IN MEMORIAMAlice C. Novo Bristol, 71, the winner of the 2001 URI Foundation’s Staff Excellence Award, Oct. 16, in West Warwick. A master gardener, Bristol brought her knowledge of plants and insects, dedication, and meticulous attention to detail to her position as senior clerk/typist for URI’s Cooperative Extension Education Center and Master Gardener Program. For 30 years she gladly put in long hours, sometimes working seven days a week to make sure that events, like Greenshare Field Day, went off without a hitch. Bristol was the sister of the late Robert F. Novo ’60, director of operations for the College of Resource Development, who is memorialized by a gazebo at Cooperative Extension’s Learning Landscape gardens.
Edward S. Josephson, 86, a former adjunct professor of food science and a pioneer in food irradiation, died in Providence on Oct. 2. Irradiation, which preserves food by using radiation to kill harmful microorganisms, is now being used to sanitize mail from possible anthrax contamination. Josephson pioneered the process at the National Institutes of Health and Natick Laboratories before coming to URI. Although skeptics have voiced safety concerns about irradiated food, Josephson claimed it was safe and would eliminate “the estimated 9,000 deaths and 6.5 million to 33 million cases of food-borne illness.” Josephson was a Harvard graduate and earned a Ph.D. at MIT.
David M. Pratt, 83, professor emeritus of oceanography, died at South County Hospital on Nov. 23. After retirement, he and his wife, Virginia, studied the behavior of giraffes in Tanzania and mute swans in R.I. Pratt excelled in painting and woodcarving and loved singing multiple harmonies. A Navy veteran of World War II, he and his wife often traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in demonstrations for peace and justice.
Irene Hawkins Stuckey, Hon. ’62, age 90, professor emerita of plant physiology and the author of Rhode Island Wildflowers (1967), died in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 10.
After receiving a B.S. in chemistry from Vanderbilt and a Ph.D. in plant physiology from Cornell in 1937, Stuckey joined the faculty of Rhode Island State College’s Agricultural Experiment Station. She was the only woman on the research team.
Her interest in Rhode Island’s native plants flourished with URI’s acquisition of the 2,300-acre W. Alton Jones Campus. Stuckey marked all of the nature trails, and in 1961 began to lead wildflower walks to raise money for the Whispering Pines Conference Center. Her walks, which she conducted until 1994 (long after her 1978 retirement), were so popular that during one year she led 1,200 people through the trails.
Stuckey won a national graphic arts award for Rhode Island Wildflowers. In April 2001 she and Lisa Gould published Coastal Plants from Cape Cod to Cape Canaveral. She also published numerous articles on such subjects as forage crops, weeds, ornamental plants, native plants, and salt marshes.
Stuckey received the R.I. Natural History Society’s first Distinguished Naturalist Award in 1994 and was also honored by the New England Wild Flower Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although she moved to Nashville in 1999, she returned to South County to celebrate her 90th birthday last spring—and to attend a book signing at the Coastal Institute on the Bay Campus.
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