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Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts was born on
May 14, 1897 on the northwest side of Chicago. He attended Illinois
State Normal University for one year, but left to see something
of the world. He served a tour of duty in the Army Medical Corps
during WWI, and entered the University of Chicago on his return
(in October 1942, Ricketts was called back into the Army, serving
in the VD clinic at the Presidio). He attended classes sporadically
between 1919 and 1922, taking classes in zoology, philosophy,
Spanish and German, but left without taking a degree. He was,
however, profoundly influenced by one of his teachers, W.C. Allee,
an ecological theorist whose 1931 treatise Animal Aggregations
dealt with the universality of social behavior among animals
(including man) and the theory of social transition, that animals
act differently in groups than as individuals. |
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Bust of Ed Ricketts by Jesse
Corsaut |
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Ricketts Comes to California
In 1923, Ricketts came to California
with his Chicago roommate, A.E.Galigher, and opened Pacific
Biological Laboratories.
Located at the corner of Fountain Avenue
and High Street (now called Ricketts Row) in a one-story board
and batten building, the lab supplied biological specimens and
slides to schools and research institutions. Eventually, Galigher
moved to Berkeley, and Ricketts became the sole owner of the
business.
In 1925, Ricketts published an article,
Vagabonding Through Dixie, (Travel, June
1925), which described his walk from Chicago through the South.
PBL moved to 740 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey in 1928 (the street
was later renumbered, and the lab's address changed to 800; it
was renamed Cannery Row in 1958).
During the 1920s, Ricketts lived with his
wife, Anna, and three children at several homes in Pacific Grove
and Carmel. Even after Ricketts moved the business to Monterey,
he maintained a P.O. box at the Pacific Grove post office. Ironically,
he took up full-time residence at the Monterey lab in 1936, and
several months later, on November 25th, a fire started in the
adjacent Del Mar Cannery, destroying the lab and most of its
contents (including Ricketts extensive marine ecology library
and family heirlooms). Fortunately, the manuscript of Between
Pacific Tides had already been sent to Stanford University.
The lab was a meeting place for local artists, writers and scholars,
including Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller. After the fire, many
of Ricketts' friends helped him reconstruct the lab and replace
its contents. |
Photo of Ed Ricketts courtesy
California Views: The Pat
Hathaway Collection |
Ricketts Meets Steinbeck
In October 1930, Ed Ricketts and
John Steinbeck met at the cottage of a friend in Carmel, although
Steinbeck told the story of their meeting at a dentist's office
in “About Ed Ricketts” in The Log from the Sea
of Cortez. They had an immediate rapport, and the two
shared their experiences and ideas in what might best be described
as a commensal relationship. Ricketts was a major influence on
Steinbeck's writing and philosophy, and, as Jackson Benson notes
in his exhaustive biography The True Adventures of John
Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Viking, 1984), the main themes
in Steinbeck's writings “were developed and nurtured in
the rich soil of their mutual enthusiasm for exploring ideas
and their implications.” The period of time that Steinbeck
and Ricketts were in each other's company, between 1930 and 1941,
was one of the most productive periods of Steinbeck's writing.
Ricketts was the inspiration for Doc in Cannery Row
and Sweet Thursday, Doc Burton in In Dubious
Battle, Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, Doctor
Winter in The Moon is Down, as well as characters
in several other works. |
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Ricketts' Work
Ricketts was not just a catalyst
for Steinbeck's writing; Stanford University published his ecological
handbook of intertidal marine life, Between Pacific Tides,
in 1939. The 5th edition is still used as a textbook at many
universities. From March 14 to April 18, 1940, Ricketts and Steinbeck
took their famous sojourn on the Western Flyer to the Gulf of
California, which resulted in the book The Sea of Cortez.
Steinbeck kept no journal of the trip, except in his head, and
relied heavily on Ricketts' notes when he wrote the narrative
half of the book.
In fact, Ricketts' philosophical "Essay
on Non-Teleological Thinking" was revised by Steinbeck as
the Easter Sunday chapter.The Log from the Sea of Cortez
(1951) differs from The Sea of Cortez (1941) in
that the phyletic catalogue that Ricketts compiled is omitted,
as is Ricketts' name as co-author. It also includes the poignant
quasi-biographical essay, About Ed Ricketts. Later
editions have reinstated Ricketts' name on the title page. He
developed a filing system for the specimens he gathered which,
according to his friend Ritchie Lovejoy, “when finished
[would be] a complete and comprehensive survey and index of every
known marine animal from the Gulf of California to Alaska."
Lovejoy also noted that Ricketts produced the “most comprehensive
study of sardine habits and migration ever compiled. There is
nothing else to compare with it in detail, observation and conclusion." |
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  See a selection from BSU's Edward
Ricketts pamphlet. |
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The Man vs the Myth
While "Doc" of Cannery
Row and Sweet Thursday is a character based
on Steinbeck's close friend Ed Ricketts, there are distinct and
pronounced differences between the fictional hero and the real
man. Many of Ricketts' quirks and traits become part of Doc's
persona, and the distinctions become quite blurred, perhaps due
to Steinbeck's great capacity for capturing telling points of
character and description through apparently superficial detail.
Or perhaps Steinbeck's portrayal tells more about himself than
about his friend. The Ricketts we see through Steinbeck's eyes,
the solitary bachelor, "concupiscent as a rabbit,"
who spent most of his time interacting with the fringe of conventional
society, contrasts with the serious, hard-working scientist who
spent most of his energies searching for his ultimate goal, the
truth. Steinbeck may have created this persona to demonstrate
that the traditional values cherished by middle-class society
were invalid, using the Ed/Doc character to point out the disparity
between sinner and saint. Whatever Steinbeck's motivation, the
life and lore of Ed and Doc have melded together, leaving the
real Ricketts clouded in mystique. Ultimately, one must realize
that Steinbeck was creating art, not writing history, and the
disparities between fact and fiction are simply literary license. |
Ricketts' Philosophy
In addition to being a marine biologist,
Ricketts was a philosopher. Using a unique combination of scientific
method and metaphysics, he attempted to tie together apparently
unrelated elements into a unified whole. He referred to this
holistic idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
as the "toto picture." He called the means by which
he tried to achieve understanding the philosophy of "breaking
through," from a line in Robinson Jeffers'
"Roan Stallion," and
attempted to achieve his ends through a method he called "non-teleological
thinking" or is thinking, in which the search for cause
and effect are abandoned for a Zen-like acceptance of things
as they are. |
Ricketts' Later Years
After the breakup of Ricketts'
marriage in the mid 1930s, he lived at the lab with Toni Jackson,
who was his companion from 1941 to 1947. Although Ricketts' divorce
from Anna was never finalized, on January 2, 1948, he married
Alice Campbell in Barstow, California. After Steinbeck moved
to New York in 1941, he and Ricketts rarely saw each other, although
they corresponded up until the time of Ricketts' death. The two
had plans to take another collecting trip, this time to the Queen
Charlotte Islands, when Ricketts' car was struck by the Del Monte
Express on May 8, 1948. He died on May 11th. |
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See Don Bain's 360-degree
full-screen panorama of the Ed Ricketts memorial at Drake
and Wave streets (near Cannery Row in Monterey), including the
Rec Trail that now occupies the old railroad right-of-way. Also
visible is Jesse Corsaut's bust of Ed Ricketts. |
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Ricketts' Legacy
Ed Ricketts has left his legacy
on the Monterey Peninsula and beyond. His work has inspired several
generations of biologists, particularly, as John E. McCosker
has noted, his benchmark theses on the effect of wave shock and
tides upon animals and plants. Despite the fact that his manuscripts
were destroyed in the 1936 fire and never rewritten, students
at Hopkins Marine Station were familiar with them and built upon
Ricketts' ideas. The Outer Shores, a two-volume collection
of Ricketts' scientific and philosophical essays (edited by his
friend and fellow marine biologist Joel W. Hedgpeth) was published
in 1978, and is essential reading for a better understanding
of the man and his ideas. A sea spider, Pycnogonum rickettsi,
originally collected from local anemones by Ricketts, was named
for him. Recently, two species of sea slugs were named after
Ricketts and Steinbeck, Catriona rickettsi and Eubranchus
steinbecki. To learn more about these nudibranchs, visit
The Slug Site.
In 1979, over 30 years after Ricketts' death, Moss Landing Marine
Laboratory christened their research vessel, a 35-foot lobster
boat, the RV
Ed Ricketts (the boat was retired in 2003 and returned
to Maine waters). On July 14, 1994, the City of Pacific Grove
renamed High Street, where the first lab once stood, Ricketts
Row. |