22 Facts About Ed Ricketts

Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher.

Ed Ricketts had a younger sister Frances and a younger brother Thayer.

Ed Ricketts spent most of his childhood in Chicago, except for a year in South Dakota when he was age 10.

Ed Ricketts hated the military bureaucracy, but according to John Steinbeck, "was a successful soldier".

Ed Ricketts then spent several months walking through the American south, from Indiana to Florida.

Ed Ricketts used material from this trip to publish an article in Travel magazine titled "Vagabonding Through Dixie".

Ed Ricketts returned to Chicago and studied some more at the university.

In 1922, Ed Ricketts met and married Anna Barbara Makar, daughter of Croatian immigrants- Marija Piskuric and Miho Makar.

In 1924, Ed Ricketts became sole owner of the lab, and soon two daughters were born: Nancy Jane on November 28,1924, and Cornelia on April 6,1928.

In late 1930 Ed Ricketts met aspiring writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol, who had moved to Pacific Grove earlier in the year.

Steinbeck spent time at the lab, learning marine biology, helping Ed Ricketts preserve specimens and talking about philosophy.

Ed Ricketts played music for Steinbeck until he could bear to come back to himself.

Ed Ricketts lost nearly everything, including an extraordinary amount of correspondence, research notes, manuscripts, and his prized library, which had held everything from invaluable scientific resources to his beloved collection of poetry.

Also in 1940, Ed Ricketts began a relationship with Eleanor Susan Brownell Anthony "Toni" Solomons Jackson, who became his common-law wife.

Jackson and her young daughter Katherine Adele moved in with Ed Ricketts and lived with him until 1947.

Ed Ricketts himself read Cannery Row with exasperation, by all accounts, but ended saying simply that it could not be criticized because it had not been written with malice.

Just a few weeks later, Ed Ricketts met Alice Campbell, a music and philosophy student half his age.

On previous trips Ed Ricketts had done most of the needed research and he gave Steinbeck the typescripts for these as he had done previously with The Sea of Cortez.

Ed Ricketts was among a few marine biologists who studied intertidal organisms in an ecological context.

Some concepts that Ed Ricketts used in Between Pacific Tides were novel then and ignored by some in academia.

Ed Ricketts pursued pathfinding studies in quantitative ecology, analyzing the Monterey sardine fishery.

The research Ed Ricketts did on sardines was a seminal application of ecology to fisheries science, but it was not published as an academic paper.