Mary Anne Heimerdinger Clench, an AOU member (), Elected Member (), and Fellow (), was born on January in Louisville, Kentucky, and died on June in Gainesville, Florida. As a child, Mary, her older sister, Alice, and their parents Henry and Alice Heimerdinger moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where her father was public relations director for National Distillery—no doubt a challenging job during Prohibition. Mary seemed to have received her self-confidence from her father and her love of the outdoors from her mother, an avid gardener. Mary’s love of birds, however, was fostered by a series of mentors. Her high school biology teacher in Manhasset, Jesse V. Miller, was an active bander who involved his students in bird banding. After working with Miller for four years, Mary obtained her own banding permit and joined the Eastern Bird Banding Association in . Miller also loaned her his copy of Margaret Morse Nice’s Watcher at the Nest, which she said “clinched” her choice of a career. She chose Wheaton College for her undergraduate education because they offered a course in ornithology. In , she graduated from Wheaton (where she was a member of the synchronized swim team) with a B.A. in Biology. Her ornithology professor, Clinton V. McCoy, encouraged her to go on to graduate school. She joined the AOU and began graduate school at Yale, working first with S. Dillon Ripley and later with Philip S. Humphrey. At Yale she earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. The project for her first M.S. (), “The population increase of the Northern Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus abieticola (Bangs) in New England,” did not result in a thesis, but in a report that was never published. Her second M.S. () was a non-thesis degree in Biology. Her Ph.D. dissertation (), “A study of morphological variation in the dorsal and ventral pterylae of Passeriformes,” was published in part in The Auk (, :–). The Auk 129(4):787−788, 2012 © The American Ornithologists’ Union, 2012. Printed in USA.