Ludlow Griscom - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

Griscom was born in New York City, the son of Clement Acton Griscom and Genevieve Sprigg Ludlow. As a boy, his interest in birds showed itself as early as 1898. In 1907, he found fellow nature enthusiasts when he joined the Linnaean Society of New York.

Griscom received an A.B. degree, with a major in pre-law, from Columbia University in 1912. Despite initial resistance on the part of his parents, he entered Cornell University as a graduate student of ornithology, studying under Arthur A. Allen. Louis Agassiz Fuertes was one of his neighbors, and they became good friends. Griscom's master's thesis dealt with field identification of ducks of the eastern United States, and he received his A.M. degree from Cornell in 1915. He taught there and at the University of Virginia, and continued to study toward a doctorate. However, financial pressures prevented him from completing that degree, even though his father ultimately consented to his career choice.

Griscom married Edith Sumner Sloan on September 14, 1926; the couple had three children, Edith Rapallo, Andrew, and Joan Ludlow. Griscom was an enthusiastic opera- and concert-goer and accomplished pianist.

Read more about this topic:  Ludlow Griscom

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:

    For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.
    Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)

    All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself—civilization, in a word—are the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which charactizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)

    Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;Mthe heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)