George Happ

The first home I remember is a white farmhouse with massive American elms in the front yard. We lived on high ground, a mile from the Mississippi River in southwestern Illinois. Our backyard was an oak-hickory forested ravine where I was always vigilant for rattlesnakes and copperheads. We kept chickens, a Samoyed dog, and a Shetland pony.

To avoid losing sons in the Franco-Prussian war, my maternal great-grandfather (a physician in Pomerania) emigrated to claim a homestead in western Minnesota. As a young man, my grandfather moved to Lidgerwood, North Dakota where he prospered as banker and businessman. Although my grandfather had only a third grade education, he was well read and well-travelled all over continental USA, to Europe, and even to the Panama Canal while it was under construction.

After graduating from high school in Lidgerwood, my mother spent a year in Putnam Hall finishing school in Poughkeepsie, New York before enrolling in nearby Vassar College. Graduating with a major in physics, she declined doctoral scholarships at the University of California (Berkeley) and MIT to accept a position at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington. "Miss H G Movius" (pictured at the left in 1918) published the results of her research on the properties of high speed steels in 1919 (see Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering). In 1921, she moved to St. Louis to teach mathematics at the Principia School, and a decade later became Registrar at the Principia College until retirement in 1963.

My paternal grandfather owned a bakery business in Port Jervis, NY.  After service in WWI, my father earned his Bachelor's and Master's degree in biology from Cornell University. He joined the staff of the Principia School in the mid-20's and later obtained his doctorate in taxonomic botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden (Washington University). He founded the biology department at the Principia College and served as its Chair until his retirement in 1958. He was active in several national societies, including service as the founding chair of the Committee on Human Ecology for the Ecological Society of America.

Elsah, Illinois, where Principia College is located, was a town of 175 people on the Mississipi River . The two-room school building, serving 46 students in eight grades, was built of limestone quarried from bluffs along the river.

To save gasoline during World War II, I rode a pony three miles to Elsah school. The pony was pastured for the day in the back schoolyard, next to a 30-foot mound of pans, cans, discarded tools, and other scrap metal donated by villagers to the War Effort.

On many school days in 1942-45, we practiced overhead silhouette recognition so that all students could readily distinguish American fighters and bombers from German and Japanese ones. Sometimes I wistfully longed for an opportunity to test my skills on actual Axis intruders, but all the planes flying in our midwestern skies were tediously American.

Miss Marie Roach taught grades 1-3 (downstairs) and Mrs. Mayme Reisner, grades 4-8 (upstairs). Ten minutes was allocated to every subject in each grade, starting with the youngest students and proceeding on to the upper grades. I thank Linc Rhoads for the picture (to the right) of the entire 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade student population in October 1947.

I spent my high school years as a boarding student at Principia High School in St. Louis. While at Principia College, I majored in biology (natural history and ecology), minored in political science, served on the editorial board of the campus newspaper, and was director of the annual Public Affairs Conference. My fondest memories are of informal student-faculty "bull sessions" when we analyzed authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, Henry Kissinger, Niko Tinbergen, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Kenneth Rexroth, and David Riesman.  

• Principia College, Elsah, Illinois: 
• Bachelor of Science, 1958 (Biology).  
• Senior Honors Thesis: An ethogram of the American Robin 
• Cornell University :  
• Doctor of Philosophy, 1964, in Animal Physiology with Thomas Eisner.  
• Doctoral committee included Howard Schneiderman, Ari van Tienhoven, William Dilger, and William Brown.  Howard E. Evans was an informal adviser.
• Postdoctoral research in Organic Chemistry with Jerrold Meinwald, 1964-65. 
• University of California San Diego: Participant in NSF-UCSD Workshop in Molecular Techniques for Developmental Biology, 1974.