Dr. Theodore W. Sudia, US National Park Service
(1925 - 2015)
Theodore W. Sudia Obituary (George
Wright Society) (PDF) <--- Read this first.
The above George Wright Forum obituary covers many of Ted's career
highlights, while hinting at the contradiction of his later life,
that he had alas (in the eyes of many) hit the “Peter Principle” and
risen to his “Level of Incompetence.” His lifetime of success in the
Boy Scouts, Navy, Academia, and Civil Service alas did NOT transfer
to Political Philosophy, and while he hoped to form a new
eco-political party, his ideas went over like a lead balloon. (At
one presentation I attended, two of his friends walked out, less
than 5 minutes in.)
Indeed, it tactfully omits that (as far as I know) Ted was expelled
from the highly successful Society of park
science professionals he had co-founded with colleagues he had
known since college days at Kent State! He was certainly on the outs
with them, no doubt due to their lack of enthusiasm for his
half-baked, late-life, eco-political ideas. (In his later years,
Albert Einstein's version of a Unified
Field Theory went nowhere, but at least he didn't get himself
thrown out of Princeton!)
Ted needed another PhD in Philosophy of Science, plus maybe an LLM
in Public Sector Law, but this was the late 20th century, before
online seminars. He could have joined the Board of a major
environmental group, become an Emeritus Professor of Ecology
somewhere, applied for a Residency in some Philosophy Department, or
possibly all three, but instead wrote numerous
(mostly unread) essays on how the National Parks can be a
model for a new vision of Society.
Despite his major, enduring impacts on US and global natural and
cultural resource management, only one of his professional friends,
his long term protege [MO], came to see him at the end.
= = = = =
Draft Collection of Ted Sudia Stories (raw biographical notes) –
Incomplete and not in order.
(Any teenage kid living in Washington, DC with both parents working
for the federal civil service could no doubt recall more, and
possibly better, stories than these.)
[Skipping over Ambridge, PA, Kent, Columbus & Toronto, OH, and
Winona, MN]
Our St Paul, Minnesota Era
Our family's summer of 1963 road trip to the Southwest, to areas
where he and his PhD advisor Arthur Herrick had previously studied
the plant life. Trained as a Botanist, he knew the common and
species names of every plant, their ranges, and would discourse upon
them on walks . Work for Green Giant on determining optimal harvest
times, based on degree-days, which led to their “Picked at the peak
of perfection” advertising jingle. Light rooms and big Xenon lamps,
to grow crops year round while adjusting the day length.
Considerable work on wheat rust and other plant diseases.
Their weekly Ag-Botany seminars by PhD students, professors, and
visiting professors, which were social as well as educational
events. He told me that a good title for a scientific paper was “The
Effect of X on Y.” He gave a guest lecture at some ag school,
including a list of suggested plant science research topics, which
they posted on the wall and used as their research agenda.
His first trip to Russia in May 1963 as part of an early scientific
exchange, where he dressed like a Russian, was constantly tailed by
the KGB, and debriefed by the CIA on his return. The annual U Minn
Botany Dept sweet corn picnic at the Agricultural Experiment Station
at Rosemount, MN (which later inspired the annual NPS summer crab
and corn feast, held near the Tidal Basin). The experimental Hayes
White sweet corn was reputed to be the sweetest. (Still available.
Developed in the 1930's by H.K. Hayes of Minnesota State Univ,
Mankato.) His publication on Flight Distance in the Great Blue Heron
appears to be a legitimate ornithological research project, not the
prank that he portrayed it as to me. Someone later cited it in her
PhD thesis on the Great Blue Heron.
His studies on absorption and translocation of radioactive isotopes
in crops, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission (now NRC) to assess
the effects of fallout from nuclear war. His using an automated
liquid scintillation counter to evaluate radioisotope labeled
samples of plant material, which had been reduced to ash in small
round dishes, in a shielded refrigerated system resembling a deep
freezer. When he handed me a bar of Uranium 238 (the non-fissionable
kind), the size of a candy bar, which was stored wrapped in a sheet
of Lead, so I could feel it was much heavier than Lead. Everyone who
visited the "hot" lab was issued a standard red plastic radiation
badge with some x-ray film inside, which would be developed
periodically to monitor their exposure.
Moving to Washington, DC (1967)
Failing to get tenure and promotion to full professor, he leaves U
Minn in 1967 to take a job with American Institute of Biological
Sciences (AIBS) working for director John R. Olive [1916-1974] in
Washington, DC. While at AIBS he helps produce their magazine
BioScience, serving as book review editor.
Prior to him joining AIBS, John Olive, Ted, Glenn Herrick, myself,
and John's 2 sons (Kent & Craig) went on like a 6-day, 10-lake
canoe trip in the Boundary Waters region north of Ely, MN, camping
on an island in the middle of some lake. A great wilderness
experience with 3 natural scientists.
Unemployed for 8-9 months after some falling out with Olive at AIBS,
he tries to found a National Graduate University on what was
then Avenel Farm, during which he met David A. Fegan (d. 1996), a
local real estate lawyer, who introduced him to MD GOP
Congressman Gilbert Gude. His old Navy buddies (Robert M. Linn
& Albert G. Greene) were doing science at the National Park
Service, so between them and an assist from Gude (during the Nixon
Admin), he gets a senior civil service appointment in the Park
Service, and soon succeeds Linn as NPS Chief Scientist, who
later heads out to Isle Royale, MI, where he runs the GWS.
[Also during the above unemployment, he studied Animal Behavior,
creating and observing a colony of gerbils. This research was never
published, but a) included the observation that many “animal
behaviors” were also seen in humans, suggesting that humans are more
primal than they suspect, and b) led to his Theory of Language and
Tools (TLT), a major influence on my early philosophical theories.]
His successful effort to move natural resource inventories into the
park maintenance budget, along with road repairs and snow removal,
where it was much less likely to be cut than if budgeted as
research.
His creation of the Center
for Urban Ecology (CUE), and authoring 9 papers in pamphlet
form (see below) on Urban Ecology, including one titled The
River in the City (1974), in which he urged city planners to
look upon rivers as a natural asset, rather than the grubby or
ruined dockyards more often seen back then. This led to a
renaissance of urban river and harbor projects, such as Baltimore
Harbor Place (1980), a successful shopping and dining area, and
multiple downtown river walk projects. (Some of which predate and
must have inspired him.)
When former Idaho governor Cecil D Andrus
became Secretary of the Interior, he brought along RM, a young
intern / briefcase-carrier, who had been his limo driver during the
Democratic Convention. A glib talking English major, RM told me he
once persuaded then House Speaker Tip O'Neill to pull over on the
George Washington Parkway and chat with him (hopefully at one of the
overlooks). While everyone else at the Interior Dept was ignoring
him, Ted befriended RM, which allowed him to gain insight into top
level political affairs (3 tiers up), and considerably influence
them, by educating the junior aide on various topics.
His support for the first Inter-Agency Grizzly Bear Task Force,
which produced what was viewed as a workable scientific compromise
with the ranchers and environmental groups. The time he convinced
Interior Secretary James Watt, a devout evangelical Reagan
appointee, that it was God's Will that the Cape Hatteras
Lighthouse would fall into the Atlantic Ocean, due to continual
erosion and movement of barrier islands due to onshore currents, so
don't try to save it. His work on a Coastal Zone Management task
force.
Another round of trips to Russia, now as a US government official,
helping them develop their parks. In Russian, Zapovednik means
“forever wild,” their word for national park. The time he asked a
Russian park manager what Basic Law was he operating under? He
replied, “Law, what law? There's this guy in the Kremlin. I call him
and he tells me what to do.” The drinking contests with Russian
officials, which due to his alcohol tolerance, he was winning. A
more senior Russian official, who could have been mistaken for
Khrushchev, had dinner at our home on Halloween, with a translator,
and was handing out candy to startled kids.
His creation, along with Linn, Greene, and others, of the highly
successful George
Wright Society, as a professional organization for natural and
cultural resource managers, which frequently hosts the heads of
relevant federal agencies as speakers at its events. Naming it after
the legendary first Chief Scientist of the National Park Service
back in the 1930s (who was independently wealthy) paid off later
when it elicited sizeable donations from his well-off family. (I was
member No. 7 of the GWS, but dropped out since I was not a natural
resources manager.)
His policy for Evangelical groups at the Grand Canyon, that they
could tell their own followers the Canyon was made in 7 days, but
not anyone else. The time he had made so many trips to the NPS
Conference Center at Grand Canyon that he forgot to look in the
Canyon. The time he visited Haleakala in Hawaii Volcanoes, which was
shrouded in mist, but once he ascended, the fog cleared on time for
him to get the view.
[If you knew Ted and this list brings back memories, consider
opening a text or document file on your computer and type some notes
into it. Dates for these events would come in handy. Or if you
already wrote a relevant essay, I can post/link it or include it as
a chapter. All inputs will be credited, unless you prefer
anonymity.]
The time he advocated a “let-burn” policy for the Great Yellowstone
Fire (of 1988). As he explained it, the locals feared the fire was
bad for business, and sending scientists to town meetings wasn't
convincing them. However, when those same scientists appeared on TV,
saying the same things, the locals believed them. Film production
companies used the event to capture dramatic footage of trees
exploding in flames. Things turned out fine when the area
experienced a bloom and lush greenery brought tourism back to normal
(as they had said it would).
His efforts to create Cooperative Agreements with Universities to a)
do surveys of park resources, b) pay them to read the relevant
literature, and c) train the next generation of students to do
science on natural lands. This was no more than what Green Giant,
General Mills, and other food companies had been doing at U Minn,
funding crop scientists to work on solving their problems, such as
when to pick peas for best taste and texture? Or how best to control
plant diseases like wheat rust or corn smut, and improve drought
resistance, etc? Now he wanted to fund Universities to look at
solving NPS's problems.
Just as these Cooperative Agreements were successful, they triggered
a major anti-Science backlash within the Interior Dept, including
preposterous ethics allegations that he was taking kickbacks from
the Universities. The FBI cleared him of any such misconduct, which
would have been wholly unlike him, but the tension remained,
especially after Reagan was elected, and old style managers
accustomed to ruling the roost resented Science being used to
overrule them. (At one point he explained to me the difference
between malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance.) They couldn't
fire him due to Civil Service protections, but he was relieved of
duties, sent to the Turkey Farm, a holding unit for unwanted
staff, and assigned a desk in the attic of 1100 L Street, NW with
bird dung on it.
During the worst period, he spent 3 years at the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA), which also has many land, water, and resource
management issues, where he worked effectively with tribes and other
stakeholders on numerous issues, including nearly creating an
American Indian Homeland. Coincidentally, my mother Cecelia Sudia
over at HHS was working on Indian Child Welfare, briefly making them
a DC “power couple” on Indian Policy.
As he explained, for land to be "irrigable" you must be able to grow
something on it, in a water-efficient manner. So for example, land
consisting of 10' of egg gravel over 20' of boulders would be
considered non-irrigable, and hence not entitled to receive
allotments under regional water compacts or treaties.
The time he out-maneuvered the Secretary of the Smithsonian in a
dispute with the State of New York over Indian artifacts, and got
him fired, making me swear never to tell anyone what happened. The
time some medicine men looked at rudely stored Indian relics at the
Smithsonian and promptly left town saying, “The spirits aren't going
to like that.” The next day (1-13-82) Air Florida Flight 90 crashed
into the Potomac River killing 78, and 3 were killed in a Metro
subway mishap.
Publication of MO's now classic book on The
Value of Conserving Genetic Resources, which Ted commissioned
her to write as an NPS science title, was delayed until 1984, due to
the Reagan Admin's lack of interest in promoting Ecology.
His efforts to help create parks and natural areas in other
countries, including Spain and Russia. The time he almost created a
major nature preserve in Malaysia, but one of his assistants (LVK)
leaked the deal, after which the billionaire power player backed out
and did nothing.
The time another of his assistants (CK) introduced Robert Redford,
a prominent figure in Conservation, to Ted's niece JG (my cousin,
now deceased), a purported psychic, which turned out badly. CK later
got an MD from Harvard Medical School, was diagnosed with cancer,
tried natural remedies that didn't work, and promptly died, sending
his costly Harvard MD down the drain. (A “70's Death,” as one friend
[NBO] remarked.)
Long term colleagues included: J Arthur Herrick, Glenn Herrick,
Albert J Linck, Eduard
Stadelmann, Angela OkYoung Lee-Stadelmann, George Alghren,
Clyde Hurst, Mary Abrahamson, Larry Littlefield, Roy Wilcoxson, Bob Linn,
Al Greene, John
L Hoke. Other contacts included: Bill
Kornblum (social ecology), Jack Balch
(NASA), Gil Levin
(Biospherics), and Jack
Dangermond (ESRI).
[In Summer 1967, I visited Ed Stadelmann's home in Vienna, Austria,
which was full of priceless antique grandfather and cuckoo clocks
that all went off at the same time, cared for by his long term
butler Hans, who fed me a breakfast of hard bread, salami and
cheese. I signed the guest book at the Pflanzenphysiologisches
Institut, and stayed a few months with friends of his in Tyrol, who
called him Onkel Eddie. The famous phone number you could call to
obtain an A-440 tone to tune your violin, which we did, is no longer
in service.]
= = = = =
The NPS Urban Ecology Series (Pamphlets)
by Theodore W. Sudia, PhD
1. Man, Nature, City, 1971
2. The Vegetation of the City, 1972
3. The Ecology of the Walking City, 1973
4. The River in the City, 1974
5. The City as a Biological Community, 1975
6. The City as a Park, 1976
7. Technology Assessment and the City, 1976
8. Ecological Engineering of the City, 1978
9. Wildlife and the City, 1978
These 9 pamphlets (see link above) were coffee table booklets
suitable for handing out to tourists and high school students at
urban park facilities, written in part to restart his pipeline of
science publications, which he had been neglecting. Looking at the
dating, in 1976 he was making a major (but unsuccessful) effort to
be appointed Director of the National Park Service in the incoming
Carter Administration. Then after Reagan was elected in 1980, the
cry became to "Defund the Left," including anything pertaining to
Ecology, after which he transferred to the BIA.
If the political skies had not darkened, he could have kept going,
adding further pamphlets such as:
10. Urban Stream Ecology
11. Urban Lake Ecology
12. The Geology of Urban Soils
13. The Hydrology of Urban Drainage
= = = = =
Institute for domestic Tranquility (IdT)
Although he had been promoting a political
philosophy based around the idea of "domestic Tranquility,"
which the Preamble to the US Constitution recites but does not
define, since at least 1976, he formed a non-profit organization
(formerly located at IdT.org) which gained its
501(c)(3) tax status in 1984.
An anonymous non-government website, NPSHistory.com, has very
helpfully provided us with archived versions the Institute for domestic Tranquility,
including most issues of his self-edited publication We the People: Letters
of the Institute for domestic Tranquility (Sept 1986 - Sept
1993) for your reading enjoyment.
[I would have gone about this project much differently, but this is
Ted's bio, so I'll present my version elsewhere. I'm also
considering writing an AI-assisted counterfactual novella in which
his ideas succeed and become the basis of a new Social Contract with
Nature.]
A good example of the book that Ted should have written can be seen
in Constantinos
A. Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of
Human Settlements. (1968) New York: Oxford University Press.
Ted admired this work by the noted Greek architect and city planner
(who designed numerous cities including Islamabad) and wished he
could have come up with something like it. A summary can be found here.
= = = = =
Ted stories from earlier times
Frank (Fyodor) Sudia (1886-1967) & Paraskeva (Paraska) Storozka
(1886-1928) were both born in the Ukraine in two nearby villages,
Tilawa and Chestohorb, near the western capital of Lvov (Lvyv),
which at the time were in Poland. They immigrated to the USA via
Hamburg, Germany to Ellis Island around 1907, where they met each
other and got married while working at a lumber camp in "Cross Fork,
PA" (which can no longer be located). Their 8 children in order
were: Anne, Marion, Frank Jr, Victoria,
Helen, Dorothy, Wm Daniel (Danny), and
Theodore (Ted), all now deceased. The first four were somewhat
older, causing them to be considered as 2 groups.
Theodore W. Sudia was born in Ambridge, PA on October 10, 1925. The
youngest of eight children, his mother Paraskeva died in 1928 when
he was age 3, of an abscessed tooth prior to wide availability of
penicillin. Raised by his older sisters, who apparently brutalized
him, he had a tough childhood, moving out to live with his married
eldest sister Anne at the earliest possible moment. His living
situation was sufficiently unstable that he attended 4 different
high schools. What he learned from this, he later told me, was that
what people know about you is almost entirely what you tell them, so
come up with something positive.
Born in 1925, he was 8 in 1933, the depths of the Great Depression.
No one had any money, and they certainly weren't giving it to him.
However, by chance he noticed that when he picked up discarded
cigarette packs, they sometimes contained a coin. His big mistake,
he told me, was telling others about it. After that, he never found
a coin in a cigarette pack again. (I've always seen this as a
parable about investment opportunities.)
One of his early jobs involved shoveling sand from one side of a
room to another in a Pittsburgh iron foundry. Each day a railroad
car would dump a load of sand on one side, and he and other guys
would shovel it over into carts on the other side. This job made him
decide to go to college.
Indisputably smart, he briefly attended Stevens Tech, a top ranked
engineering school in New Jersey. But the person who really taught
him Calculus was Snake Singleton, a machine tool operator at some
factory where he was working, thus enabling him to tutor me and
other relatives on this critical subject.
As I recall, he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy during
WW-2, no doubt with winks from Navy recruiters. This was certainly a
key fact in his life, since if he hadn't done so, he wouldn't have
qualified for free college (up through his PhD) and subsidized VA
home loans, nor met my Mother, etc.
Enlisting in the US Navy as an underage kid, he achieved no great
rank, rising to something like Petty Officer, but it was a coming of
age experience, and solidified his strong outgoing personality.
Serving on a minesweeper in the Pacific, he saw no combat, mainly
clearing minefields by various means such as dragging the mines up
and shooting at them with rifles to detonate them. Said he had been
in all of the so-called "Seven Seas." He did however live through a
major typhoon, with 90 foot waves, during which he was part of the
piloting team. This later gave him enough seamanship skills to avert
disaster during a near-miss yachting fiasco.
After the war he worked at North American Aviation in Columbus, OH
as a tooling inspector in an aircraft factory, perhaps because he
could pass a math exam. His job was checking to see if special tools
and jigs matched the design specs, making him an expert micrometer
user. He once explained the difference between a slip fit and a
press fit, versus when 2 metal surfaces were both super-flat, they
would stick together and needed to be slid apart. He also explained
the types of bolts and nuts, and how they sampled shipments of parts
to check for defects.
He had a desktop model of a North
American F-86 Sabre Jet, from the Korean War Era, which he
must have worked on, likely to pay rent while studying for his
(otherwise free) PhD at Ohio State in Columbus.
At the time they were using wrought iron skinning jigs to bend
sheets of aluminum into shapes needed for the wings and skin of the
plane. He wrote up a suggestion and dropped it in the Suggestion Box
that rather than wrought iron, they should use some castable plastic
filler material "such as auto body solder." This generated a patent
(too old to be online) and saved them $100s of millions. He received
a certificate of merit and a $25 savings bond, along with a note to
the effect that there was no other way to reward him since the
contribution was too great.
Note the similarity between Ted's idea of casting aircraft skinning
jigs out of plastic and his older brother Frank, Jr's method of casting insulators out of clay. Ted knew of
his older brother's idea, which may have motivated him to submit his
suggestion.
I don't know why he decided to major in Botany, Plant Physiology,
Plant Pathology, and Ecology, receiving arguably among the first
PhD's in Ecology from Ohio State in 1953, the year I was born.
Presumably some combination of inspiring teachers, wanting to get
out of heavy industry, the prospect of jobs in the agricultural
heartland, and maybe my mother's family's quaint, early-settler
Appalachian farm in Eastern Ohio, where they were still using a team
of horses to bring in hay.
Moving to Minnesota in 1954, he got a series of teaching jobs,
including teaching Earth Science at Winona State Teacher's College
(now part of U Minn), solidifying his knowledge of Geology and
Hydrology, which serve as the foundation for Ecology. During the 4
years we spent in Winona, MN, he served on the School Board, and my
2 younger sisters Rachael and Norah were born. Then in 1958 we moved
to St. Paul, MN, after he landed a job as an asst professor of Plant
Physiology & Botany, working in the old Agricultural Botany
Building on the St. Paul "Farm" Campus of U Minn, where I would
often hang out after school, occasionally working on small projects
or washing glassware.
Okay, that's enough old Ted stories for now.
More to come as I generate, gather, and organize more material about
him.
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