Thanks, Dr. Benninghoff.

My mother's graduate advisor was a man named Dr. Benninghoff. (I met him twice...once, he and his wife invited all of us to their house for lunch when we were up visiting relatives in that part of the world, and then, a second time, not that long before his death, they were down in Illinois where my parents lived, and we all went out for dinner together.)

Oh, wait, I also discussed "contingency plans" with him after being asked to leave the first graduate program I was in. He was long-retired by then but still had an office on campus.

He was a kind man and someone who seemed to look out for students. After he died, his wife went through all his stuff (academics have a way of accumulating LOTS of publications, both books and journals). She asked if I wanted a donation of his back numbers of Ecology (which stretch back to 1954, and terminated around 1980 or so). My first thought was to donate them to the library here...but then I decided to keep the collection together, on shelves in my department. I'm glad I did. On several occasions there's been a "classic" paper that I needed or that a student needed and I could say, "Give me a minute, I'll go make you a copy."

Yes, I know lots of thing are online and JSTOR has a database of all the old Ecologies....but to subscribe to them is prohibitively expensive, at least for the Ecology database. So doing it the old-fashioned way still works best here.

Today, I found I wanted to look at an old Victor Shelford article about Mississippi floodplain forests that another author I'm reading referred to. It was published in 1954...so I went down to look for it and hoped.

Well, bless Dr. Benninghoff again (and bless Anne, his widow, for being so organized). The issue was there, right in the box where it was supposed to be. So I have that article available to me.

I'm really glad I was smart enough to accept the offer of these; they may take up a lot of space but they have been useful. In some fields "old" articles aren't very useful, but in ecology many of them are.