"A native of Fairmont. Minn., he is a graduate of St. John's University in Maryland, and holds an M.S. in plant ecology from Arizona State University, where he also received a graduate teaching assistantship. Mr. Kramer has worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and spent two years in the Army as a second lieutenant."
"set amid 3.300 acres of varied terrain ... remarkable in its natural beauty. It includes wetlands, several lakes, an oak savanna, a restored prairie, and hiking trails that wind through an extensive pine and hardwood forest."
(Buell's) "life touched many hundreds of North American ecologists through the Rutgers Ecology Seminar that he initiated and sponsored. In the many summers he taught at the University of Minnesota's Lake Itasca Biological Station, he recognized exceptionally promising young students. Often the fortunate person was hired as an assistant, transported across the country in his car, fed chicken dinners and given a thorough introduction to life as a field ecologist."
"While he was working on his PhD, he ran into me. It's a funny story. I was working in my neighbor's restaurant before starting college, to get some money together. So I was waitressing. I wasn't the best waitress in the world, so I had to watch my P's and Q's because the other waitresses were career waitresses. So I was really, "What do you want?", and not taking much notice of or remembering who came in at that point. Richard wrote a note to me one time on the back of a receipt. It wasn't the first time this had happened. So I went to the back and I said you won't believe this, I got another request to make a date or get to know, that sort of thing. George, my neighbor, said "this guy waits for your tables." I said I couldn't believe that, that somebody waits for my tables. And he said, "You really should go out with him. He's really nice. He's in the reserves." The reserve unit was doing their reserve duty right close by and that's why some of them came in at different times to eat at the restaurant. And that's how we met."
Richard's PhD work at Rutgers was in plant ecology, which Patricia described as "the overall relationship of different plants to each other, the ecology of the soil, weather, and land use."
Richard Comes to Princeton to Study Herrontown Woods
On one of their first dates, he took her to Herrontown Woods, to show her what he was working on. She said he would point out jack-in-the-pulpit and things like that. She was a history major, but the second summer, she helped him in the trailer. He dried plants of all the different species. With special ink she wrote the plant names on the folder. Those specimens are preserved at Rutgers' Chrysler Herbarium.
Kramer's time in Princeton coincided with what ecologist Stephen Pacala has called the "heroic age" of ecology at Princeton University. Henry Horn, an ecologist who would share his knowledge with the community during many nature walks over the years, joined the Princeton faculty in 1966 "amid a wave of interest in evolution and ecology in the then-Department of Biology."
National interest in the environment was on the rise, spurred by images of flagrant industrial pollution. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was first published in 1962, calling into question the postwar chemical revolution. As a kid in the 1960s, I remember holding Kleenex over my nose as my parents drove from Chicago through Gary, Indiana, where sulphurous clouds of pollution from steel plants would drift across the highway, turning the skies different shades of yellow, orange, and purple in the middle of the day. Another time, as our 707 jet descended into Los Angeles, the smell of L.A.'s notorious smog permeated the cabin. At home in small town Wisconsin, the woods behind our house was periodically sprayed with a fog probably laden with DDT. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it caught fire in 1969. Unlike our current relentless spewing of invisible, odorless carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the chemical assault on nature back then also registered as a visceral assault on our senses, generating powerful images on the evening news and repugnant odors in daily life that ultimately drove political action. Subsequent regulation spawned a new field of environmental professionals trained to measure pollutants and assess their impact. Though he started out as a plant ecologist, Richard would later have a big impact in developing the environmental profession.
Richard's graduate study of Herrontown Woods was funded in part by a Sarah Barringer Hart Fellowship, awarded in April, 1965, that paid him to be the resident naturalist at Herrontown Woods for a few summers.
Today, this being 2024, Herrontown Woods is 150 acres, plus 80 acres at Autumn Hill Reservation, all owned by Princeton and maintained by the Friends of Herrontown Woods. Back in the mid-60s, it was much smaller but, as the only nature preserve in Mercer County at the time, served as an incubator for environmental education in the county. Taken from Town Topics articles, here's what the scene was like back then, when Elizabeth Veblen was still alive and living next to the preserve in Veblen House, (and women still went by their husbands' first and last names):
Herrontown Woods contains some 80 acres maintained as a natural preserve in the northeast section of Princeton Township, and was given to Mercer County by the late Prof. Oswald Veblen and Mrs. Veblen. It is administered by the Mercer County Park Commission and a citizens development committee, appointed by the commission. Members of the committee are Mrs. Gordon Knox, chairman; Mrs. Alan Carrick, H. Russell Butler Jr.. Carl Breuer, Richard Thorsell and James Sayen.By November of 1966, a self-guided tour of Herrontown Woods had been developed.
PARK GUIDE OFFERED
Explorers of the Herrontown Woods Arboretum will be able to observe and interpret natural changes in the woodland with the help of a new guide booklet available without charge at the parking area off Snowden Lane. The explanatory material is keyed to markers along the park's trails. The guide was; sponsored by the Citizens Development Committee and prepared by Richard Kramer of the Rutgers Botany Department.
A June 22, 1967 Town Topics article underscores how central Herrontown Woods was to environmental education in Mercer County. After a month of hosting school groups from around the county, Richard spent July and August leading nine nature walks per week for the general public.
A WALK IN THE WOODS
Summer Program Offered. Guided walks describing the summer life of a forest will be conducted in HerrontownWoods starting next Tuesday. The walks will be held every day, Tuesday through Friday, at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and on alternate Saturdays beginning July 1. Groups of more than 10 must call the Chamber of Commerce office, 921-7676, for reservations. Dr. Richard Kramer of Rutgers, will lead each of the walks. Dr. Kramer is completing his study of Herrontown Woods under Sarah Barringer Hart Fellowship. Subjects covered on the walks are plant and bird identification, predator and prey relationships, soil and water consrervation and stream and woodland ecology. During the past month, guided walks in Herrontown have been the exclusive province of school children in Mercer County. More than 600 children and their teachers visited the woods during this period.
In the mid-1960s, computers were just starting to come into widespread use in research. According to his wife, Richard collaborated back then with a grad student in computer science to collect and analyze data. They divided Herrontown Woods into quadrants and documented what plants grew in which quadrant. That data then had to be transferred to a computer, which back then was a very tedious process. Though some businesses had moved on to magnetic tape, the Rutgers grad students were still using computer cards. The product of his research took the form of a dissertation entitled, The biotic and abiotic influences on, and delimitation of, the plant associations in Herrontown Woods, Mercer County, New Jersey.
An aside: As often happens in my research of Herrontown Woods' history, it has turned out that Richard Kramer's world had many parallels with my own. Like Kramer, I grew up surrounded by natural splendor in the midwest before moving to Princeton. In my 20s, I spent a few months living in a tipi near Black Duck, MN, an hour away from where he grew up. Kramer's botanical mentor, Murray Buell, had a close professional partnership with his wife Helen Foot Buell. Similarly, my botanical mentor at the University of Michigan, Warren (Herb) Wagner, worked closely with his wife, Flora Wagner, whom I remember sitting in the room across the hall from his office, peering into a microscope. Many times I accompanied Wagner on his field trips in search of Botrychium ferns and butterflies. Like Kramer's two year tenure, it was my botanical interest that led me to Herrontown Woods, some 40 years later. I also date back to that early era of computers, having helped my father prepare his astronomical data for analysis in the room-sized computer in the attic at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. Each data point had to be typed onto a punch card about the size of an airline boarding pass. The cards were then carefully stacked and fed into the computer.1968 was a big year for Richard J. Kramer. He finished his dissertation at Rutgers, married Patricia Ann Cahill of Highland Park, NJ, and moved to Mary Baldwin College in Stanton, Virginia to teach and start a family.
Not only did Herrontown Woods provide the setting from which Richard J. Kramer's career could grow, but Oswald Veblen's role in early computer development (described here and here) helped make computers available for Kramer to do his research. In this quiet way, Oswald Veblen's influence can be traced far and wide.
The Dr. Richard J. Kramer, CEP, Memorial Award for Environmental Excellence was established by the ABCEP to recognize extraordinary achievements of individuals in the environmental profession.
Thanks to everyone mentioned above who helped me finally learn about the life of Richard J. Kramer and his profound influence, not only on Princeton in the 1960s but also nationally in his efforts to nurture the environmental profession in the decades that followed.
The "J", by the way, stands for John. Of the many people who have given their time and talent to studying and rehabilitating the Veblens' legacy of land and buildings, some make such special contributions that they seem like "angels in our midst." For his work at Herrontown Woods and beyond, Richard J. Kramer will always be our St. John.
Wonderful research and reconstruction; many thanks.
ReplyDeleteWonderful article everyone in Princeton should read. All the more reason to donate funds for the restoration of the Veblen House and protection of Herrontown Woods.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sally!
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ReplyDeleteGood job Steve! What a tremendous bit of research, you really told that story comprehensively. It would be great to find a grad student to repeat Kramer's painstaking work 50+ years later.
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