Purdue Number One

By Walter Beineke

The major impetus for this book was to provide the historical background of the discovery, the reproduction, the patenting and the marketing of the genetically superior Purdue #1, the first tree patented for timber uses and the philosophy behind it. Purdue #1 can be found growing in at least eight countries and in nearly every state in the union.

It tells the story of Walt Beineke's childhood and adolescence in Indianapolis from Boy Scouts, Shortridge High School, to undergraduate work in forestry at Purdue University, and on to graduate school at Duke University and North Carolina State University emphasizing the influences that led to his 34 year career as a teacher and forest geneticist at Purdue University.

The book includes stories of the people who shaped the development of Purdue #1 from family, to friends, to teachers, to colleagues, to nearly 100 students and even a few notables such as Bill and John Hillenbrand, Richard Lugar, Ralph Davis, Birch Bayh and Evan Bayh.

Stories, some humorous, some poignant, some about the times and the way teaching and research was accomplished by a small cadre of graduate and undergraduate students in Purdue Universitys Department of Forestry and Natural Resources are the essence of this book.

It is rich in connections among the various people and happenings from the period of recognition of the increased importance of growing trees and the applied research that has enabled the planting of Indiana black walnut around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452021065

Walter Beineke

“Environmentalism” didn't begin in the 70’s or 80’s as most believe.  It actually started long before.  As a child Walt Beineke was caught up in the idea that growing and planting trees could help “save the earth”.  In addition to his mother's influence, Boy Scouts cemented his love of the outdoors, trees and growing things and helped set his goal to become a forester.  The friends made during those times, and his marriage to his high school sweetheart provided him with lifelong support.  After earning a BS in forestry from Purdue, he went on to earn a Masters from Duke and a Ph.D. from North Carolina State. Somewhere along the way, it became obvious to him that people who owned land and had money should become interested and involved in planting trees.  By growing trees faster and with greater value, he felt that progress could be made in trying to replace some annual crops with tree crops. With advanced degrees in forest genetics in hand, he became a professor in forestry at Purdue, and while teaching several courses, accomplished the research that developed genetically improved black walnut.  He patented the first trees for timber and patented the first trees using DNA fingerprinting as part of the patenting process.  His work has provided many jobs and given a boost to the economy by founding an entirely new industry. Walt is Professor Emeritus of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue and was a teacher and researcher for 34 years.  He was voted outstanding teacher in his department seven times and outstanding advisor twice.  He is the author of over 100 articles and several book chapters.  He is listed as the inventor on 23 patents and presently consults for industry and private land owners on growing and managing tree plantations.

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© 2010 Walter Beineke. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/22/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2106-5 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2104-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2105-8 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010906596

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Dedication

To Mom and Pop who raised their sons to appreciate the great outdoors—even the squirrels!

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Ada Niemann – Beineke (1910 – 2004) and

Frank A. Beineke (1907 – 1997)

Photo from 1978

In Memory

To the memory of Bill Lowe who passed away in March of 2010, before this book was published. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to confirm or deny the veracity of the stories concerning his participation. He will be missed by all of us.

Acknowledgements

FIRST, I MUST ACKNOWLEDGE PROFESSOR HARVEY HOLT who was the first to suggest that, Someone should write all this stuff down before it’s lost and that, Purdue #1 is the only thing that the Purdue Forestry and Natural Resources Department is known for nationally and worldwide (perhaps a slight exaggeration), and as time goes on, new faculty and students in the Department will have no clue concerning what was achieved.

Harvey was dismayed when ArborAmerica wanted to buy the original Purdue #1 from the department to slice it into veneer to determine the actual quality of that tree. A faculty meeting was held to determine if the tree should be sold, and Harvey found that few of the new, young faculty members had any idea what the debate was about. They were all for selling the tree. Somewhat jokingly, Harvey expressed that a fence with a plaque on it should be built around Purdue #1. Due to Harvey’s explanation of what Purdue #1 was all about, the faculty decided to preserve the original Purdue#1 in the department’s Darlington Woods.

My wife’s help with typing and proofreading is greatly appreciated, but beyond that, she has had to suffer through all those years of late dinners, lonely nights, few vacations and weekends of fieldwork. Her endurance and patience through it all has kept me on a relatively even keel. Thank you!

My daughters, Linda and Sara, didn’t get the attention from their father that they deserved as they grew up. If I had it to do over, I would not have traveled as much and would have left a lot of seedlings unplanted.

A special thanks goes to Dr. Ronald Overton, who, as a young undergrad, first found and recognized the potential of Purdue #1.

And thanks to all of those students who made the genetic improvement of black walnut possible with their hard work and dedication. I have told some of their stories here, but there are many others just as important that remain untold.

Finally, thanks to Grace Malone for the cover illustration.

Contents

CHAPTER 1 The Youngster and Purdue

CHAPTER 2 Duke and North Carolina State

CHAPTER 3 Return to Purdue

CHAPTER 4 Walnut: The Strange Species — Grafting and Other Near-Death Experiences

CHAPTER 5 Genetic Testing and The Great Discovery of Purdue #1

CHAPTER 6 Clark State Forest

CHAPTER 7 The Hillenbrands

CHAPTER 8 The Walnut Council, Ft. Wayne Drug Deals and Other Travels

CHAPTER 9 Reasons for Some Forestry Philosophies

CHAPTER 10 Other Projects

CHAPTER 11 The New Group, New Ideas and the Patenting

CHAPTER 12 Marketing the Patents

CHAPTER 13 The Land, Kay, Linda, and Sara

CHAPTER 14 The Tyranny of the Squirrels

CHAPTER 15 Undergrads

CHAPTER 16 Teaching Dendrology

CHAPTER 17 Student Encounters

CHAPTER 18 Approaching Retirement

CHAPTER 19 Clients

CHAPTER 20 ArborAmerica and Purdue’s HTIRC

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Bill Lowe at Base of Purdue #1 in 1968.

CHAPTER 1

The Youngster and Purdue

GOTCHA! YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THIS WAS ANOTHER story about the vaunted athletic teams of a major university. However, you may not find many championship banners hanging from the rafters in Purdue athletics venues, but you will find that Purdue is number one in trees.

It all began in Indianapolis in the early 1940’s. When I was a little kid, my mother often observed me either watching or poking at the giant carpenter ants as they climbed the huge red oak tree in our front yard at 4116 East 34th Street. The tree was three or four feet in diameter and must have had a crown spread of 100 feet. It was the only large tree in the area and was a standard landmark. Our driveway is the one on the left side next to the huge tree.

As time passed I became intrigued with the acorns. My cousins and I thought we were very cool to make acorn pipes by cleaning out the nutmeats inside. (Which, we, of course, tried to eat. That’s how I found out that red oak acorns are extremely bitter.) We all carried pocket knives in those long-ago naive times, so next we cut a small hole in the acorn base, and poked a hollow- stemmed weed stalk into the hole. Then we crunched up some oak leaves, stuffed them into the pipe and lit the leaves with matches. It was OK to have matches. Obviously this was a time before smoking was looked upon with such disdain. We hacked and wheezed for the few moments it took to burn, and if it was dry enough, it DID burn. Then we’d repack the pipe and do it again. We usually did this in the field behind my house out of parental view, and we only set the field on fire four or five times. It was great fun to see the fire trucks. Anyway, I think I had a point here. The tree was part of my everyday life for many years.

Other things came to my attention concerning the acorns. They grew into little trees. We had oak trees coming up in all the flower beds and bushes. The squirrels planted most of them and that was OK. I still thought squirrels were cute then, long before I found them to be my mortal enemies. My father finally, at my urging, dug an oak tree and planted it in the backyard. A year or two later he dug it out because there was a much larger oak tree that had come up next to it. I saw what he had done and told him that he had saved the silver maple tree and killed the oak. For some 15 to 20 years he insisted that it was an oak tree. (Even though no acorns were ever forthcoming and the tree was covered with the helicopter seeds of silver maple every spring.) Because I tried so hard to prove to him that it was a maple tree, he forced me to learn to identify trees, and I found that I had a real knack for it.

Actually, the influence of my mother and my Uncle Al spurred me in the direction of an outdoor career path. Mom loved the outdoors—gardening, bird feeding even before it was fashionable, and wildlife conservation. She made available to me all sorts of books on birds, plants and wildlife. It was her passion and she taught me at a very young age to appreciate nature. My Uncle Al, mom’s brother, owned a small farm near Cincinnati and we often visited. He raised all kinds of animals and I helped him. He had an interest in trees and gardening as well. Mom’s father also had a small farm as a sideline and large garden. So I guess you could say that I came by my interests naturally through my mother’s side of the family. Must be some sort of genetics involved.

Boy Scouts provided an outlet for my interest in trees. I taught tree identification as a camp counselor at summer camps. For the big scout fair in Indy one year, I planted acorns and walnuts in pots and estimated how long it would take to grow trees to a harvestable size if they were taken care of in plantations. That was the first time that I saw the potential of fast-growing walnuts verses the slow-growing oaks. I wish I would have started a plantation then, and in fact I tried to talk my dad into buying farmland to plant trees. Of course he was sure he was raising a strange, weird and unusual child. He worried a lot about me.

Somewhere in my teen years the city decided to widen 34th Street and install new sewer pipes. So the old tree went away. That’s when I first became a sort of tree hugger. I really missed that old tree, but fortunately it lived on in a seedling I planted in the front yard (back from the street). I went back to the house many years after my folks moved and collected acorns and grafting wood. Unfortunately the grafts proved incompatible with the root stock and after several years the grafts died. And, unfortunately, the identity of the seedlings was eventually lost. Perhaps if I went back there –-?

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Tom Waggener probably had more influence on my eventual life’s course than any other individual. I met Tom in first grade. He was a skinny little kid with eyes full of mischief. He was the smartest kid in the class even though he seldom let on, but I knew. So I sort of latched onto him to be sure he would be willing to help me out when I didn’t understand something or missed what was going on. As it turned out, I helped him, too, so that between us we had a reasonably functioning brain. We managed to get through grade school and high school together and when it came time for college, Tom decided to go to Purdue in forestry.

Of course, my high school counselors said I could never make it at Purdue with my somewhat mediocre grades. Statements like that always spurred me on to do better than expected. It was often true, that once I got to college, when a professor said, I don’t give A’s. I said, I’ll prove you wrong and often did.

Tom’s father was the outdoor writer for the Indianapolis Star and Editor of Outdoor Indiana magazine and thought that forestry would be a good career for Tom because of his outdoor interests. At that time, I was determined to go into geology, because I really enjoyed rock collecting and studying geological processes. I still do. The problem was that I wanted to go to Colorado School of Mines, but it was too expensive. My desire to become a geologist was predicated to some extent by Bill Mace, who was my neighbor for a few years during high school. I got him involved in scouting and we attended Philmont Scout Ranch, along with Dick Hedge, another longtime neighborhood friend. Bill wanted to go to Colorado School of Mines, too; but he had to move away when his father was transferred. He eventually ended up in computer engineering in Texas. We remained in touch over the years, and while I was researching bunch disease of black walnut, a serious virus-like disease, Bill had the facilities and access to electron microscopes and made some photos of the virus for us. Needless to say he has a Purdue #1 in his yard near Hutto, Texas.

Indiana University had a small geology program, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to consider becoming an IU student. Tom said, why not go to Purdue in forestry and I said okay. So we went off to Purdue with two of our friends. I roomed with Bob Landgraf with whom I spent more time as a youngster than I did with anyone else. Bob is a very funny guy and to this day, he makes me laugh as no one else can. We lived only a block from each other and played lots of cowboys and Indians. Since Tom lived some distance from us, we really didn’t see much of him outside of school. Thus Bob and I were probably closer in our younger years, and in fact, Bob was best man in our wedding. There were 9 to 11 of us that grew up together and were all involved in scouts and we all earned the Eagle rank. We became known as the Dirty Nine — a sort of gang for good guys — despite the name. And it is true that everyone in that group grew up to be successful in many different fields of endeavor. It was a unique group. I think most of us credit the Boy Scouts as the experience that made us what we are today.

There is no doubt that my boy scouting experiences and fellow scouts influenced my career in forestry. My trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico for leadership training for a month when I was 16 opened a window into learning about the forests of the West and spurred my interest in why tree species grew where they did. The three day survival experience with only the clothes on our backs and a knife, provided a learning experience that guides me to this day.

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Jim Henry, one of the funniest and shortest guys I ever knew, (as my short wife, Kay, would tell you, was the only man she didn’t have to look up to) went to Philmont a couple of years after I did, and he came back with stories of bears tearing up his tent and chasing him. The stories always started with, When I was at Philmont. So among his old friends, he is still known as Bears Henry. Bears went on to be a Purdue grad and a very successful company manager. His wife’s family owned a farm in Martin County Indiana, where they eventually retired. We have tried to find a site on the farm for a walnut planting, but so far haven’t found one, although there are walnuts growing on some very poor soils on that farm. He has had many contacts with consulting foresters and District Foresters that are my ex-students and he is always amazed that when he mentions my name, they all say, Sure, I know him. He taught me how to identify trees.

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Jed Smith was a Dirty Nine member and in the same grade with Bob, Tom and I. We all hung out together, especially as teenagers. He was the one real athlete among us. He played a lot of baseball in the forerunner teams of Little League, which was just getting started when we were kids. So he wasn’t around quite as much as the rest of us. But when he was, we had a lot of fun, often at Jed’s expense. Jed was a joker and often put the joke on himself, although it was hard to tell sometimes if it was intentional or not.

For instance, there is the famous light-green (chartreuse) convertible story. Jed had just purchased a well-used Chrysler convertible to cruise the drive-ins and impress the girls, but with gas prices soaring to $.25 a gallon, we asked him what kind of gas mileage a big car like that would get. After much speculation, Jed said, Well, I’ll find out and jumped in the car and took off with a couple gallons of gas in it that he had just purchased. When it was on empty, an hour later, we got a call. We were at Bob’s house and Jed said, Well I went 22 miles on the 2 gallons of gas before I ran out. I am at such and such and I think there is a gas station down a ways and I’ll go get a can of gas and I’ll be back in a little while. He insists he was pulling our collective leg, but with Jed you never knew.

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Walt, Tom Waggener, Jed Smith, Bob Landgraf at

70th Birthday Party in 2008

Another time we were at, of all things, Boy Scout summer camp, and all of us older Explorer Scouts were counselors at Cliff Meiers’ camp down in Martin County that year. As I recall, Tom was driving the camp carryall and Bob, Jed, Jim Henry, Jim Anderson and myself were present. Henry had brought a bunch of firecrackers to camp for Fourth of July festivities. Back then, explosives such as cherry bombs and large firecrackers were easily obtainable, although illegal. We were headed back to camp after an evening in town along the gravel back roads when Henry said, Let’s open the tailgate and throw out some firecrackers. So we did. After a mile or two of this, a car came over the hill behind us and we stopped throwing out the firecrackers. The car caught up with us, turned on his siren and flashing lights and pulled us over. First, he asked Tom for his driver’s license etc. and Tom said, So Ocifer, what’s the problem? (Tom tended to get his words confused when he was excited.) The Ocifer, who was the county sheriff, said that there were reports of someone firing guns along the road that night and asked, You guys got any guns? And Jed piped up, No sir, we don’t have any guns, and Jed’s voice inflection was such that the next words out of his mouth were going to be, But we have some damn fine firecrackers. So quickly, we all started talking at once to be sure Jed didn’t say anymore. Again, he swears he wasn’t going to say that, but thankfully we’ll never know. Can’t you see the local paper headlines Boy Scouts Caught Shooting Off Huge Hoard of Cherry Bombs"

Jed’s ultimate claim to fame and lifelong hobby is that he has attended every 500 mile race since 1960, and six before that for a total of 56 and 50 in a row! In 1958 and 59 the Marines did not share his enthusiasm for the race. He is a real fan and can tell you who won each race and why. During our high school and college years, most of us tried to go to the race together except when Purdue held exams on race day. Also, Jed has been to all 16 Brickyard 400’s.

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Cliff Meiers was a sort of patron to our scout troop and had taken us under his wing. Cliff had a way of giving life lessons to young impressionable boys. While his language did not inspire imitation, at least to our parents, some of his pithy methods of getting a message across resounded with the younger crowd. On one of our many scout hikes at Cliff’s Trails End Camp (a sign at the entrance proclaimed it so, and a ways down the lane was a sign on the outhouse indicating, Tails End), Cliff was cooking breakfast for everyone on the wood stove in the outdoor kitchen. Not only were some 25 or so scouts present, but also the leaders and fathers who drove the boys down there. One poor father stepped up to put in his order and Cliff said in his gruff, gravelly voice, How do you want your eggs? The dad said, It doesn’t matter. So Cliff handed him two eggs right out of the carton. The dad laughed and said, Well, I’d like them cooked and Cliff said, If it doesn’t matter, that’s it, move on you indecisive SOB. The dad never did get his eggs cooked, but it was a lesson to those of us in the line. Sometimes you have to make decisions and not be wishy-washy or you’re likely to not get anything.

Another time, Tom and I went down to open camp with Cliff in the spring, which was an adventure in itself, because even though Cliff was a relatively wealthy man, he never acted like it. He had an old car and was not the best driver in the world, but his most disconcerting habit was when going downhill, he turned the engine off and coasted. Then at the bottom of the hill, often going 80 miles an hour or so, he would turn the key on and a huge backfire would explode from the car — enough to scare the wits out of us and anyone around. I asked him why he did it and he said, Well dumb ass, I save a lot of gas that way. Those other bastards just don’t know how to drive.

Upon arrival at the camp, we cleaned things up, repaired any vandalism and took stock of the foodstuffs that had overwintered. On this particular day, Cliff fixed eggs, according to our orders, (we had learned our lesson), and we were looking for jelly for our toast. Cliff found half a jar on an upper shelf and opened it. I