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Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 34(2), 1980, 98-100
HARRY KENDON CLENCH, IN THE FOUNDING OF THE LEPIDOPTERISTS' SOCIETY
Charles L. Remington
Dept. of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520
Harry Clench has, for more than thirty-five years, been one of the most supportive and warmly interactive American lepidopterists in this century. His early passing means the sad ending of his encouragement and expert advice for the circle of lepidopterists in the Pittsburgh region who could visit with him in person regularly, and for the very large number of correspondents who had the good fortune to receive in the mail his occasional bonanzas of fascinating answers and ideas.
Harry's point of view on interchanges between lepidopterists was never more productive than in 1946 and 1947 when he and I worked out the organization of the Lepidopterists' Society and produced the early issues of the News. As his brief and very nice foreword to the recent Society Commemorative Volume makes clear, he and I were in total agreement on the guiding principle of the new Society's operation, as stated in our letter of 24 March 1947 inviting 325 lepidopterists to join:
". . . facilitating the exchange of specimens and ideas by both the professional worker and the interested amateur in the field."
Harry's foreword tells some of the early story, but there is much more of importance, and I would like to add a little more background now. As Harry reported, his father William J. Clench and my father P. Sheldon Remington were youthful collecting pals in the Boston area. There was a third friend, Kendall W. Foster, who often joined them in collecting trips for Lepidoptera and for mollusk shells. The three were proteges of Charles W. Johnson, the noted zoology curator at the Boston Society of Natural History, and they got their advice on collecting locales and techniques from Mr. Johnson and regularly went to him for help in identifying their specimens. It was fitting that when Bill and Julie Clench chose a middle name for their first-born son, Harry, they produced a fusion, "Kendon," from the names of Kendall Foster and Sheldon Remington. Just think, Harry might have carried Remster, Foston, Sheldall, or even Shelster instead of Kendon! W. J. Clench became a widely respected curator of malacology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, P. S. Remington became a preparatory school headmaster and teacher of mathematics, Latin, and biology at the Principia and Daycroft
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Schools, and K. W. Foster also went into prep school teaching of biology, at the Groton School. Only Dr. Foster gave up specimen collecting, for the study of marine fish coloration. Harry's father and mine not only stayed in close touch, they actually went on at least two mollusk-collecting expeditions together, especially aimed at getting a substantial research collection of freshwater mollusks from the swift rivers in the Tennessee Valley that were about to be disastrously altered by the great series of T.V.A. dams. Some of the mollusks are now extinct, and that magnificent Clench-Remington collection is mainly divided between the museums of the Universities of Michigan and Yale. Harry and I were too young to join these trips in the late twenties, but I'm sure he heard a lot about Shel, and I certainly heard many tales of Bill. Our first direct contact came by mail when we found that each of us by incredible coincidence began our publishing almost simultaneously with papers on species of the same small genus of Blue butterflies. His was "A new race of Hemiargus for the Bahamas," apparently published in late December 1941. Mine was "The distribution of Hemiargus isola (Reakirt) east of the Mississippi River," published early in 1942!
So in June of 1946, when I was to arrive with my new Californian bride in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after my three years of military service as a medical entomologist, it was natural that my father wrote to his Cambridge friend Bill Clench for help with our apartment hunting. Harry came home from military service with his French bride at about the same time, and of course we immediately became close friends. The senior Clenches were wonderfully hospitable, and on many weekends Jeanne and I were evening guests in their home. Harry and I were soon incubating plans for the birth of the Lepidop-terists' Society (which we at first called "The Lepidopterists' Union"). Harry accurately recalled these steps in his foreword, mentioned above. I don't remember that one of us first thought of the idea of a society and then convinced the other. Probably we had both mused on it before we met, like the accident of our simultaneously doing manuscripts on Hemiargus with no shared knowledge.
Due to my intensive Ph.D. program at Harvard, we had to work nights and weekends on the organizing, and on the writing, mimeographing, and mailing of the News, and when Harry began serious studies at the University of Michigan several months after the News was started, his move forced him to give up all regular work on the News and Society. But our collaboration in the crucial early period was intensive and warmly mutual. In retrospect, we occasionally have recalled our view that the Society was an idea whose time had come, and that no doubt without our efforts one or more other organizations
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resembling it would soon have been founded in North America. But we felt that our special role was in finding a style for this society, directed at advanced amateurs and professionals together, and was better than various alternatives that might have been created. We had a few negative critics, but gratifyingly few, and I believe that Harry's felicitous personality contributed to the friendly reception we met.
Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 34(2), 1980, 100
CALLOPHRYS (MITOURA) HESSELI (LYCAENIDAE) IN GEORGIA: A STATE RECORD
It has long appeared likely that Callophrys hesseli Rawson & Ziegler occurs in Georgia, particularly in light of recent records for this species in northern Florida (Nordin, News Lepid. Soc. 1978(2): 9; Roman, News Lepid. Soc. 1979 (2): 12). Since the larval foodplant of hesseli is the white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides L.), we have sought the insect for the last several years in the only area of Georgia where white cedar is known to occur. This covers a four-county area (Marion, Schley, Talbot and Taylor) through which Cedar Creek and Whitewater Creek flow. The best stands of white cedar were in several swamps along the Taylor and Schley county lines.
On 7 April 1979 at 1100 h, at the crossing of Georgia Hwy. 127 and Whitewater Creek, we took a fresh female C. hesseli. It had alighted on the fresh shoots of a willow (Salix longipes Shuttl.), some six feet from a white cedar growing on the creek bank. It was the only hesseli we were able to net that day, although we saw numerous hairstreaks in flight and at rest at or very near the top of the cedars—hopelessly out of reach of our nets—both at this location and several others in the area. We find it curious that some of these hairstreaks on the white cedars were Callophrys gryneus Huebner. While we saw substantial numbers of red cedars (Juniperus virginiana L.) along the highways, we wonder if perhaps C. gryneus uses Chamaecyparis thyoides as well as J. virginiana as a larval foodplant.
Irving L. Finkelstein, 425 Springdale Drive N.E., Atlanta, Georgia 30305 and Abner A. Towers, 3260 Rilman Road N.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30327.