The Life of Dr. Donald M. Tuttle Entomologist

I discovered something really priceless online yesterday evening when I was doing a search for Dr. Tuttle's obituary.

I found an interview of Doc that was done by the Arizona College of Agriculture and the Arizona Historical Society Oral History program. In this interview he describes his entire life, including his work with 4-Hers. Something that he never talked to me about was his early childhood experiences with his mentor and entomology, which were almost exactly the same as my initial experiences with him.

For those of you that didn't already know... I was absolutely convinced that I would become an entomologist until I was about 18 years old. I joined 4-H with Doc as my 4-H leader in 1980 at the age of nine. I continued studying insects during high school in FFA, (Future Farmers of America) and then I worked for 2 years as a research assistant for the UofA Cooperative Extension Service in my hometown. A full summer of counting and separating thousands (maybe more) of frozen leaf hoppers into piles by species with a fine tipped water color brush changed all that. I'm still very much in a long-term, committed relationship with the study of living insects, their ways of living in the world, their communication techniques, societal make-ups, group dynamics, natural adaptations, etc. (If you need any proof of that - just check out the Skunkroot's Stompin' Grounds blog)

Here is the link to the .pdf file with the "Doc" interview:

http://www.ag.arizona.edu/alumni/oralhistory/DTuttle.PDF

And to the HTML version:

HTML Version of "Doc" Tuttle Interview