[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED
MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 1999.]
Remembering
May Watts The shoes, sensible. Her walk, lighthearted
and determined.
By
Lori Rotenberk
That's
one thing those who studied and worked with May Theilgaard
Watts — oh, and there were many — recall. The
sound of her swift footsteps leading them through the canopy
of trees, bogs and marshes, trails and sand dunes, searching
for the clues that would teach them how nature has evolved.
They
double-stepped to keep up with her enthusiasm and quick
humor. Ahead of her time in so many ways, Watts, once a
one-room schoolteacher herself, blossomed, graduating in
1918 from the University of Chicago Phi Beta Kappa in botany
and ecology under the renowned naturalist, Dr. Henry Cowles.
Stargazer,
artist, poet and naturalist, Watts' interests were many.
It shows in her 1957 Reading the Landscape of America,
a beautifully written book used for decades by educators,
which explains just how glaciers, climate change and farming
altered our landscape. Watts later penned Reading the Landscape
of Europe and, besides scientific papers, also wrote guides
still in use today on tree and flower identification. Watts
also wrote "Nature Afoot," a popular nature column
for the Chicago Tribune, and had her own educational horticulture
program on public television.
This
tall, lovely woman, who often secured her braided hair in
a red bandanna, may be most warmly remembered as staff naturalist
at the Morton Arboretum, from which she retired in 1961.
A few years later she spearheaded successful efforts to
establish the Illinois Prairie Path, a 40-mile treasure
of a hiking and recreation trail on the former right of
way of the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad in DuPage County.
When
May Watts died at age 82 on August 20, 1975, she left behind
a legacy through her writings and in the spirits of her
hundreds of students; many who knew her carry on her work
and spirit today.
She
was boisterous and sensitive. May Watts, her friends recall,
was advocate for the heavens, the birds, the insects, the
prairie plants, the pines and oaks, the gritty dunes. An
avid reader of mystery novels, Watts took that same approach
to her reading of the landscape — forever seeking clues
and evidence on how things began and where they might next
be found.
Come
early morning on the days she taught at the Morton, a gaggle
of her students would depart from Chicago on the Burlington
train and walk the mile to the Arboretum from the station,
recalls Carol Doty, a former friend and student of Watts
who has just retired as the Arboretum historian.
"Then,
Lisle was a sleepy little crossroads and May had people
of all ages coming out to take her unusual classes,"
Doty said. Through ditties, and handmade, giant flowers
that unzipped to reveal stamens, stomas, filaments, anthers
and sepals, Watts taught bits of taxonomy and botany. Her
landscape sketches and poems were a constant in the classroom,
and tools by which students became adept at identification.
Rose
Oplatka of Berwyn, now in her mid-80s, recalls, "I
was teaching seventh grade, and had signed up for Mrs. Watts'
first course. During that time you would have to come to
the Arboretum and stay overnight in cabins that were near
the Thornhill building. I earned several certificates from
her."
"May
was a remarkable person," Oplatka continues. "Personally
I thought she was like a Viking princess, looking like a
queen even as an elderly lady. She was most compassionate,
a very kind person."
As
a slightly mischievous young woman, Watts grew up in Chicago's
Ravenswood neighborhood, where her Danish-born father, a
landscape designer, first introduced her to plants. Often
she would camp with her sister overnight on the lakeshore,
where the old Edgewater Beach Hotel now stands. There began
her penchant for sleeping in the bosom of the earth, deciphering
the night sky.
An
adventurer in every respect, she along with her husband
or students trekked the mountains and forests of both Europe
and the United States studying ecosystems and plant life.
Along the way, Watts, who also attended the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, documented the terrain in colorful
sketches that are now kept in archives at the Morton's Sterling
Library. Among her favorite pastimes besides art and poetry
was picking flowers that graced tables in her Naperville
home.
Early
in their marriage, the Wattses lived in Ravinia and there
May joined noted landscape architect Jens Jensen, urging
residents in that community to save the wild prairie that
yet remained there in a 1936 booklet titled "Ravinia:
Her Charms and Destiny."
Ray
Schulenberg, former Curator of Woody Plants at the Arboretum
and one of the Midwest's major figures in ecosystem restoration,
says of Watts: "I idolized her. She was one of the
most charismatic people I've ever known. Maybe the most.
She had this strong and admirable character and personality.
And she could teach in the most unusual ways, which I think
came from her background teaching in a one-room schoolhouse."
"Some
of the people my mother taught at the arboretum became life-long
friends," says her daughter Erica, now 72. "But
her best students were myself and my brother and sister.
She used to keep us busy. She would tell us to go out and
find a maple leaf and bring it back. So out we would rush
to see who would be the first. Then we would return and
she'd say, "Go find an ash leaf" and so it would
go. She would come home from teaching and tell us wonderful
stories. Once someone had found in the winter a snowy owl
which had run into the building and had broken a wing. She
had tried to set the wing on the snowy owl, but the bird
gave one heave and took off. The things she got to see!"
Years
after her death, during a campaign to make her Naperville
home an historic landmark in that town, was found a poignant
memento. Drawn in pencil on the white clapboards of that
house were the various stages of an eclipse that occurred
in 1963, traced from the shadow cast by an instructive little
cardboard box.
Testimony
to what everyone who ever knew May Watts had seen in her:
a passionate interest in all aspects of nature, from the
smallest wildflower to the eternal heavens.
Lori
Rotenberk is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. After
researching this story, she says, "I'll never see prairies
and dunes ever again in the same way. I can read them now
because of what she taught me."
