| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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feature The Legacy of George Lindsay
Academy Curator of Botany Frank Almeda recalls a 1986 botanizing trip with George Lindsay to Namibia in southwest Africa. “George had been there five years earlier and had a remarkable memory of where individual plants were. We’d drive for hours and it seemed like he simply wanted to show people these wonderful things—to share them with people he knew would appreciate them. He would just stand there, gazing at a Euphorbia, some Lithops or a Welwitschia, and he’d be almost radiant with pleasure.” Although George Lindsay clearly relished his role as Academy Director from 1963 to 1982, botany was his lifelong passion. He became so well known in his field that when a caricature appeared on the front cover of the December 1992 issue of the official journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, it required no caption. Growing up near Pomona in southern California, the young George Lindsay early on exhibited an abiding—and yard-filling—interest in desert plants, particularly cacti. When he got his driver’s license at 14, his ambit widened and culminated in his first visit to Baja California. Lindsay was captivated. He began writing about his expeditions for Desert Plant Life. He also began making scientific contributions, describing his first species, the scarlet-flowered Cochemiea maritima cactus from Baja, at the age of 21. That year, he received special mention in the annual address of the president of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. He said that Lindsay continued “his exploring trips into the northern district of Lower California and will soon be a master of the numerous species in the region.” While honing his passion for plants, Lindsay was inevitably drawn into a passion for photography, which became a symbiotic partner in his fieldwork. Cacti do not submit readily to being pressed and preserved, so photographs become essential elements of their descriptions. His travels and writing won him such renown that, when searching for a Director for Arizona’s newly-formed Desert Botanical Garden in Tempe in 1939, the Board of Trustees unhesitatingly picked George Lindsay. He was just 22 years old, and had completed only three years of college, but the trustees could not overlook this prodigy. Lindsay spent a whirlwind year at the 300-acre Desert Botanic Garden. He oversaw the planting of thousands of native cacti, supervised the layout of the gardens, and arranged for the construction of the elegant adobe buildings. His job done, he returned to his family’s farm, Lemon Crest Ranch, to work on a taxonomic treatment of the genus Cochemiea. World War II interrupted this idyll and led Lindsay into a new application of his photographic expertise: as an aerial cinematographer for the Air Force. He flew 25 combat missions over Europe. “We had a Supreme Headquarters pass,” he says in his oral biography, “which said we couldn’t be interfered with by the military.” After Lindsay was demobilized, he returned to lemon ranching. Over the next four years,
he interspersed the management of the family citrus plantations with trips
to Baja California, including one with botanist Reid Moran, who he had
gotten to know through Desert Plant Life. They traveled on a 36-foot
ketch, which gave them access to the then-remote and fabled island of
Guadalupe in the Sea of Cortéz. “Plants inspired in him a real joy,” recalls
Moran, echoing the impressions of Frank Almeda. “He would stand beside
some piece of desert flora positively beaming with pleasure. It was an
intense and almost proprietorial pride. I’m sure his later focus on conservation
was influenced by the idea that he wasn’t going to let anything bad happen
to It was soon clear to Lindsay where his heart lay. He sold the citrus farm and went to Stanford University to study botany under the tutelage of renowned botanist Ira Wiggins. At 33, “he was older than most of the grad students, with extensive administrative and business experience,” recalls Alan Leviton, Lindsay’s contemporary at Stanford and now Curator of Herpetology at the Academy. “Professor Wiggins treated him both as a colleague and as a student. George Lindsay was a very big man and because of his age and experience, this dual treatment seemed quite appropriate. Ira Wiggins never let him abuse it, though.” Lindsay’s doctorate was awarded for his taxonomic revision of the barrel cactus genus Ferocactus, in which he described twelve new species. He was also becoming famous for his innate ease among California’s elite and powerful. He persuaded banker J.W. Sefton to sponsor the Sefton-Stanford Gulf of California Expeditions, and as its Scientific Director led the 1952 expedition aboard Sefton’s ship Orca. All the while, he assiduously collected cacti and took photographs. Although he didn’t travel on Orca’s 1953 voyage, “he was instrumental in setting it up,” says Leviton, one of the participants. “Making things happen for others was very typical of him.” Leviton and Lindsay would become lifelong friends. At the time, a broad general knowledge of botany and zoology was expected of any doctoral student in Stanford’s biological sciences department. “We studied for our prelims together and spent our evenings in the botany loft testing each other,” says Leviton. While the Orca toured the islands in the Sea of Cortéz, Lindsay spent the summer of 1953 in the tundra of Point Barrow, Alaska, as Wiggins’ aide at the Arctic Research Lab. The Arctic evidently agreed with Lindsay, because the next year he was asked to run the outstation at Umiak, 180 miles southeast of Point Barrow. “It was pretty remote back then,” remembers Max Brewer, a permafrost expert who succeeded Wiggins as the lab’s director. “It was just this little place with 12-15 people and a whole lot of habitat. It wasn’t like now where you can just fly in and be a weekend warrior. It took a special person to maintain morale.” George Lindsay was more than up to the job. Lindsay, says the veteran Arctic researcher, was “a very affable type with a wonderful ability to solve problems so that everyone felt as though they had won. And he always had this big, optimistic grin.” After finishing university in 1956, Lindsay was back in the administrative saddle as Director of the San Diego Natural History Museum. There he hired his long-term field colleague Moran as Curator of Botany. “George set about building up the Museum—and I mean that quite literally,” says Moran. Weekends often found him out in the exhibit hall busy with hammer and saw. Lindsay placed great emphasis on fieldwork and, while hiring new staff and raising the Museum’s profile, took it upon himself to build up the museum’s cactus collection and act as official photographer. Somewhere in all this, he found the time to establish, with National Science Foundation (NSF) support, the Vermilion Sea Field Station at Bahía de los Angeles in Baja California and, with Moran, make three overland botanical collecting trips to mainland Mexico. In 1963, George Lindsay came to San Francisco to succeed Director Robert C. Miller, who had been in charge of the California Academy of Sciences for the previous 25 years. Under Lindsay’s leadership, the Academy would expand dramatically. He reopened the Anthropology Department, arranged for the funding of Cowell Hall, presided over the establishment of the Meyer Fish Roundabout and, through his friendship with Phyllis Wattis, built a new wing for a new exhibit area, Wattis Hall, and two research departments. For Lindsay, education and the public came first, but he was also dedicated to the preservation of the Academy’s collections. Lindsay helped to secure substantial funding for these holdings. Thanks to his efforts, for many years the Academy was second only to Harvard in obtaining NSF funds to maintain its collections. He also started the Academy’s endowment, which today is worth $180 million. Lindsay was a mover and a shaker, and some staff members were afraid of him. But such fears were groundless, according to Leviton. “Many people found George somewhat intimidating. He was a big man with a gruff voice, and was very conservative in many things. But at the same time, he was very warm-hearted. He was, I think, trying to be a father figure, but didn’t quite know how. So he ended up appearing dictatorial. He had his little quirks, like his dislike of facial hair.” When John McCosker was hired as the Superintendent of the Steinhart, he was told to shave off his “Frito-Bandito moustache.” Lindsay also liked to be in charge. “The Academy was like a wagon wheel,” says McCosker, “with George at the hub.” And he liked referring to the famous people he knew by their first names—people such as crooner Bing Crosby, Perry Mason creator and writer Earl Stanley Gardner, and Vic Bergeron, founder of Trader Vic’s. But Lindsay parlayed the prestige and power of his social contacts for the cause of wildlife conservation. When his close friend, San Francisco philanthropist Kenneth Bechtel, hired a Catalina flying boat in 1973 to visit the tiny islands of the Sea of Cortéz, he was accompanied not only by Lindsay but also the legendary Charles Lindbergh. Some months after their survey of these remote wildlife-filled islands, this triumvirate arrived in Mexico City to attend the Mexican premiere of a Bechtel-sponsored documentary on the Sea of Cortéz. Lindbergh expounded passionately on the beauty of Baja California and the Sea of Cortéz to presidential staff and Mexican media alike. When the Mexican government gave legal protection to all of the Gulf of California in 1978, Lindsay credited the famed aviator’s eloquent pleas and downplayed the fact that he had been the driving force behind the original expedition. Lindsay was also largely responsible for persuading Bechtel to donate his 3,000-acre Pepperwood Ranch in Sonoma Country to the Academy. Lindsay’s modesty was coupled with justice and impartiality. “He was always a very fair man,” recalls Almeda. “To be less than even-handed would have been anathema to him.” Almeda also remembers the low profile Lindsay kept after his retirement as director in 1982. Although he retained an office in the Botany Department, he did not want to be a burden. Lindsay also came to rely more and more on his wife, Geraldine, whom he had met at the Academy. She initiated what has become a thriving docent program. She also kept his feet on the floor. Exasperated by his habit of name-dropping, McCosker recalls her loudly interrupting her husband one day to say, “George, Sears called to tell you your shirts are ready.” Lindsay’s retirement though was by no means low-key. He botanized actively and continued writing regular pieces for the Cactus and Succulent Journal well into retirement. He died in 2002 at age 85. His lifetime love of plants overflowed into some 120 papers and articles, including accounts of his collecting trips. “Apart from his PhD,” says Leviton, “most of Lindsay’s published work was semi-popular, but it was no less important for that.” A fitting epitaph for a man who brought plants to people and people to plants. Adrian Barnett is the Academy’s oral historian and a rainforest ecologist specializing in primate conservation. |
