interest in seashore life. It cannot serve as a thorough manual to marine invertebrates, but it addresses the common and conspicuous animals in a style that invites and educates newcomers and offers substantial information for experienced biologists. It is not organized according to taxonomic classification, but instead by habitat. Thus, crabs are not all treated in the same chapter. Crabs of the rocky shore, high in the intertidal are in a separate section from crabs of lower intertidal zones or sandy beaches.

Sea of Cortez is almost two separate books. The first section is a narrative, co-written by Steinbeck and Ricketts (Ricketts kept a daily journal during the expedition; Steinbeck edited the journal into the narrative section of the book). Later, the narrative was published alone as The Log From the Sea of Cortez, without Ricketts's name. The remainder of the book, about 300 pages, is an "Annotated Phyletic Catalog" of specimens collected. This section was Ricketts's work alone. Ironically, it was presented in the traditional taxonomic arrangement, but with numerous notes on ecological observations where they were available.

Since Ricketts's day, ecology (the science) has moved on to more precise and quantitative analyses, and "natural history" is generally unacceptable in the ecological journals. Ricketts took a stab at quantitative ecology in articles he published in the Monterey newspaper, analyzing the local sardine fishery. He documented annual sardine harvests, described sardine ecology in terms of plankton and water temperatures, and noted that harvests were declining even as fishing intensity was increasing. When the fishery crashed, everyone in Monterey wondered where the sardines had gone. "They're in cans," Ricketts wrote. ^[3] By today's standards this would have been a facile conclusion. But Ricketts's work is an early example of quantitative ecology applied to resource exploitation.

[edit] References

1. ^ Tamm, Eric Enno. Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004. ISBN 1-56858-298-6
2. ^ Childs, Marquis. (June 1985). "A novel aquarium depicts the story of Monterey Bay." Smithsonian v16.pp95(6).
3. ^ Early years and family info, pp. xv-xxii; daughters, pp. 111 and 199; WWII draft, p. 177; Separation from Nan, fire, p. xxxi; Toni and Kay, Alice, death, pp. xliv-lii; Nancy Jane's son, p. 237; Essay info, pp xxxii-xxxvii; John Cage reference, pp. 81-84 and p. 194. Ricketts, Edward Flanders. Rodger, Katharine A. (2003). Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-5087-X

[edit] Further reading

• Astro, Richard. (1973). John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: the shaping of a novelist. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-0704-4
• Astro, Richard. (1976). Edward F. Ricketts. Western Writers Series No 21. Boise State Univ. ISBN 0-88430-020-X
• Ricketts, Edward F. and Jack Calvin. (1939). Between Pacific Tides. Stanford University Press; 5th/Rev edition. 1992. ISBN 0-8047-2068-1
• Ricketts, Edward Flanders. Hedgpeth, Joel W. (ed). (1978). Outer Shores. Mad River Press. ISBN 0-916422-13-5
• Ricketts, Edward Flanders. Hedgpeth, Joel W. (ed). (1979). Outer Shores 2: Breaking Through. Mad River Press. ISBN 0-916422-14-3
• Ricketts, Edward Flanders. Rodger, Katharine A. (2003). Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-5087-X
• Smith, R.I. and J. T. Carlton. 1975. Light's Manual: Intertidal Invertebrates of the Central California Coast. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02113-4
• Steinbeck, John. Ricketts, Edward F. (1941). Sea of Cortez: A leisurely journal of travel and research, with a scientific appendix comprising materials for a source book on the marine animals of the Panamic faunal province. Reprinted by Paul P Appel Pub. 1971. ISBN 0-911858-08-3
• Steinbeck, John. Astro, Richard (intro). (1995). The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Penguin Classics; Reprint edition. ISBN 0-14-018744-8

[edit] External links

• NPR: National Public Radio (USA) piece on Ed Ricketts and the 'Dream' of Cannery Row.
• [1]: Short biography of Ed Ricketts, contains several errors.
• [2]: Website about the first biography on Ed Ricketts titled "Beyond the Outer Shores" by Eric Enno Tamm (cited above).
• [3] and [4]: two pages from the California Views photography website, with good photos and brief biographical info. on Ricketts.
• [5] San Francisco Chronicle article on plans to repeat the Ricketts / Steinbeck Sea of Cortez trip.
• [6] San Francisco Chronicle article on latter day Ricketts followers, "Ed Heads," written by Eric Tamm.