Apr 21, 1916 - Sep 15, 2002

Bayard Harlow McConnaughey. During visit to Woody Williams in Dickerson, Maryland, 1980's
 

Bayard McConnaughey: UO professor, peace activist dies at 86 

A memorial service will be held Sept. 28 for Bayard McConnaughey, a retired University of Oregon biology professor and community activist who died Sept. 15 from diabetes and prostate cancer. He was 86. 

Eugene civil rights advocate Marion Malcolm described McConnaughey as "a man of conviction, commitment, action and ironic wit." Others who knew him described him as a peace activist, environmentalist and human rights activist, as well as a respected biology teacher. 

He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and received his Ph.D. in 1948 from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the UO faculty in 1949 and taught 37 years before retiring in 1986. 

From 1942 to 1946, he served in the Army at the Central Pacific Area Medical Laboratory in Honolulu. But during the past 20 years he was at the UO he was a persistent critic of the military and was the chief sponsor of a proposal to remove the Reserve Officer Training Corps program from campus. 

Largely through McConnaughey's efforts, the UO faculty vigorously debated the status of the ROTC program more than a dozen times between the mid-1960s and the year he retired. 

He argued that the program was not compatible with other UO programs because it was under the control of the U.S. Department of Defense and because the university had no control over the ROTC curriculum. 

In one of the faculty debates on the issue in the winter of 1986, he argued that ROTC was "counterproductive in every way to the true purpose of a university." 

More recently, McConnaughey spoke out in opposition to plans to build an Army National Guard armory across from Lane Community College. 

He and his wife, Evelyn, were frequent contributors to the Letters to the Editor column in The Register-Guard, where he most recently criticized property tax breaks for the Hynix computer chip plant in west Eugene and PeaceHealth's decision to build a new hospital on the northern edge of the Eugene-Springfield area. 

McConnaughey was born April 21, 1916, in Pittsburgh to Harlow and Hattie Cherryman McConnaughey. He married Evelyn Shirck in Twin Falls, Idaho, on June 26, 1949. 

He lived in Bogor, Indonesia, from 1963 to 1966. His interests included birdwatching, hiking and working for world peace. 

He was a member of the Unitarian Church, Friends of Eugene and the Eugene Natural History Society. He became a member of Phi Beta Kappa national scholastic honorary while enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Survivors include his wife; three sons, William of St. Louis, and Edward and John, both of Yakima, Wash.; two daughters, Diane McConnaughey of Boise and Rebecca Gile of Anchorage; and six grandchildren. 

The memorial service will be at the Unitarian Church at 477 E. 40th Ave. in Eugene. Memorial contributions can be sent to the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, P.O. Box 1344, Depoe Bay, OR 97341, to Friends of Eugene, P. …

Bayard McConnaughey Memorial 
by Nathan Tublitz

Kind, gentle, caring, principled, with a unique joy and respect for everything biological. That is the Bayard those of us in the Biology Department and Eugene Natural History Society knew and loved. Perhaps the best way to honor Bayard's life and numerous contributions is listen to his own words, excerpted from autobiographical notes published 18 years ago in the Jan 1984 Eugene Natural History Society Newsletter, with some added commentary.

"My earliest memories are of Benzonia, a small rural village in northern Michigan, to which my mother moved with her father and three small children following the death of my father. My most vivid memories of this period are of tramping through the woods with my grandfather to go fishing at Casey's pond of the wonder I felt at the beauty and mystery of the fish, frogs, turtles, and snakes at the pond's edge. My excitement was unbounded upon finding one day the beautiful green and gold chrysalis of a monarch butterfly. My mother encouraged me to keep it to see what might happen. I cannot adequately express the amazement and awe I felt when a big beautiful monarch butterfly emerged from it.

"It was during this period that I began to take on large projects and persist in them for long periods. The two I remember best: 1) I was going to level all hills and uneven places in the world so there would be no impediments in riding my tricycle; and 2) I was going to empty Crystal Lake a 9 mile lake nearby Benzonia by bailing it out with a tin can which I emptied a few steps up the beach. My older sister expressed doubts that I would complete either project but that did not deter me." Tenaciousness and focus were qualities that Bayard carried throughout his life, in his work, in his activism, and in his devotion and love for his family.

"When I was 7 we moved to Claremont, California then a nice place not yet Los Angelized. Here I began to collect insects and to maintain a menagerie of lizards, snakes, salamanders, scorpions, and spiders in our back yard. It was also at 7 that I first saw the ocean an utterly new world to me. This made such a lasting impression that as soon as I got out of high school I enrolled in the summer session at the tiny one-man marine station of Pomona College at Laguna Beach. This was so thrilling that I went six summers in a row - the last two as an instructor. I have been hanging around marine stations ever since."

Bayard's love of the marine environment was infectious - numerous students have said that the single best experience of their undergraduate education was the day they went tidepooling with Bayard. Bayard's "Marine Biology" book was a major textbook in his field for 2 decades, used by 1000's of students in 100's of classes across the country and internationally as well.

"I took my master's degree at the University of Hawaii and then became, of all things, a camouflage engineer for the US Engineering Department in Honolulu, with no previous engineering experience of any sort. After induction into the army I was assigned to the 'Fighting 65th Engineers' as a camouflage man."

That such a principled man of peace would be assigned to the 'Fighting 65th Engineers,' a unit that did no fighting, was a stroke of divine genius.

"When the Central Pacific Medical Labs was formed, I managed to get transferred to it and spent the rest of the war as a technician in the bacteriology and parasitology sections."

Bayard's wartime lab experience formed the basis for his outstanding expertise in bacteriology and parasitology. This background lead him to his world renown research on mesozoans, primitive multicellular organisms that live inside octopus and their kin.

"In spite of my efforts, we managed to win the war and I returned to graduate studies at Scripps Institute of Oceanography at La Jolla. Upon completion, I accidentally stumbled into a job at the Univ. of Oregon."

Bayard came to the UO Biology Department in 1948. In those days, the Marine Station at Charleston was jointly operated by OSU and UO, and Bayard quickly became a mainstay there. In 1952, the Marine Station was closed for 3 years due to lack of funds; fortunately Bayard successfully petitioned the State to reopen the station in 1955, and was its acting director from 1956 to 1957. He taught there for many years afterwards and was known as a living encyclopedia of all knowledge marine.

"I've been here at the U of O ever since with two notable diversions. The first was a three year leave of absence to help set up and teach in the Faculty of Fisheries in Bogor, Java, Indonesia."

Evelyn and Bayard were free-spirits in the best tradition. The morning of their departure from Eugene to spend several years in Bogor, the McConnaughey family were picked up by a close friend who noticed Evelyn frantically throwing clothes into suitcases. As she finally finished packing, Evelyn turned to Bayard and said "I told you we should have packed last night."

"During my final year in Bogor, there was a communist coup, a counter campaign by the army in which 500,000 people died, inflation was at 100% per day for a time, and Sukarno was overthrown all while I was the last American in Bogor."

The political and social upheaval in Indonesia forced Bayard to send his family away that third year, yet Bayard stayed on to keep the Faculty of Fisheries afloat in spite of the obvious personal dangers.

"The other adventure was a semester with World Campus Afloat in 1974, visiting 14 countries and teaching marine biology and ecology while at sea. My wife and two daughters were also along - it was a wonderful way to see the world!"

Bayard was completely devoted to his family. He took them everywhere and did everything with them. One student, Larry Oglesby, reports that Bayard let his children draw on the blackboard during his lectures. And Bayard and Evelyn were a team in the truest and deepest sense of the word. They did everything, went everywhere together.

In the early 80's while at the Marine Station, Evelyn wrote a seaweed cookbook. For her cookbook, she developed all sorts of exotic recipes mixing seaweed and other more normal ingredients together, and tested all of them on Bayard, who uncomplainingly ate every seaweed-containing dish, no matter how unusual. One exotic recipe was rhubarb and Nereocystis (Bullwhip Kelp) pie - but Bayard took it all in, literally, as a show of respect for the love of his life, Evelyn.

"I have always kept my biology near the hobby level, so as to enjoy it thoroughly. My tendency to persist in large improbable projects has however stayed with me. For the past 30 years my major project, aside from biology, has been to rid the world of everything military."

Perhaps my sister was right - the world still has some bumps on its surface that are difficult to negotiate on a tricycle (the Himalayas, Alps, Andes, Rockies and Cascades to name a few). Crystal Lake is still unemptied and my advancing years and present world trends suggest that I may not get the world completely demilitarized in my time either. In fact I haven't even succeeded in demilitarizing the University of Oregon!"

Bayard wrote that in 1984. In 1986, after nearly 20 years of sustained effort, Bayard finally succeeded in having ROTC removed from campus.

Kind, gentle, caring, principled, with a unique joy and respect for everything biological. That's the Bayard I knew. And I, the ENHS, UO Biology Department, Eugene and the world are much better off for having known, lived with and learned from this remarkable man.

~ Nathan, a many time past president of the ENHS as well as a University and Community activist, gave this eulogy at Bayard's memorial service, Saturday, September 28, at The Unitarian Church of Eugene and Lane Counties. Bayard's text in its entirety, as he wrote it for Nature Trails in 1984, has been included on the following pages. This "remarkable man's" words will delight all who read them.