One of the connections I did not make in the Wikipedia article for Ludlow Griscom that I am expanding is his dislike of Texas ornithologist H. C. Oberholser. I have transcribed many of Oberholser’s migration cards as part of the Bird Phenology Project. Griscom butted heads with a lot of his colleagues; I don’t think that he and I would have got along. But this zinger, quoted in William E. Davis, Jr, Davis, Dean of the Birdwatchers: A Biography of Ludlow Griscom (1994), is too good to keep to myself. It’s from a letter to Guy Emerson in 1943:
I happen to have known Oberholser very well indeed over a long period of years. While I have every esteem for him as an ornithologist, as a man and a human being he is a mean spirited hypocrite and, in spite of his scientific distinction, got himself detested by every ornithologist in the United States. For years his colleagues in the National Museum and the Biological Survey looked forward with keen anticipation to the happy day when he would finally reach the retiring age, and all of them would enjoy writing a sonofobituary address. (p. 150)