Joel Hedgpeth - Career

Career

Hedgpeth met and corresponded with Edward F. Ricketts (1897–1948), a charismatic researcher of West Coast marine biology and the real-life model for the character "Doc" in John Steinbeck's novel, Cannery Row. Hedgpeth himself may have been the model for the character, "Old Jay" in Steinbeck's novel, Sweet Thursday . Hedgpeth later was the editor of several editions of Ricketts' "Between Pacific Tides," a classic in marine biology, describing marine life along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. Hedgpeth edited more of Ricketts' writings in two volumes of "The Outer Shores."

His publications included the massive Volume 1 of the "Treatise on Maine Ecology & Paleoecology" (1957); and Introduction to Seashore Life of the San Francisco Bay Region (1962). His teaching posts included the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. He was also director of the Pacific Marine Station, a University of the Pacific research facility at Dillon Beach, California, from 1957 to 1965. He was director of the Yaquina Biological Laboratories of the Marine Science Center, Oregon State University, Newport, Oregon, from 1965 to 1973. He retired as Professor of Oceanography in September, 1973. He and his wife moved to Santa Rosa, California during retirement. He died July 28, 2006 in Hillsboro, Oregon. His archives are housed at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

The nudibranch Polycera hedgpethi was named in his honor by Ernst Marcus, a marine biologist who taught at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Hedgpeth was an iconoclast and an early environmentalist. He spoke Latin, German, Welsh, and Russian. He founded the "Society for the Prevention of Progress" and was its sole member, under a pseudonym, Jerome Tichenor . Under the same pseudonym, he published "Poems in Contempt of Progress" and vocally opposed a nuclear power plant once proposed at Bodega Head, California . He was influential in the developing West Coast environmental movement in the 1970s. His influence was instrumental in getting the California freshwater shrimp, Syncaris pacifica, listed as an endangered species .