Two parents, three siblings and a monk

Bill grew up in an intact family with two parents, three siblings and a monk. We met September 10, 1968. Bill talked of his parents, siblings, a monk, his motorcycle, ten speed bike and a white sunfish. Williamson Central High School, Lake Ontario, Eastman Kodak Company joined the mix. By the end of the evening, my head spun, monks, motorcycles and sailboats swirling into an indecipherable whirlpool. Sailboats and bikes proved easiest to understand. Both typified, the Bill that showed up at the first night, freshman Sock Hop at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. A monk, well that was another story.Robert LaForet became Brother Maur (“dark one”) when he joined Mount Savior Monastery, in Pine City, outside of Elmira, New York. In January 1959, Father Damascus, the Abbot, approached the Taylors. Monastic life didn't suit, and Brother Maur joined the Taylor family, temporarily. The Maur disappeared but the Brother remained, shortened to Brud. Temporary stretched into permanent. When Brud, thirty-three, arrived, he moved into a guest cottage, named “Mary Magdalene” with Bill, age 8. Each morning, Brud slung Bill encased in a sleeping bag over his shoulder and trekked to the house. Locations changed, Bill and Brud remained roommates.Besides a monk, three siblings were part of the seventeen-year-old package that arrived at the dance. “I'm the youngest of four,” Bill began when the band exited the stage for a short break. “My sisters, Kathy and Judy are seven and four years older. Bobby is fourteen months younger than Judy and three years my senior.” I tried to sort who was who. “Kathy, Judy, Bobby,” I silently mouthed. I doubt I could have repeated their names let alone their ages the next day. “We live in Pultneyville, near Sodus Point, east of Rochester. My home is two houses from Lake Ontario.” Finally, Bill gave me an anchor, Rochester and Lake Ontario, names out of seventh grade history. Up to this point, New York meant the city and surrounding counties north to the Catskill Mountains.Bill and I arrived at Hartwick from opposite directions. Sketching a straight line from Rochester to Long Island, Oneonta lay about the midpoint. I arrived from the southeast, Bill from the northwest. Likewise, we approached Hartwick along different paths. Over a week, I searched four liberal arts schools scattered around New York State, systematically crossing off the ones that didn't fit. Bill fell into Hartwick. To appease his parents, he investigated five colleges in Ohio. “They didn't want me at the same school as Bobby. He was the outstanding freshman and president of his class each year he's been here.” Bill completed one application, Hartwick's, because it was the only one that failed to require an essay. Once accepted, the decision stuck.I spent fall term, no, make that all four years of college, placing the fragments of his story into some sort of whole. We spent hours discussing our youth. That's not exactly true. My eighteen years took the better part of the first hour, Bill's the rest of the term and we barely scratched the surface. Family relationships loomed large, occupying quiet moments, jostling for attention. Bill gnawed on past events, brought issues to the surface and pushed them back into their secret recesses. He struggled to make sense of his past.“Since I've been born, we've changed houses every four years.” His dad, Robert Fred Taylor, joined Eastman Kodak Company in the mid 1940’s, remaining there until he retired. However, for Bill, entering a new school every four years proved less stable. The family lacked the time to grow roots in a community or make lasting friends. Transferring from Monroe High, a city school, to Williamson Central, surrounded by farms and Lake Ontario, became a challenge. Spring of ninth grade, Bill tried to carve a niche into a class of seventy-five students who hadn't glimpsed a new face in five years. “A group of students dumped me into a garbage pail. Two teachers looked the other way. At the end of the year, I was given finals on material I never covered. I failed two courses and attended summer school.” Bill shuddered. “My high school career went downhill from there. Mom organizing migrant workers in a farm community didn't help.”Life in Pultneyville for Bill was never dull. “I'd come home from school and never knew who would be at the dinner table. One time I said this out loud. I insulted Eloise Wilkin. Boy, was she hurt.” Eloise, one of his mom's closest friends, penned children's books which her sister Ester illustrated. Intricately patterned wallpaper, nursery teddy bears and small children sprang from the pages. These ‘Golden Books’ populated bookstores from coast to coast and I remembered them from my childhood.Eloise wasn't the only visitor. Some spent a day, others claimed a bedroom. Once, his mom rescued a prostitute who was hiding from her pimp. “I took her out on Lake Ontario. We talked about her job.” Fresh Air kids from New York City, a Native American from Oklahoma, and Mary, an African American from the south, joined the mix. Mary gave birth to Marya, her second daughter while living in Pultneyville. Marya eventually joined her sister Rhonda and her grandmother in Florida while Mary stayed with the Taylors obtaining two degrees in nursing.Not limited to migrant workers and rescuing women, Bill's mom's causes kept her busy. In the late 1950’s, early 1960’s, she threw herself into the civil rights movement, marching on Washington. Later, she transferred her energies to peace. A newspaper photo dated November 15, 1963, shows his mother meeting with Soviet First Secretary, Viktor Karpov of the Russian Embassy and Donald Brezine, a Jesuit scholar, at an institute on the morality of war. She also knew Daniel Berrigan, a nationally prominent priest who opposed the Viet Nam War. The IRS audited his dad's tax returns yearly for over a decade. His parents blamed an FBI visit on their anti-war activities. Eventually, they picketed nuclear weapon installations near Syracuse, New York. Although his mother overtly championed these causes, his dad maneuvered behind the scenes supporting the new additions to the family, joining the marches and basically keeping the family afloat financially and emotionally. Both his dad and Brud ran the house when his mom was immersed in her crusades. Wait, they ran the house no matter how she spent her time. Although ten pounds at birth, she hovered around eighty to ninety pounds most of her life and often ran out of energy. The role of housewife failed to mesh with her self-image or fragile constitution.Religion permeated every aspect of family life. “We would recite the Rosary in the living room, sometimes on our knees. It seemed like we prayed for hours.” On Christmas Eve, the kids were loaded into the car and the family drove to Mount Savior Monastery, Brud's original home. Between the eight hour round trip and the service, they were gone all night. After returning home, gift paper covered the room as presents were unwrapped. Bill remembers the gift tradition ending when he was in sixth grade. “We stopped getting presents. By then, Kathy started college. College became our Christmas gift.” Easter found the family returning to Mount Savior. Vigil started at one or two in the morning, ending at dawn. Trips to the Monastery weren't limited to holidays. At one visit, an irate monk confronted the guests. Someone had thrown rocks at their glass seedling containers. Bill looked at Bobby and he looked at his feet. “How were we to know that what looked like a pile of discarded glass, housed plants. Boy, was Dad mad! We both felt the paddle that time.”Bob and Bill attended Stella Niagara near Niagara Falls. Bill started fourth grade and Bob sixth. It was bad enough going to a Catholic boarding school, but a Catholic military boarding school was worse. At the time, they called Naples, a small town at the southern end of Canandaigua Lake, home. “Mom claims Bobby and I begged to go to that school.” Bill didn't sound convinced. At Stella Niagara, Bill was forced to study and his grades improved. Part of the time was spent in the classroom and part on the marching field. The Commandant, retired from the Army, believed in military routine and regimen. Unfortunately, Bill belonged to fourth grade's ‘C’ Platoon, the school's worst unit. For Parade Day, they practiced for hours. “They'd tell us to about face. Half of my platoon would turn right and half left. We marched in our wool dress uniforms. It was hot. Kids passed out. We'd march over them. I learned everything I ever wanted to know about the military in fourth grade.”Now at Hartwick, Bill struggled academically. Monsieur Ramsey taught in French, banning English at the door. Dumbfounded, Bill stammered “But, but, but”. French in his high school was taught in English. This is where his military experience served as a motivation. In the late 1960’s, early 1970’s, the draft hovered. Study or go to Viet Nam became the mantra. Bill studied and earned a 2.0 by the end of freshman year so he could return to Hartwick and me. Even though tougher, increasingly the courses became interesting, and by graduation Bill earned grades that just allowed for applications to graduate schools. Having spent the four years pretty much together, Bill asked, and I said yes, necessitating finding a graduate school that would accept both of us. His advisor recommended West Virginia University (WVU) and as it was our only choice, we planned a wedding and a move to a whole new world in August 1972.Bill received a grant from West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to study brook silversides in Moncove Lake in southern West Virginia. A month after graduating from Hartwick as well as a month before our wedding, Bill joined the DNR in Elkins West Virginia. After a short orientation, they dropped him off at the lake with instructions to approach anglers and ask for their catfish stomachs. He heard many a snicker about those northerners and catfish guts as he struggled to dissect their catch. One night, he called his dad and lamented that he couldn't do this. His dad responded, “pack up and come home.” Instead, Bill flew to Newark, New Jersey and spent a long weekend on Long Island with me and my parents. After the wedding and a honeymoon in Bermuda, we moved to Morgantown and enrolled in graduate school, me in social work and Bill in Biology.Dr. John DeCosta, Bill's major professor at WVU, was a gentleman of large proportions, so large, he reclined in a chair all night, struggling to gain comfort. Dr. DeCosta failed to live up to the moniker of gentleman and possessed a caustic sense of humor. He regaled in telling stories of throwing empty beer cans at passengers in the front of the bus when he took an excursion at a scientific meeting in Europe. He relished in playing students against each other but for some reason seemed to like both of us. My program ended in May 1974 and Bill was working on completing his thesis after spending countless hours counting benthos and zooplankton under a microscope. Finally, the data were punched into computer cards and entered into the university's huge, main frame computer. Bill decided a PhD was in his future and I decided studying under DeCosta was not an option even as a last resort. Living under DeCosta's rules proved difficult. He expected his students to be in the lab seven days a week, from early morning until after sunset. To leave for a weekend required special permission and you had better have had a good reason if you couldn't attend his parties. Behavior at the parties was monitored. Consuming alcohol was encouraged but imbibing too much was ridiculed. Enough was enough. In retrospect, Bill credits Dr. DeCosta for giving him a chance and teaching him how to design and implement a research project.Bill looked and found Dr. Shelby Gerking at Arizona State University (ASU). Not leaving anything to chance, Bill wrote to Dr Gerking and requested an interview paying his own airfare to Phoenix. Bill returned home with multiple research papers that he promptly left on the plane and had to call Dr. Gerking for additional copies. Dr. Gerking took a chance on Bill and accepted him provisionally into his fisheries lab. We found housing and moved to Mesa, Arizona in June 1974. Bill had a lot of catching up to do but by the end of four years, Bill aced his oral comprehensive exams and received his PhD in Zoology in May 1978. Dr. Gerking proved to be a very different professor than Dr. DeCosta, a supportive mentor who met for coffee every morning at ten to discuss myriad scientific issues. The expectation was that Bill would get his work done, not how many hours he worked. I worked at Maricopa County General Hospital, as a medical social worker, while Bill studied rainbow trout, periodically travelling to the Apache Reservation in Springerville, Arizona. Above all this, Dr. Gerking agreed to a project in Yugoslavia sending Bill to Lake Ohrid in what eventually became Macedonia. After an initial hiccup where we were told to return home, the Hydrobiological Institute allowed Bill to study rifle minnows to them, riffle minnows to everybody else. Bill returned to Ohrid for six years living with a Macedonian family for three months each time, one year in total. Bill learned a bit of Macedonian and the family a bit of English.With a pregnant wife, Bill applied for positions and ended with five interviews, four at research firms and one at the University of Missouri. A fellow student came into his office and moaned how come Bill was the only one getting interviews? Bill's office mate Linn jumped up pushing Craig out of the office stating, “because he is good!” Although Bill's original aspirations revolved around research, he decided designing his own projects and even teaching was more important so when offered he cancelled all the other interviews and we moved to Columbia, Missouri. He caught Missouri's attention because he had taught a course, “Man and the Environment” to inmates at a low security prison, outside of Morgantown, while we lived in West Virginia. The summer after we moved to Missouri, Bill attended a conference and met Charlie Liston, a Michigan State University (MSU) fisheries professor who told him about a failed search for a position he fit perfectly. Bill responded if the job was still open when he returned from Yugoslavia, he would consider applying. It was still available; they kept calling and a fisheries biologist in a state surrounded by four Great Lakes was an opportunity he couldn't refuse. March 15, 1980, we moved to Michigan with eighteen-month-old Kyle, buying our third house in three years, in three different states, in three different areas of the country. In June1982, Lauren joined the mix.The rest of the story is difficult to delineate in a few words so quick statements will have to do and even here, many recognitions are left out. Bill served as Chair of the MSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife from 1992 to 2008 with a two-year stint as the Dean of the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural and Resources. He was appointed MSU University Distinguished Professor of Global Fisheries Systems and received the Distinguished Alumnus award from Hartwick College. He received the Fisheries Excellence Award from The American Fisheries Society. Appointed by President George Bush in 2002, Bill still serves as a commissioner on The Great Lakes Fishery Commission. He was the Associate Director of the Michigan Sea Grant College Program for over 30 years and served on the board of the Great Lakes Fisheries Trust for almost as long. Bill has published extensively in the scientific literature (>120 articles) and co-edited five books. Bill was named to the inaugural class of the American Fisheries Society's Fellows Program and was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2023. Once during a heated discussion when we were juniors, he announced that one day, he would be a world-renowned fisheries biologist. If having colleagues all over the world counts, he obtained this goal.Now as to those two parents, three siblings and the monk, we struggled for years to decipher all the family dynamics. Were we successful? No, but we tried hard and came close. Would they agree with our tentative conclusions, hard to tell. 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