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- MY LIFE AND TIMES by Keith McCree -
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My Professional Career
I was born in 1927 in Christchurch ,New Zealand. In September 2010, the city was struck by a major earthquake, followed by multiple aftershocks. Many of the old buildings in the center of town that I remember from my childhood were damaged or destroyed. Fortunately, few people were killed or seriously injured. A second earthquake struck in February 2011, causing much more extensive damage and burying hundreds of people beneath the rubble. Earthquakes are common throughout New Zealand, because it lies on the western edge of the Pacific tectonic plate, but this is the worst earthquake in living memory. Other recent earthquakes along the western edge may mean that the Plate is on the move.
My earliest known ancestor was a Huguenot, Valentin Macaré, who was born circa 1580 in Valenciennes, France. He and his family fled religious persecution and settled in Canterbury, Kent, where he died in 1645. Various spellings of the family name were entered into the records, for example Macaré, Macarée, Macaree, Maccarée, Maquarée, Macorée (always pronounced 'McCree'
).
My great grandfather Edward Macaree (Chapter 1) was born in 1844 in Shoreditch, London. In 1877 he brought his wife Sarah and their family out to New Zealand. They settled in Christchurch, in the province of Canterbury, which was named for the province in Kent. Christchurch was established as a Protestant colony (Church of England). The family name McCree was entered into the records.
My grandfather was Charles McCree (Chapter 2) and my father was Jeff McCree (Chapter 3). He married Alma Harris in 1925. My childhood was spent in in their home in St. Albans (Chapter 4).
I was born with a problem-solving brain, and began dabbling in science at an early age. I was educated at St Albans school and Christchurch Boys' High School whose motto was Altiora peto 'I seek higher things'.
I received the B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in physics from the old Canterbury University College, the Alma Mater of 'The Father of the Atom', Ernest Rutherford. It is now an arts center. My supervisor for the master's degree in 1948 was Professor F.C. Chalklin, who had recently arrived from University College, London. I learned from him the nuts and bolts of physics research (including the advice to become ambidextrous). I helped Prof. Chalklin to set up the vacuum spectrograph for soft X-rays that he had been using to study the structures of crystals. Unfortunately, it turned out that the spectrograph had been damaged during the bombing of London and could not be focussed properly. Shortly after, Professor Chalklin was killed in a plane crash while on the way to an international conference.
I learned to play the piano as a child, and became a proficient amateur pianist. I shared my piano teacher (Clarice Bell) with my friend and neighbour Maurice Till, who was already much better than me. At one of Miss Bell's recitals, he played the Mendelssohn concerto on the grand, while I did my best to supply the orchestral part on the old upright piano. At his home we ran through the four-hand version of the Beethoven symphonies (singing the choral parts of the 9th.). Maurice had graduated with a degree in Mathematics but chose music as a career, and became New Zealand's best-known and well-loved accompanist and solo pianist.
I was taught to play the organ by C. Foster Browne, choirmaster and organist at ChristChurch Cathedral. I played the flute in my father's chamber music group, in which he played the clarinet, my grandfather played the saxophone, and friends played an eclectic selection of other instruments. Later in life I enjoyed learning to play the viola. Most recently I played an electronic piano that simulated the sound of a concert grand (also harpsichord, organ and 11 other instruments).
My father also got me interested in photography. Working at home (in the bathroom), I developed my Kodak 120 black-and-white film (nominal image size 6 x 9 cm.), then enlarged and printed the negative images. In the 1950s I started using Kodachrome 35mm. colour film.
Another important part of my early life was tramping (hiking) and biking, firsr with my father and then with boyhood friends David and Maurice (Chapter 5). I have fond memories of excursions to Arthur's Pass in trains drawn by steam locomotives, in the days before the Pass was readily accessible by road. Everywhere I've lived since, I've enjoyed exploring the area on foot or by bike.
By the time I reached 21 I was bored with life in my home town. I got a job as a research physicist for the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) in Lower Hutt, near the capital city Wellington. In 1950 I was sent to Taupo to join a team doing geophysical exploration of New Zealand's volcanic hot springs, research which laid the groundwork for geothermal power production at nearby Wairakei (Chapter 6).
Back in the lab in Lower Hutt, I became interested in the question of how to establish standards for the brightness and color of a traffic signal. In 1955 I wrote to an expert in the physiological basis of color vision, Professor W.D. Wright of Imperial College in London. He invited me to study for a Ph. D. with him. So I packed my belongings in a tin trunk from my grandfather's factory and proceeded to London via the Suez Canal (Chapter 7).
During my stay in London (Chapter 8) I enjoyed walking trips to the surrounding countryside (in England this is called "rambling") (Chapter 9). I also took a walking trip to the Lake District in northwest England (Chapter 10). I did a cycle trip to Wales with fellow-student David, and visited Michelle in Paris. On a student hiking trip to Salzburg (Austria) with Frank in 1956, I fell in love with a Swedish girl, Barbro Persson. Next year we were married in her home town (Chapter 11). We lived for a few months in a flat in Warwick Avenue, Notting Hill.
After I graduated in 1958, we travelled to New Zealand via the Panama Canal (Chapter 12). We moved into my old flat in Mahina Bay, on the eastern shores of Wellington Harbour (Chapter 13). Our two boys, John and Alan, were born while we lived at Mahina Bay. We later moved to Rona Bay in Eastbourne (Chapter 14). During the next few years we made many camping trips around both the North and South Islands ((Chapter 15, Chapter 16).
I returned to work at the Physics Lab of the D.S.I.R. in Lower Hutt. There was little interest in color vision in New Zealand, where the main industry is agriculture, so I continued my earlier work developing light measuring instruments for plant science studies. These included solarimeter for measuring photosynthetically active radiation (P.A.R.), a term which at that time was ill-defined and seldom used. I began research on the physiological basis for photosynthesis and respiration in plants, in collaboration with John Troughton.
At age 40 I found myself dissatisfied with professional life in New Zealand, and emigrated to the United States. I took a post-doctoral position with R.S. Loomis and W.A. Williams in the Agronomy and Range Science Department at the University of California, Davis. They were interested in incorporating my work on photosynthesis and respiration into computer simulation models of crop production. I developed an equation for the rate of respiration of the clover plants that Troughton and I had studied, and presented it at an international conference in Trebon, Czechoslovakia in 1969. This paper has often been quoted in the literature on respiration in plants. The equation became known as the 'McCree equation'.
So in the autumn of 1967 the whole family packed their belongings in wooden crates (painted red for easy identification), drove to Auckland, and set sail on the S.S. Canberra for Honolulu (Hawaii), Vancouver (British Columbia) and San Francisco. Bob Loomis picked us up and drove us to Davis, and he and Bill Williams installed us in an apartment near the U.C.D. campus (Chapter 17, Chapter 18).
In 1968 I was invited to join C.H.M. van Bavel, as Associate Professor in the new Institute of Life Sciences, Biology Department, Texas A&M University. So in the summer of 1968 we drove across the United States from California to Texas, starting with Yosemite and visiting the famous desert canyons of Arizona along the way (Chapter 19).
Texas A&M is in the Bryan/College Station metroplex, about midway between Houston and Dallas. In 1968 we bought our first home in Bryan (Chapter 20). Our main outdoor activity in the hot Texas summers was sailing (Chapter 21). In the cooler months I worked on building a hiking trail in Buescher State Park (Chapter 22). We made several trips to Colorado for more serious hiking in mountains (Chapter 23). After a conference in Calgary, I drove to Lake Louise and hiked in the Canadian Rockies (Chapter 24).
My first research project was to measure the action spectrum, absorptance and quantum yield of photosynthesis in 22 species of crop plants. Using these data, I showed that measuring photosynthetically active radiation with a quantum flux density meter that had a constant response in the waveband 400 to 700 nm. would be better than measuring than the radiant power flux density in the same waveband with a solarimeter. This led to the widespread use of quantum meters in the plant sciences.
When the Institute of Life Sciences folded in 1971, I moved to the Soil and Crop Sciences Department. Continuing my research on photosynthesis and respiration, I showed that, for a whole plant (including roots), over a 24 hour period, respiratory losses are much greater than had previously been thought from single leaf measurements in the daytime. Crop plants can lose as much as 50% of their daytime photosynthetic gains.
I built these ideas into new computer simulation models of the carbon balances of plants, with emphasis on agricultural production under dry conditions. I put the models on to one of the first Macintosh computers and used them in my graduate-level course 'Principles of Crop Physics'. My software package 'Exploring Crop Physics' used simulation models to demonstrate the effects of environmental factors such as solar radiation, air temperature, humidity and soil water supply on rates of photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. The models calculated the energy balance, carbon balance, and water balance of a leaf, a plant or a field crop.
To make it easy for the students to run my computer simulation models, I gave the models a hypertext interface. Hypertext is a term that was coined in the 1960s to describe a system that allows the user to enter and retrieve information in any order, not just the fixed order specified by the computer programmer. I used the original hypertext system HyperCard, which was published by Apple Computer and included with every Macintosh computer, starting in 1987. Today, everyone knows how to use hypertext links on the World Wide Web, but it was a novelty when I started using it.
My first computer was a Macintosh that I bought in 1984, and I have stayed with them because they work. Every time.
In 1989 I decided to retire. Barbro and I moved to Oregon (OR-e-g'n) in the Pacific Northwest, where we hoped to enjoy our lifetime hobbies, in my case hiking and photography, in a climate that is more like New Zealand's. We bought a home in Oakridge, which is on the western slopes of the Oregon Cascade mountains at an altitude of 370 m (1200 ft.). It is near the headwaters of the Willamette (Will-AM-et) River, and is surrounded by National Forest. Most of the forest around Oakridge is in plantations of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), but there are areas of ancient forest ('old growth') that have not been logged yet. When we arrived in Oakridge, logging was in full swing. It was greatly curtailed after the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted in 1994.
There were 90 trails within easy driving distance of our home. We were delighted to find that the trails were getting very little use. We could get out in the mountains practically every day and quietly explore nature. We're followers of John Muir, who is reported to have said "People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike!". We especially enjoyed the wonderful mix of big trees and plants in the ancient forest (Chapter 28).
Barbro was amazed at the number of native wildflowers. She identified and located 160 species that were common in the area.
Using my knowledge of computer programming, I put the information that I gathered on the local trails into a HyperCard stack on a floppy disk. I then linked the trail data to another stack on the local wildflowers that Barbro identified. Later I put the whole project on a CD-ROM so that I could include my color slides of trails and wildflowers (Chapter 25).
Our trail and wildflower guide was fully interactive. We created a trails list for every wildflower, and a wildflower list for every trail, then we linked the two with hypertext. The guide was designed to be read on a computer, not as a book. There must be hundreds of books on wildflowers, and many books on trails, but only computer software can combine the two in this way.
In 1996 I started a Web site 'Hiking Trails and Wildflowers' so that we could share our experiences with trail and wildflower lovers around the world. I included a small sample of the information from our guide. Then I developed a Web-browser version of the guide that was compatible with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. It was essentially a huge Web site on a CD-ROM. This version used HTML (HyperText Markup Language) (Chapter 26, Chapter 27). In 2010 we discontinued our Web site, because we felt that the information had become outdated.Tanya Harvey's Mountain Plants of the Western Cascades is a good source of current information.
I have been using digital cameras exclusively since 1997, when I bought one of the first digital cameras, a Kodak DCS 120. I discovered right away that digital cameras are ideal for making quick photographs for the Web. In 2001 I added a collection of digital photographs to our CD-ROM (Chapter 28, Chapter 29).
A few years later the area was invaded by mountain bikers and our peace and quiet were shattered.
When I turned 80, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a progressive disorder of the brain and nervous system that affects movement. I found that I could no longer hike the trails of the Oakridge area, so in 2007 Barbro and I retired again, this time to city life in Eugene, Oregon.
Exercise is especially important to a Parkinson's person. It's simply a case of 'use it or lose it'. So I carried on as well as I could with my lifetime habit of taking a long walk every day. Barbro and I enjoyed walking on the streets and in the parks near our home in the eastern hills. We were happy to find some trails that are free of mountain bikes (Chapter 30).
Four years later, as my eyesight and my ability to walk up hills both deteriorated, we retired to an apartment complex (Willamette Oaks). Our apartment on the top floor has a view of the Willamette River and has easy acceess to the trails along the river.
'Becaise I do not hope to turn again . . .T.S.Eliot, Ash Wednesday
