Robert Pearcy:
CLASS OF 1959
Needham High SchoolClass of 1959
Needham, MA
Robert's Story
Life
I live in Davis, California where I am a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Davis is in northern California between San Francisco and Sacramento. At the University, I primarily teach plant ecology and related courses. My research has taken me to places here in California, Hawaii, Australia and over the past 10 years to Panama where I have projects in tropical forest ecology. My wife, Carol, is a high school teacher in Davis. Our son, Dean, is a photojournalist for a TV station in Spokane, WA while our daughter, Shannon, is in Oakland, CA where she works in health services administration at the headquarters of Kaiser Permanente, a large HMO out here.
We are contemplating retirement in a few years. We now have a house near Darby, Montana that we really enjoy, but only get up to it for 1-2 months in the summer (my wife for longer than I) and for a week at Christmas and a week in the spring. That will change once we retire. Darby is a small town of about 900 in the southern end of the Bitterroot Valley in the very western part of the state. We are a few miles out of town. We enjoy great views of the Bitterroot Mountains out the back and out the front of the Sapphire Mountains on the other side of the valley. We look right into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area about two miles away. There is lots of wildlife including deer, elk, moose and bighorn sheep in the area, and overall the countryside to the east, west and south is either wild or only sparsely populated. It...Expand for more
is a welcome relief from our overcrowded California environs. Hamilton, 20 miles to the north and Missoula, 65 miles north provide the necessary services beyond the essentials of groceries, hardware, etc. I really enjoy the fly fishing in the Bitterroot River 5 minutes away, and in other rivers in Western Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. We have enough pasture for a couple of horses that my wife in particular really enjoys. I am not much into riding but I enjoy seeing them in the pasture. We are fortunate to have some friends nearby that can look after them when we are not there. Our kids love the place and they come at Christmas and in the summer. We are still unsure whether we will be in Montana year around or go back to California in the winter. The Bitterroot Valley is referred to as the banana belt of Montana and in most years, the temperatures and snow are not that much of a problem.
In terms of more ancient history, after attending Paul SmithÂs College in northern New York State for two years, I graduated in forestry from the University of Montana and then received a PhD in Botany from Colorado State University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, my first real job was at the State University of New York in Albany in 1971. After four years, I moved to UC Davis where I have been for the past 28 years. I spent four years as a Department Chair but, fortunately, that job has a term limit! Thus, most of my career has been spent in teaching and research. Carol and I were married in 1965.
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