OBITUARIES

Glenn Ray Noggle
More than a half-century ago, our plant physiology class at the University of Florida was fascinated as Professor Ray Noggle described the control of plant growth with red and far-red light. He had just returned from a national ASPP meeting where he had heard about phytochrome and controlling plant growth with light from the indelible discoveries of Harry A. Borthwick and Sterling B. Hendricks. So it is with considerable sadness that former students and colleagues note the death of Glenn Ray Noggle, 94, on April 1, 2009, at his home in Albermarle, N.C. Education has indeed lost a strong, persistent advocate, for much of Ray’s career was quietly devoted to educational efforts. These can be traced from when he was a senior graduate student teaching lab techniques to two young beginning graduate students, Arthur Galston and Martin Gibbs, at the University of Illinois in the early 1940s, to his most recent role—facilitating discussion sessions on current topics for senior adults at Spring Arbor, Albemarle.

Ray graduated from Miami University, Ohio, in 1935, with an AB in chemistry and later entered the University of Illinois during World War II, graduating with a PhD in botany in 1945. He conducted research at the Blandy Experiment Farm, Virginia, 1946–1948; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1948–1952; the Southern Research Institute, Alabama, 1952–1954; and the Charles F. Kettering Foundation (see the photo), where he held a joint appointment as an instructor at Antioch College, Ohio, from 1952 to 1957. His true educational bent was crystallized when he became professor and head of botany at the University of Florida, Gainesville, from 1957 to 1964. He then became the Botany Department head at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in 1964. He continued on at NCSU as professor long after his retirement in 1977.

As a graduate student at the University of Florida, I fondly recall Professor Noggle’s outgoing, helpful nature. In fact, he facilitated my career by personally connecting me with Martin Gibbs. He kept a lively seminar program going; I still vividly recall one regular speaker: Professor F. C. Steward. These memories are made current by the present-day use of a wireless technology termed “Clickers in the Classroom” as a teaching and learning procedure. Professor Noggle arranged an annual visit by Professor Steward as Steward traveled each spring from his winter home in the Caribbean back to Ithaca, N.Y. When Professor Steward lectured, usually on the regeneration of a plant from a single cell, he would not ask for slide changes. Rather, he held a child’s clicker and simply clicked it as the slide change signal. By the finish you were almost salivating, a true Pavlovian experience for young students. But no “clickers” were available for us to respond!

Ray Noggle’s career was about serving and helping others. He did that fairly quietly but with very determined mannerisms. He loved interacting with others, especially in learning experiences, and this character lived through him to age 94. He served ASPP as its executive secretary–treasurer from 1956 to 1960, and at a critical transition time for ASPP, after serving as head of botany at NCSU, he came to the new headquarters in Maryland as the Society’s executive director, 1978–1982. Ray’s joy of teaching led him to coauthor with George J. Fritz the textbook Introductory Plant Physiology, published in 1976, which he used in teaching at Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia, USSR, as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar in 1977. Naturally then, even while in retirement, he continually supported activities such as botanical gardens, educational tours, and other learning experiences, especially for senior adults.

Ray’s lifelong quiet determination can be illustrated with one example: his boycott of a nationally known soup because he objected to the company’s refusal to hire union laborers. Professor Glenn Ray Noggle is memorialized as a helpful, determined, and lifelong educator.

Clanton Black
University of Georgia