Robert Kingston Vickery, Jr.—In Memoriam

Abstract

Dr. Robert Kingston Vickery, Jr., emeritus professor in the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Utah, passed away at age 99 on 20 July 2022 in Salt Lake City with his wife of 71 years, Marcia Hoak Vickery, in attendance. His life was filled with adventure, accomplishment, and love. He was born in Saratoga, California, to Robert Kingston Vickery, Sr., and Ruth Bacon Vickery on 18 September 1922—the oldest child and only son; he had 2 younger sisters, Mary and Ruth. Bob started school in Europe, with stops in England, France, and Italy, where his father was assigned to grow Cal Spray, the company he worked for. When Bob was in first grade at a Montessori-type school in Rome, he showed an early love for plants by growing flowers, vegetables, and other plants in a planter box, rather than tending to more traditional subjects. Returning to the Bay Area of California when he was 7, Bob completed primary and secondary schools and entered college at Stanford, with a class or two at University of California, Berkeley. He emphasized architecture, science, and engineering. When World War II intervened, Bob enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he was trained in meteorology and communications, was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant, and received an A.B. degree in civil engineering (February 1944) from Stanford, with his Air Corps training contributing to the graduation requirements. After some brief stateside postings, he was sent to Hickam Field in Hawaii in the Army Airways Communication System, and then as a new 1st lieutenant to Iwo Jima, where from his arriving ship he saw the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Mt. Suribachi. He was the officer in charge of control towers on Iwo Jima, and he built the first one out of scrap materials. At the end of the war, he came home on a stretcher as a victim of tuberculosis and spent a year recovering in hospitals and at home, during which time he decided to do experimental work with plants as a career. To that end he enrolled at Stanford and completed an M.A. (1948) in which he studied roadside plantings. He then undertook a Ph.D. (1952) at Stanford as well. His dualmajor professors for his doctorate were Dr. Ira L. Wiggins (e.g, see Shreve and Wiggins 1964, Wiggins 1980, and Wiggins and Porter 1971), a renowned classical plant taxonomist, and Dr. Jens C. Clausen (e.g., see Clausen 1951), a pioneering Danish American genecologist with appointments at both the Carnegie Institution of Science and Stanford University. Bob learned a great deal from both of them and other faculty. It turns out that just prior to Bob’s graduate studies, an international group of geneticists met at Carnegie Mather Field Station in the Sierra Nevada and attempted to identify a plant species that could serve as an interdisciplinary experimental organism in genetic studies, much as the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) had served as an animal model. The group suggested that the monkeyflower Western North American Naturalist 82(3), © 2022, pp. 616–624