Ed Ricketts

Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (May 14, 1897 - May 11, 1948) commonly known as Ed Ricketts, was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher. He is best known for Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology, and for his influence on writer John Steinbeck, which resulted in their collaboration on the Sea of Cortez, later republished as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951).

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Biography

Ricketts was born in Chicago, Illinois to Abbott Ricketts and Alice Beverly Flanders Ricketts. He also had a younger sister, Frances, and a younger brother, Thayer. Ricketts spent most of his childhood in Chicago, except for a year in South Dakota when he was ten years-old.

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

After being discharged from the army, Ricketts studied zoology at the University of Chicago and was influenced by his professor, W. C. Allee, but Ricketts dropped out without a degree. He then spent several months walking through the American south, from Indiana to Florida. He returned to Chicago and studied some more at the university. In 1922, Ricketts met and married Anna Barbara Maker, whom he called "Nan". A year later, they had a son, Edward F. Ricketts Jr., and they moved to California to set up Pacific Biological Laboratories with Albert E. Galigher: Galigher was Rickett's college friend with whom he had run a similar business on a smaller scale. In 1924, Ricketts became sole owner of the lab, and soon after two daughters were born: Nancy Jane in November 28, 1924, and Cornelia, on April 6, 1928.

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, missing the age cut-off by days. During his service, he kept collecting marine life and compiling data. His son was drafted in 1943.

In 1945, Steinbeck'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. Regarding "Doc", Steinbeck wrote: "He wears a beard and his face is half christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth."

Steinbeck's caricature was largely true, but incomplete and sometimes misleading. Ricketts himself read it with exasperation by all accounts, but ended by saying that it could not be criticized because it was not done with malice. ^[1] Ricketts was also portrayed as "Doc" in Sweet Thursday the sequel to Cannery Row; as "Doc Burton" in In Dubious Battle; Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath; and "Doctor Winter" in The Moon is Down.

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 marriage 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 the Del Monte Express 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.

A lifesize metal sculptured bust of Ricketts, placed at the site of the long defunct rail crossing, commemorates him.

Pacific Biological Laboratories

Main article: Pacific Biological Laboratories

  In 1923, Ed Ricketts and his business partner Albert Galigher started Pacific Biological Laboratories (PBL), a marine biology supply house. The lab was located in Pacific Grove at 165 Fountain Avenue.^[3] The business was later moved to 740 Ocean View Avenue, Monterey, California, with Ricketts as sole owner. Today, that location is 800 Cannery Row.

On November 25, 1936, a fire broke out at the Del Mar Cannery next to the lab. Most of the laboratory's contents were destroyed. The manuscript for Between Pacific Tides survived as it had already been sent to Stanford University for publication. The lab had been a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, and writers, including Steinbeck, Bruce Ariss, Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, Lincoln Steffens, and Francis Whitaker.

The business was fictionalized as "Western Biological Laboritories" in Steinbeck's Cannery Row.^[4]

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 (without attribution) in a chapter titled "Non-Teleological Thinking" in The Log From the Sea of Cortez. [1] 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 appears in Katharine Rodger's book, Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts (2006).

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 second 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 fifth edition. Between Pacific Tides was written in a time when most biologists worked at discovering, describing, and classifying the world's plants and animals. The third and fourth editions of Between Pacific Tides were revised by Joel Hedgpeth, a contemporary of Ricketts and Steinbeck. Hedgpeth continued the taxonomic excellence of the book while retaining the ecological approach to intertidal biology.

In 1941, S. F. Light (of UC Berkeley) published a substantial book of California intertidal marine life along traditional taxonomic organization . Light's Manual is another standard classic work and is still in print, now in its third 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 uninitiated, but essential for the specialist. On the other hand, Between Pacific Tides is chatty, readable, full of observations and side comments, and 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. ^[5] 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.

References

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