I was very sad to learn of Bud Tordoff's death (July 23, 2008) at the age of 85. He was a remarkable person.

You may wish to look at the obituary links [on the Intro comments page]. They tend to focus on the fact that he was "the heart and soul" of the peregrine falcon recovery project in our part of the country. They point out that he was one of the heroes of WWII, an ace fighter pilot.

The notices go too quickly over the fact that he was the director of the Bell Museum of Natural History from 1970-1983 and a member of the EEB faculty. I feel that I should insert a few words for the benefit of younger faculty (Is everyone younger than me?) and graduate students. Bud was one of the key people who helped lay the foundations for and subsequently helped build the EEB Department.

EEB (EBB) was originally crowded into the Bell Museum building on Church and University across from the Armory. In 1970 when Bud, Birney, Corbin, and I were hired EEB had essentially no budget of its own and was held together by "good will" so to speak. Well, actually we argued a lot, and so perhaps I should say it was held together by "common purpose" and mutual respect and the disagreements were understood to be honest disagreements. It was a collection of faculty from various departments who had been freed up by their administrators to explore if a new program could be built. The main reason that it was housed in the Bell Museum was the fact that John Tester and Don Siniff had a big training grant to develop methods to study animal behavior and ecology using radio telemetry and had transformed Cedar Creek into a buzzing operation with graduate students, post-docs, and visiting professors. John had had a long association with the Bell Museum and Dwayne Warner, Curator of Ornithology, had also been an inspiration in terms of the potential of Cedar Creek. Herb Wright's operation was nearby and some of his students and Shapiro's were housed with us.

The then Dean Richard Caldecott was trying to be helpful in making the collaboration work, and when he hired Bud, as Caldecott told me when I interviewed, he wanted to use the Museum and its academic resources to get the new Department going and make it first class. Bud necessarily cracked the whip and put most of his time into building the department and as our boss made sure that Birney, Corbin, and I did the same.

It was very difficult and it was a lot of work! Moreover, the building was really crowded as one can imagine, and the exhibits staff felt especially cramped and even neglected. Museum secretaries griped that they had to help EEB graduate students. Even such seemingly little things can take time and energy to deal with in a crowded community. And during those years there seemed to be endless agonizing budget cuts on top of everything else. Bud had constant figurative and literal headaches. He seemed to wear over those years, but he more than just hung in there. He had a forceful personality, and through force of personality he kept the EEB agenda on track while at the same time setting a high standard for integrity and example for the common good.

His daughter had just died as they were moving from Michigan to Minnesota in 1970 and I guess he held it in and put on a brave face, because friends back in Michigan said that he was in fact very torn up. Anyway, I would judge that he was under all sorts of pressures in his new job in a new community.

In the department, things held together impressively enough in terms of both intellectual purpose and personal interactions to convince the administration to give us true new salary lines and we began our first job search and hired Bob Taylor. Part of the department moved to the St. Paul campus for a short while and we all worked consciously hard to stay connected and enthusiastic despite the distance. It worked. So then we got the money to search for an outside Chairman and two Assistant Professors. This made it possible to hire Margaret Davis, then Trice Morrow and Dave Tilman and at about the same time most of the department consolidated in the old Zoology Building, and the rest is history. A lot of history, of course!

Back then in the early 1970s this was the Department of Ecology and Behavioral Biology -- note that evolution was not in the name! I think it was EBB. Bud's "drive" when he came in was to get everyone on the same page by recognizing the importance of evolution as a primary intellectual theme that would unify the diverse elements that had come together to try to form a department. Birney, Corbin, and I were hired as evolutionary biologists to help him pursue this theme.

He constantly made his point at every opportunity, at faculty meetings, informally, and programmatically and it was sometimes a struggle. But look, years later when it was proposed to include evolution in the name of the department as recognition of what had become a fact, no one thought this an odd idea and it breezed right through! Presto -- EEB.

We also need to credit Bud for helping us to get a Historian of Biology in EEB. The History of Science Program was looking around for a department that would be a welcome host for a faculty position whose salary they would pay. Believe it or not, in those days space and budgets were tight and there were not open arms around campus. Bud had scholarly instincts and loved the idea, though, and gave Malcolm Kottler office space, secretarial help, telephone, etc. out of the shrinking museum budget. Malcolm was a historian of evolutionary biology and he was incredibly stimulating, helpful, and generous with his time and all came to respect and love him and came to see how his perspectives could be valuable. Even the skeptics were won over. That opened the door so that it was next very easy to replace Malcolm with John Beatty when Malcolm moved back to Boston. Beatty did well and that in turn made it easy to place Mark Borrello and Susan Jones. They are wonderful additions to the department. It is not clear that they would be with us today if it was not for Bud's decision and advocacy of the idea back then.

Bud was more than an administrator. He knew birds and much ecology like the back of his hand. He was a treasure house of knowledge. He was a staunch advocate for organismal biology as well as ecology and evolution. He regularly drank coffee with the graduate students in the museum and talked with them endlessly about the real world of nature and professional matters. He challenged them to be careful and thoughtful observers. He was an avid hunter of birds (famous for woodcock as I recall), and talked more than would have been my own choice about hunting and dogs. But I must admit that even I learned perspectives that I still remember. He told me once that he could never hunt or kill mammals after his war experiences. It is ironic that so many remember him as a war hero, but he was not actually proud of the person he was then. "You know, I was young," he confided apologetically and with clear sadness. Bud seemed to me to be unusually honest with himself and that was one of the things that really impressed me about him. He was a gifted observer of animal behavior and ecology as I implied, and evidently of people because he sometimes came up with simply remarkable insights about individuals. I have the impression that he was also an usually good observer of his own inner self as well -- something that can take both intelligence and unusual courage. You might argue and disagree with Bud but you had to respect him as an intelligent human being with integrity and principles.

I don't want to leave anyone out in pointing out that he played a key and I believe essential role in getting the department off the ground; I only feel that we need to give Bud his due. But the fact is that it is very difficult for me to imagine that the solid foundations that allowed EEB to exist and flourish could have been possible without Bud's energy, determination, and leadership, along of course with critical contributions from others in those early years such as John Tester and Don Siniff and their vertebrate behavior/ecology group and Herb Wright and his paleontological and limnological group.

Phil Regal
University of Minnesota
28 July, 2008