Jim Hutcheson ’68 served in Vietnam, taught high school, built a log cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, served 26 years in the National Guard, then spent two years teaching chemistry in Ghana with the Peace Corps while helping treat illness there. Bored with retirement, a few years ago he earned a nursing degree and now volunteers as an advocate for elderly patients.
Not a typical biology major’s path, but his Wabash mentor—botanist, poet, and conservationist Robert Petty—was no typical biologist.
Hutcheson credits two years he spent after his commencement teaching biology alongside Petty at Wabash with “changing the trajectory of my career.” They made it possible for him to improve his GRE scores and to pursue his PhD at the University of Wyoming.
Hutcheson recalls most fondly a three-week road trip he took with Petty in the summer of 1969 from Crawfordsville to a biology conference in Seattle, WA. They camped out much of the way out of Hutche-son’s old Pontiac LeMans.
“He gave me a lesson in glaciology in Glacier National Park, we camped by the Snake River and in the Olympic Rainforest, and drove straight through from Seattle to Sausalito after the conference,” Hutcheson recalls. “We stopped at the Coastal Red-woods, and visited UC Berkeley, where students had burned the buildings. We experienced the serenity of nature and the madness of man. We panned for gold along the American River, and Bob quoted John Muir as we walked through Yosemite and talked about what Muir might have seen.”
The gold they found didn’t amount to much, but their conversations and seeing those places through the biologist/poet’s eyes still enriches Hutcheson’s life. He recently established a scholarship in honor of the man he calls “my mentor, colleague, and friend.” The Robert Owen Petty Scholarship will be awarded annually to a biology major in need of financial assistance.
“Bob Petty gave me a greater understanding of nature and its influence on our lives,” Hutcheson says. “His legacy will be in the students he touched, his poetry, and his tireless efforts to preserve natural areas. Robert Owen Petty was truly ‘Some Little Giant.’”
To learn more about the Petty Scholarship or other giving opportunities, contact Lu Hamilton: hamiltol@wabash.edu