GEORGE KONSTANTIN BRIZICKY, A PERSONAL EVALUATION

Abstract

George K. Brizicky arrived in the United States of America about the middle of this century having been wanderer for most of his adult life. Born in Nikolaiew, Ukrainia, in 1901, he fled his native land at an early age because of political differences. His university training was in Czechoslovakia where he attended schools in Brno and Bratislava ultimately receiving the degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences from the Slovakian University, Bratislava, in 1941. Caught in Czechoslovakia during the melee of the Second World War, Brizicky sought university life once more following the holocaust and he taught at the UNRRA University and at the Ukrainian Technical University in Munich between 1945 and 1950. He achieved the deanship of the pharmaceutical faculty at the latter institution in 1950. Then, looking for a brighter life in which to practise his art and science, he migrated to the United States with his wife Anna to begin again in New York City. But it was hard for a foreign biologist, speaking poor English, to become situated in his chosen field, and George Brizicky took what work he could get. As he told me, at one time he worked in a factory making plastic cases for radios and another time he was employed in making matches. In 1954, when looking for someone to help with the taxonomic and curatorial aspects of work in the Record Memorial Collection of Woods at the Yale University School of Forestry, I came across Brizicky's name in a placement service directory. After a personal interview, he was hired to work with me and there followed a fruitful collaboration of six years. Brizicky, the dendrologist, studied woody plants from the taxonomic standpoint; I did the same from the anatomical viewpoint. We pooled our resources and knowledge toward the solution of anatomic-taxonomic problems in the dicotyledons. Resulting were papers on the woody plants of the Florida Keys, the taxonomic status of Heteropyxis, and the position of Diomma, gen. inc. sed., among others. This collaboration continued until recent times through our investigation of the taxonomic relationships and anatomy of the Columelliaceae. In 1960, when I left the Yale School of Forestry to accept a position at the Smithsonian Institution, George Brizicky was forced to leave Yale since there were no longer funds to retain his services there. The problem of a new position for Brizicky was not to be solved easily since the opportunities for a person of his background were quite limited at the time. Fortunately, a project for a study of the generic flora of the southeastern United States was then underway at Harvard University and a place was available for a collaborator. This post admirably fitted Brizicky's talents and he was taken on to the staff at Harvard where he spent almost eight years working with Dr. Carroll Wood and others on the many problems concerned with this generic-floristic investigation. A series of reports issued from Brizicky's desk dealing with these southeastern United States plants. Closely related was another series of papers in which Brizicky sought to unravel the many taxonomic twistings and bibliographic conundrums which constantly came to light while he was pursuing his main theme on the genera. Brizicky was an indefatigable field man. Although 25 years my senior, it was he who often exercised more vigor than I in collecting herbarium specimens and wood samples on the Florida Keys during the summer of 1956. He had the camel-like