Volume 20, Number 4,
April 1974:
With These Two Hands

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN

IN THIS ISSUE
- section 1
- section 2
- section 3
- section 4
- section 5
- section 6
- section 7
- section 8
- section 9
- section 10
- conclusion

With These Two Hands
by Robert J.Boles

continued...

This trip to the Kansas Academy of Science meeting in Manhattan proved to be one of the first of a series of steps that led to his employment by the Biology Department of Kansas State Teachers College at Emporia. It was at a meeting of the Kansas Ornithological Society, of which he is a charter member, and which was meeting in conjunction with the Kansas Academy, that he met Drs. John Breukelman and Ted Andrews, of the Kansas State Teachers College, the tow men who were instrumental in his entrance into full time college employment.

On the way home from the meeting a torrential rainstorm occurred. His driver took one look at the bottomless mud road to Richard’s home and detoured over a graveled road to the northeast corner of the farm, where Richard was let out a good three-fourths of a mile from the house. Since he could not afford to ruin his best go-to-church suit and shoes, he left his clothes in the car and walked home barefoot, clothed only in his shorts. As he braced himself against the wind and walked off into the cold rain, he heard one of the people in the car shout, "Tell your wife you played poker with us on the way home!"

It was in Wichita at the Kansas Ornithological Meeting in 1956 that Dr. Ted Andrews approached Richard about the possibility of preparing specimens for the Kansas State Teachers College Biology Department at Emporia, Kansas. As a result, he was issued and invitation to come to Emporia and be interviewed for possible employment as the curator of the Kansas State Teachers Natural History Museum. At the college Dr. Andrews received him courteously, and offered Richard temporary employment at $250 a month in the Biology Department, which he accepted without bargaining for more pay. Later he took a Civil Service examination and was put on permanent status.

Richard had always been disappointed with the taxidermy instruction books that he had seen. Steps were not clearly explained or were incomplete, and the illustrations did not serve their purpose as teaching aids. For years he thought about writing his own taxidermy text, but it wasn’t until about 1945 that he made his first attempt to write bird-mounting instructions. This ambitious undertaking was soon abandoned as being too difficult. Twenty-five years later he discovered the long forgotten, unfinished manuscript among a group of old papers.

In the spring of 1956, after he joined the Kansas State Teachers College Biology Department as taxidermy instructor, his teaching duties again stirred the long dormant desire to write a practical set of taxidermy instructions, based upon his many years of experience in the field. It is interesting that his daughter Kathryn did most of the sketches that appear in the later revision of his taxidermy manual