Lloyd Herbert Shinners—A portrait

Abstract

Lloyd Herbert Shinners was born in Bluesky (population 16), near Waterhole in the Peace River country of northwestern Alberta, Canada, on September 22, 1918. He died in Dallas, Texas, on February 16, 1971, at the age of 52. He was buried in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Lloyd's father had taken his family from Wisconsin in 1907 to settle in the wilds of Alberta as a homesteader. When Lloyd was five years old, the family returned to Wisconsin where he received all of his formal education. However, before they left Alberta he had already become interested in nature to the extent, at his tender age, of planting a small garden plot surrounded by a high rail fence to keep out deer and other marauding animals. A picture exists showing young Lloyd standing proudly by his garden plot. In Milwaukee, at the age of 12, he was attaining some ability in his study of Latin and butterflies. During his grade-school years he played a cornet in the school band. As evidence of his brilliance, he graduated as Valedictorian in his class of about 2500 from the Lincoln High School. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1940. Lloyd remained at Madison for three more years while he obtained a Master's degree and his Ph.D. degree in 1943 under the supervision of Norman C. Fassett. After working for the Milwaukee County Park Board for a year as botanist, Lloyd moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1945 as a research assistant at Southern Methodist University. Soon after his arrival he was made Director of the University Herbarium, and in 1960 he attained his full professorship. Through his generosity, and under his enthusiastic supervision, the Southern Methodist University Botanical Library became one of the finest in southwestern United States, and the Herbarium grew to 340,000 specimens, without doubt the largest and one of the most complete herbaria in the United States south of St. Louis. He was the recipient of several grants from the Carnegie Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Since his bibliography of several hundred titles is to be published elsewhere, it is omitted here. Although his papers and writings were a gamut of the Plant Kingdom, he was especially attentive to the family Compositae, with which he was proficient. He founded in 1962 and published personally the botanical journal SIDA through its most recent No. 2 of Volume 4 (1971). He has three papers in the next issue of SIDA, to be published some time this year, which is to be continued by his friend and SMU colleague, W. F. Mahler. His major publication is the useful "Spring Flora of the Dallas-Fort Worth Area Texas," issued in 1958 as a part of his research project entitled "North Texas Flora." Perhaps his last major publication was his contribution of the family Convolvulaceae in Correll & Johnston's recently published "Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas." Lloyd's major research project in progress at the time of his death, and one on which he had worked for several years, was a "Gulf Coast Flora." He will be sorely missed by the colleagues with whom he was associated in the preparation of a new Flora of the Southeastern United States. Lloyd frequently injected into his scientific writings not only pungent witticisms of his own but also those of historical figures in botany. These remarks always added