Clarence Birdseye had a very
interesting life story. The thing about his life that is most interesting to me
is that he never seemed afraid to do anything. He was very smart, but he had to
leave college because he did not have enough money after his father had some
money problems. Maybe he could have worked and saved some money, so that he
could go back and finish college. His father was a lawyer, so people may have
expected him to want to become one too. He did other things with his life.
Clarence thought that he had a
funny name, so he changed it to Bob. At Amherst, “His fellow classmates called
him Bugs because he was forever examining some bug or rodent in the
countryside.” (Mark Kurlansky. “Frozen in Time.”, page 39). He was not able to
finish college, but he kept his interest in science. He always seemed to find
ways to make money. One winter after he had gone out west, he made $600 trading
fur.
Bob went to work with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and went with a team to Montana to learn about and
fight the disease Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Since he loved to hunt, this
made being in Montana a good time for him. One of his jobs when he was working
to find out what caused the disease was to kill animals and collect ticks. He
killed many kinds of animals.
However,
Bob was exempt from the new restrictions, free to kill as he saw fit in the
effort to collect a wide range of ticks and find a cure for spotted fever.
Thrilled, he shot and trapped gophers, chipmunks, pine squirrels, woodchucks,
ground squirrels, wood rats, snowshoe rabbits, cottontail rabbits, several
species of mice, flying squirrels, badgers, weasels, muskrats, and bats. He
also killed the large and dangerous brown bears, mountain sheep, coyotes, both
mule and white-tailed deer, and elk. Most of what he killed he shot, but he
also set traps. In the process he collected 4,495 ticks and killed 717 wild
animals, though his goal was to get 1,000. (Kurlansky, pages 68-69)
After he finished working on
the Rocky Mountain spotted fever project, he moved to Labrador, where it was
very cold. Bob seemed to be fine wherever he was and would eat just about
anything. He loved the winters in Labrador and found ways to use science to
make money. He started a business trapping silver foxes and shipping them to
America for breeding. When he got married, he even took his wife back to
Labrador. It was while he was in Labrador that he realized that the secret to
frozen food tasting like fresh food was that it had to be frozen very fast.
