Henry Carl Aldrich (1941-2005): odyssey of a myxomycetologist

Abstract

Henry Carl Aldrich (FIG. 1) was born in Beaumont, Texas, 17 Feb 1941. His parents were landowners and rice farmers in southeastern Texas, but in his lifetime the land and the sale of rice allotments became more profitable than planting rice. He died 11 Aug 2005 in Gainesville, Florida, of a heart attack that occurred while he was in the hospital being treated for kidney disease. Henry’s mycological interests became established early, when he was an undergraduate working in the laboratory of Dr C. J. Alexopoulos at the University of Texas. He received a B.S. degree in botany and continued as a doctoral student under the direction of Dr Alexopoulos. When he defended his thesis at age 24 he was the youngest of any of the Alexopoulos PhDs at the time of the defense. His degree was awarded in 1966. Henry found a tenure-track job immediately and moved to the University of Florida. He remained there the rest of his career, although he later moved from the Department of Botany to the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science. At the time of his death as professor emeritus his broad research interests were listed on the department Website as ‘‘ultrastructure of bacteria, fungi and plants; ultrastructure of olfactory organs of crustaceans; cytochemical and immunogold localization of enzymes in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.’’ As a mycologist Henry took off quickly and soon was known for his basic research on developmental ultrastructure of slime mold life cycle stages. Trained in the 1960s, when transmission electron microscopy was a discipline rather than a technique, Henry went to annual MSA meetings with a stack of micrographs; the rest of us learned about networking only years later. At meetings when everyone stayed in dorms, evenings were spent in lobbies with like-minded microscopists for show-and-tell sessions that were even more intense than discussions of phylogenetic trees are today. Henry knew the latest literature and his micrographs were of the highest quality, produced in a lab where he always tinkered to obtain amazing results. He adapted new techniques he read about with Rube Goldberg-engineered equipment. Toward this end I remember the day we wrestled with a second-hand electron microscope bought at a bargain-basement price and moved from Tallahassee to Gainesville in a moving van. The fact that the microscope did not fit into the freight elevator did not faze Henry, and he found a group of students and postdocs to move the bulky instrument up two flights of stairs on a weekend when no one was around to question his actions. Henry liked immediate action, and rather than fill out a work order he went in on a Sunday to cut a length out of legs of the mistakenly installed tall benches in his new lab, so they could be used more comfortably for light microscopy. In my three years as a postdoc at Florida Henry modified several microscopes, photographic enlargers, film holders and freeze-etch machines. Sometimes these were minor modifications involving cardboard, but in other cases wrenches, saws and soldering tools were used. An article that appeared only 6 mo before his death in Microscopy Today (March 2005), ‘‘Inexpen-