7:30, Thursday April 16th
On Zoom (Link Below)

Dr. Samuel Ristich (1915-2008) was a beloved figure in the mycological community for nearly four decades. He was born in Pittsburgh, PA and grew up in a Serbian-American family in Aliquippa. From boyhood he studied bird life and collected insects. He attended Slippery Rock State College and gained his Ph.D. at Cornell University. An entomologist by training and pest control scientist by profession, Sam forged a unique path in a post-retirement career as an independent scholar and charismatic educator in the study of mushrooms. While best remembered as an educator and mycologist, Sam was a celestial navigator during World War II, a civil rights activist, and discoverer of a bird thought to be extinct for over 300 years. With the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research he helped to lead one of the first environmental studies of the Hudson River. Sam was driven by a passion for teaching the intricacies of biological systems not only to advance critical thinking about nature but for social improvement and environmental conservation. He stimulated the founding of four mycology clubs and is memorialized today by the annual Samuel Ristich Foray of the Northeast Mycological Federation. This illustrated lecture by David Rose will explore Sam’s life in science and nature study.

David Rose is Archivist of the New Rochelle Public Library. He is a writer, amateur mycologist, and past president of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA). His work as an archivist began at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden where he organized the papers of world-renown botanists and mycologists including Nathaniel Lord Britton, Arthur Cronquist, and Clark Rogerson. As a consulting archivist he has organized the records of the North American Mycological Association and the Charles Horton Peck Papers of the New York State Museum. David is a contributing editor to the journal Fungi; his column “Notes from Underground” has explored “the mycologically strange” with such essays as The Pilzbefallen, The Stinkhorn Monologue, Cryptogrammic Cryptogams, and The Kolyma Psychosis. David is also author of the book Friends and Partners: The Legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Basil O’Connor in the History of Polio.