Five Eastern Peach Breeders

Abstract

HORTSCIENCE VOL. 41(1) FEBRUARY 2006 the Rutgers Vegetable Farm. Appropriately, she attended Douglas College (now part of Rutgers University) and received a BS. In the 1940s she began working as a technician in the breeding program of Maurice Blake, who was nearing the end of his career as stone-fruit breeder at Rutgers. She kept the program running between breeders, as Fred Hough arrived in 1948. At that time the main crops were peach and apple. Hough encouraged her to get a PhD at Rutgers in fruit breeding, which she fi nished in 1957 (dissertation: “Inheritance of Season of Ripening in Progenies from Certain Early Ripening Peach Cultivars and Selections”), making her the only female faculty member in the department. On paper she headed stone fruit and Hough headed pome fruit, but in practice it was a team effort. Hough (discussed further under apples) was the visionary and traveler, while she was content to work more in the background. They began breeding nectarine and apricot to develop new industries for the state, although the apricot releases such as ‘OrangeRed’ have been more successful in Europe than at home; the New Jersey industry is still modest, awaiting further improvement in cultivar adaptation (Bailey, 1971; Mehlenbacher, 1986). The Nectared series of nectarines provided adapted cultivars but, again, the climate keeps the industry small. In the peach breeding program, the use of embryo culture allowed advances in earliness. The large germplasm collection provided raw material for new types, resulting in fi rm, white peaches and fl at peaches such as ‘Saturn’. With a large crew of graduate students (one of the biggest worldwide legacies of this project), there were many crosses and selections made, resulting in important cultivars released such as ‘Encore’ and ‘Jerseyland’ (Mehlenbacher, 1986). Equally important were the large populations that were generated and thousands of seed sent around the world to help other breeders. When John Weinberger retired from U.S. Department of Agriculture–Fresno in 1973, she applied for his position. Although clearly well-qualifi ed, she was not selected in favor of one of her students, David Ramming, perhaps refl ecting the diffi culties facing a woman scientist in those days. Bailey was very dedicated to the research and well-suited to be the glue that held the project together. She was a highly organized, no-nonsense worker, not prone to jumping rows as her partner did when something exciting appeared a few rows over. She often out-worked her graduate students, getting by on sips of her lemonade rather than gallons of water. Her passions off the job were the Baptist church, photography, and bird-watching. As she worked the rows in the orchard, she could identify many of the birds by song. She Five Eastern Peach Breeders W.R. Okie U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Southeastern Fruit and Tree Nut Research Laboratory, 21 Dunbar Road, Byron, GA 31008