CELEBRATE JACK RUDLOE’S 80TH BIRTHDAY

On Friday, Feb. 17, 2023 from 6 to 8 p.m., I will be celebrating my 80th birthday at Gulf Specimen Marine Lab and all my friends and supporters are invited. No presents please, but donations to the aquarium are welcome.

Reflecting on the 65 years I’ve spent in the Florida panhandle, I perused my first book, “The Sea Brings Forth” which I wrote when I was 22, which is full of my unbounding enthusiasm for nature which we still strive to share at our aquarium. It was written before the dredges started shredding the wetlands, the developers, polluters trashing the environment, before our lifelong, futile battle of trying to stop them.  So here’s a passage from my first book.

“When I left the university I was penniless and absolutely without any useful skills that would be helpful in getting a job. All my past preparation for life had been academic, and if I had completed my schooling I would have chosen a career in science. But as it was, my only working experience was as a third-class laboratory assistant, washing Petri dishes, counting sea-urchin eggs, test tube after test tube, and keeping frog tanks clean and weeding out the dead tadpoles.

“But I was young and determined to survive; my world did not have to come to an end. There must be something I could do, something that I had a talent for. Then I remembered that on my last job, my professor-employer always bought frogs. He was studying the neuromuscular reactions of amphibians.

“That was the beginning of my career as a collector. In waist-deep swamp water where cottonmouth water moccasins lurked, while swarms of mosquitoes feasted on me, I netted 22 large fat croaking bullfrogs. This professor desperately needed the frogs to continue his research, and he paid me nearly the same rate that he had paid the commercial biological supply companies. And so my first commercial enterprise netted me $50...

“Then one day a zoologist inadvertently took me out of the woods and put me into marine collecting--he ordered two dozen live pink shrimp.
“I went to Carrabelle, a fishing village, and found a softhearted shrimper, Pea Picker and his captain, Nick Mosconis who consented to take me out shrimping with them. After that one night out on the bay I fell in love with the sea and with shrimping, and I never went back to the woods again. ... For a time I lived an adventurous, carefree life as an apprentice deck hand and an amateur biological collector...

“Eventually I gave up my carefree life as larger and more important orders came in for live specimens. When I had saved up enough money I made a small down payment on an old army barracks...(I)t was on the Gulf and I could buy specimens from the local crabbers. And I was in love with the landscape... The bay was bordered by tall, tall pine trees, massive branching water oaks heavy with drooping strands of Spanish moss, and ancient cypress swamps with big old alligators... As more orders came in, I repaired the roof and had shelves, sinks, and laboratory tables installed.”

And thus began Gulf Specimen Marine Lab.