PSB 68 (1) 2022
IN MEMORIAM RONALD L. STUCKEY (1938–2022)
Ronald Stuckey in his office in July of 1987 in the former Botany and Zoology building on The Ohio State University campus. Photograph by A. E. Spreitzer. Ronald Lewis Stuckey was a good and kind person—someone you could not dislike. He loved plants, especially aquatics, and he was intrigued by how natural geological and landscape histories had shaped their distributions. He loved the histories of people, too, especially early botanists of the Ohio territories and the often-neglected contributions of women botanists. He was mindful of impacts of people on distributions of plants in Ohio and neighboring states, which fueled his support for their conservation. He might have been regarded as an eccentric, as are all academics, which made him more interesting to friends and colleagues—perhaps even more loveable.
Ron was born in Bucyrus, Crawford County, Ohio, on 9 January 1938 to Leora Irene (Shuey) and Guy Ralph Stuckey. For the first 18 years of his life, Ron lived on a farm in Lykens Township in Crawford County, where he attended high school. Following high school, Ron attended Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, where he majored in biology and worked as a biology assistant. He was a member of the Biological Honorary Society (Tri-Beta), serving as president for one year, and he also earned membership in the Heidelberg Honor Society. In his junior year (1959), he received the Zartman Award for superior work in biology, and in summer he attended the Franz Theodore Stone Laboratory of The Ohio State University on Gibraltar Island in Lake Erie, where he took university courses in field botany and aquatic mycology. These academic successes motivated him to pursue graduate studies in botany, and he applied to and was accepted at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). In 1962 he was awarded an M.A. degree in Botany, on his way to a Ph.D. During the summers of 1961 and 1962, he served as an assistant for the aquatic plant course at the University of Michigan Biology Station at Pellston in the northern Lower Peninsula, coming under the influence of Prof. Edward G. Voss, who became his major professor. His dissertation topic was the taxonomy and phytogeography of the genus Rorippa (Brassicaceae: marsh cress). He received a graduate dissertation fellowship in his fifth year, which allowed full focus on Rorippa, for which he was granted a Ph.D. in May 1965 (published in 1972). Ron applied for and was hired into a faculty position at The Ohio State University in 1965 and began teaching classes in general botany, local flora, and plant taxonomy. He was soon promoted to Associate Professor (1970) and 77
