WM Fall 2016
Traveling Well
Research Resurrected
Bill Parker graduated in 1964, but his work never left campus.
Literally.
Not long after BKT Assistant Professor of Biology Brad Carlson arrived at Wabash, he found a copy of Parker’s senior project in the file drawer.
“Many of the amphibians and reptiles Parker observed or collected in the study had never been noted to occur in the county, and may not anymore,” Carlson says.
So Carlson contacted Parker, now professor emeritus of biology at the Mississippi University for Women, and they sent the paper to the Journal of North American Herpetology, where it is was published in March 2016 as “Resurrected Records: “New’ Reptile Occurrence Records for Montgomery County, Indiana.”
“It is my first publication with a Wabash undergrad.” Carlson smiles. “Albeit, 50 years after he graduated!”
“I had spent a year doing that study—my parents provided money for me to have a car so I could drive all around the county finding amphibians and reptiles,” Parker recalls. “Brad did a great job creating a paper out of this undergraduate thing.”
Because Parker had worked with Professor Eliot Williams H’53 on the Eastern box turtle project at Allee Woods between 1960 and 1987, he was interested in Carlson’s new take on the research. So Parker—who has enjoyed a distinguished career in herpetology—returned to campus in June. Carlson and his students welcomed him back with a trip to the 180-acre reserve.
“Three of us went looking for turtles,” Parker recalls. “We found two, and then I found another after lunch.
“I wanted to revisit Allee Woods and the campus because Eliot Williams motivated me to become a zoology major; he treated me as if I was a worthy person, a competent person. He was sort of hard ass, but sort of nice, too.”
Williams helped Parker get his job at MWU.
“In 1974 I was in grad school at the University of Utah, went to an ecological society meeting at Arizona State, and he was there. He brought the chairman of the department at Mississippi to my presentation. I got an interview for the biology professor job because of Eliot.”
Reptiles have appealed to Parker since boyhood.
“My first interest in snakes came about because I saw adults reacting in curious ways to them. My father killed a garter snake in the backyard, and I didn’t understand why. I found the body of the snake because I wanted to look at it, I wanted to see it alive.
“When I was 8 or 9, my grandfather killed a corn snake, beat it to death with a broom. I was trying to get in there and see it before it died, trying at the same time not to get hit with the broom.
“And I thought, What is wrong with these people? Of course, that’s just the reverse of what most people would have thought then.”
Parker thinks people’s fear of snakes has to do with evolution.
“An individual who would recoil from snakes would be more likely to survive and mate than someone attracted to snakes,” Parker says. “Maybe people like me are a little farther down the evolutionary ladder!”
Moments like this from Parker’s teen years stoke his sense of wonder: “I was at the YMCA’s Camp Lakewood, and there was a blind girl, and I showed her this garter snake. I watched her face as she felt that snake—the fascination, almost joy. It was a revelation.”
Parker is one of few Wabash alumni to teach at a college for women.
“From the fifth grade on, I had 12 straight years of all-male education, so I was really female deprived when I got there. It was an adjustment.”
MWU was different from Wabash in more ways than one.
“The average age of the students was about 28—there were a lot of women coming back for their degrees, or getting a different degree. The most pleasurable course I had was general ecology, where we could go out in the field and to the coast, open-eyed and learning, sharing some off-campus activities. I have lifelong friends from some of those classes.”
Parker finished his visit to the Wabash campus having dinner with Jean Williams H’53.
“There’s a certain amount of sadness being back now, remembering 50 years ago, the people who are gone,” Parker says. “But I realized I don’t know how much time I have left in my own life to do this. I wanted to visit Wabash because it had been so important in my life.”
He smiles when he mentions the paper he and Carlson co-published last year. “It was very pleasing to have this study, something I thought was long gone, resurrected.”