Lois Hattery Tiffany, 1924–2009

Lois Marie Hattery Tiffany, distinguished professor emeritus, Iowa State University, and former head of the Department of Botany, died on September 6, 2009, at the age of 85, in Ames, Iowa. She was an active member of the Mycological Society of America and was deservedly the first recipient of the Weston Award for Teaching. She taught at Iowa State University for 52 y, formally retiring in 2002, but continuing to teach, gratis, until 2005. Her research interests were broad and resulted in more than 100PUBLICations, including most recently the second edition of Mushrooms and other fungi of the mid-continental United States (Huffman et al. 2008)

Lois was born on a farm near Collins, Iowa, to Charles and Blanche (Brown) Hattery. Her early education took place in Story County, Iowa. Her interests were academic and conservation-oriented. As a high school freshman in 1938 she traveled to Iowa City to participate in the Brain Derby and later won a trip to Chicago to present a 4-H project. She received her B.S. degree in botany at Iowa State College in 1945. There Dr Joseph Gilman piqued her interest in mycology during a class she took as an undergraduate, and she went on to earn her M.S. (1947) and Ph.D. (1950) in mycology. Gilman was a great influence on her career and a valued mentor. Tiffany began her teaching career as an instructor in the Botany and Plant Pathology Department in 1950 and became a full professor in 1965.

She married F.H. (Hank) Tiffany, a neighbor from Collins Township, in 1945. Lois and Hank had three children whom they involved in some of the fun aspects of mycological pedagogy. For instance she kept cultures of Physarum polycephalum at her home where the children enjoyed feeding them oatmeal. She taught her graduate students to avoid mixing work and family with the story of taking her kids on a walk in the woods. She couldn’t resist collecting animal droppings from which she could have her students isolate coprophilous fungi. She stopped when her children started bringing her dung they had found.

The early years in academics were difficult for Dr T (as her students and associates fondly called her). What was normal in the 1940s and 1950s we now would call blatant sexism. She was given a B in a graduate course although she had the highest class average because the instructor thought it was not appropriate for a woman to receive an A in his course. When she was first hired as faculty, the chairman of the department suggested that she work for no pay because her husband had a job. She declined his offer and instead was paid the same wage as a teaching assistant, even though she was an assistant professor. One humorous story Dr T liked to tell to illustrate the discrimination she endured was of a time she was working in her office and noticed a man pass by her door several times, looking in with each pass. After the third pass she stepped to the door and inquired if she could help him. He said he was looking for Dr Tiffany.

When she replied that she was Dr Tiffany, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Are you sure?” A personal favorite (MAK) was her story about the colleague who blurted out “Not again!” when he learned that she was pregnant with her second child. She did not spend time complaining or campaigning for fair treatment. A clue to how she handled the discrimination is in a philosophy that she passed on to her students: “If you look for a slight, you will surely find it. But you have to get on to what you want to do with your life.” She persevered and over the years grew from a novelty in the eyes of many to become one of the most respected and highly recognized faculty member at ISU. She worked diligently to bring women into full acceptance in the field of science through her own example and by mentoring young women in the Program for Women in Science and Engineering, as well as other programs.

Dr T loved to teach anyone at any level. She offered a number of undergraduate and graduate classes, including field mycology (taught at Iowa Lakeside Lab), introductory mycology (one semester), principles of aquatic fungi, and her rigorous one-year course in general mycology. The course covered the kingdom in great detail with lab work coordinated with each lecture. This was her trademark course and was arguably the best graduate mycology course in the nation. In addition to botany graduate students, most plant pathology graduate students took the course. Her final exams were always interesting, with questions such as, “Write everything you know on the subject of (insert one of several brilliant questions)”, or for field mycology, “Write a dichotomous key to all of the fungi you saw this summer.” Once over the shock we left the exam appreciating just how much information Dr T had magically bestowed upon us. Her introductory mycology course continues to the present in the Plant Pathology Department at ISU.

Over the years her favorite course was probably field botany, an elective for non-botany majors. Before she began teaching it the bedraggled field course struggled for survival and was scheduled to be dropped. When Dr T learned of this she volunteered to teach it although she already had the heaviest teaching load in the department. This popular course often had more than 20 sections and was filled to overflowing each academic year. Years later many students (including KAN) still identify trees during the winter with field characteristics taught by Dr T. She encouraged her advanced graduate students to teach sections of this course to become familiar with the plants that served as substrates or hosts to fungi and to give them experience in designing a course and lecturing. Her only directive was that the course include winter twig and spring wildflower identification, for which she would provide guidance as needed, but the rest of the course was up to the instructor.

Her vast knowledge of mycology and botany was enthusiastically and expertly presented to students at all levels of academic training, not just university students. She often addressed schoolchildren. She had a marvelous ability to distill complex subjects into explanations that thePUBLIC could understand and appreciate; so she was a popular speaker and leader of amateur field trips, mushroom walks, prairie walks and spring wildflower trips. She organized and directed an adult nature weekend each year in August at Iowa Lakeside Lab. Forays into the loess hills in western Iowa were a venture that Dr T enjoyed because it let her communicate the nature of fungi to a varied group of students, most of whom were unfamiliar with the fungi but were outdoor enthusiasts. She conducted these activities often enough that she was known as Iowa’s Mushroom Lady. The importance of her mentorship of amateur mycologists is seen in the oak savanna restoration work by Bill and Sibylla Brown. The Browns won an environmental excellence award and are carefully documenting the changes in macrofungus species during savanna restoration, now in its 16th year. This survey work was made possible after taking Dr T’s field mycology class with subsequent mentoring. Moreover Lois, with Don Huffman and Sibylla, started the Prairie States Mushroom Club.

The fondest memories of hundreds of Iowa State alumni include field trips with the Botany Club. Dr T and colleague Dr George Knaphus were club faculty advisors for more than 40 y. They led camping and “botanizing” trips each year to botanically rich places, such as Big Bend National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, various national parks in Utah, the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St Louis and Arboretum in Grays Summit, Missouri, and to the Colorado Rockies. Her enthusiasm for field excursions was infectious. During trips Dr T made sure to interact with each individual so that all felt a part of the group. This sometimes occurred during the cooking or cleanup duties that were required of male and female students alike. JLR remembers hiking 9 miles up to Thunder Lake near Allenspark, Colorado, with Dr T and sharing her excitement at seeing American dippers dive into a clear mountain pool and run along the stream bottom below Ouzel Falls. Her interest in the surrounding biome during this hike reinforced his knowledge that Dr T was a true biologist, but one with a focus on the “beautiful fungi”, and that she was a person from whom he could learn much.

Working in Dr T’s research lab was a unique experience. Unlike most professors at major universities who demand or expect students to work on topics that interest the professor, Dr T allowed her students the latitude to choose topics of interest to them. She thought that the purpose of an advanced degree was to instill in the student an understanding of how to conduct topnotch research. The result was that usually no two students worked on related projects. While conducting research, the “Aha!” moments were shared. In an evening one might learn something new about polypore taxonomy, the ecology of prairie plant pathogens, see an oddball fungus from a turkey barn, learn the limitations of production of a mycotoxin or watch Achlya release its spores. Another source of painless learning was the coffee pot that was kept full all day. Students and faculty from many departments housed in Bessey Hall made it a daily habit to stop in Dr T’s lab for a cup of coffee and discussions, academic or otherwise. The lab bench set aside for this activity often contained a recent collection of an interesting fungus.

Given the latitude Dr T gave her students, it is not surprising that she published papers on all aspects of the fungal kingdom. Early in her career she studied developmental and cultural aspects of pathogens including Claviceps, Elsinoë and Colletotrichum. Her doctoral dissertation resulted in a paper on Colletotrichum that was the first study of what we now call latency in this plant pathogen (Tiffany 1951). In related work, based on her cultural observations and inoculation studies of Colletotrichum species, she inferred the link between C. destructivum with its teleomorph Glomerella glycines (Tiffany and Gilman 1954). With Gilman she published 11 papers, six that were taxonomic treatments of ascomycete families, Xylariaceae, Diaporthaceae, Hypocreaceae, Clavicipitaceae and Diatrypaceae, as they occur in Iowa. With student Judy Mathre she described Elsinoë panici (Tiffany and Mathre 1961). With colleagues and graduate students she published eight papers on lichens, predominantly flora of various Iowa counties and habitats. There were two papers each on rusts and aquatic fungi, eight papers on mycotoxins and mycotoxigenic fungi and a series of four papers with colleague Dr H.T. Horner on calcium oxalate crystals in fungal fruiting bodies. Her work on Iowa truffles (yet to be published) was recognized with the new species Mattirolomyces tiffanyae (Healy 2003). There were a number of papers on soil fungi and plant pathogens. She was especially interested in fungi in prairies and changes in prairie systems, including those resulting from burning, and susceptibility of different ecotypes of big bluestem to particular plant pathogens. The long-term work she, Knaphus and her students did on prairie fungi is unique among prairie ecological and fungal biosurveys. She and Knaphus also worked 10 y on the fungi of Big Bend National Park. Raymond Skiles, a wildlife biologist who aided their work, commented in correspondence with her daughter that, “Very few (National Park Service) units have had anything near the amount of work done on fungi as what they did for Big Bend.” She and Knaphus published on the myxomycetes of Big Bend (2001), and she was compiling their data on the other groups at the time of her death. Her work on the fleshy fungi ran the range from formal papers on ecology and distribution, to books on identification, to extension bulletins on morels and mushrooms, to popular press articles with fun titles such as “Summer mushrooms, and some are not” (Tiffany and Knaphus 1991).

She was a great advocate of the Ada Hayden Herbarium at Iowa State. She (with D. Isely and D. Lewis) received a grant to integrate the University of Iowa mycology collection into the herbarium. She added more than 8000 specimens from her own collections to the herbarium. She was very interested in documenting the mycobiota of Iowa parks and preserves and tracking the changes over time. A portion of this work is available through a Website with a database (http://www.herbarium.iastate.edu/fungi/) maintained by the herbarium.

As a university professor, a member of diverse professional societies and Iowa’s most accessible mycologist, Dr. T was an energetic contributor in all of her associations. This was due in part to her personality and in part because she fully embraced the mission of a land grant university. She was chairwoman of the Botany Department at Iowa State for six years. Her colleague Jack Horner said she was “… an even-handed, compassionate and quiet leader. She was challenged on several occasions by the faculty, and her leadership qualities and demeanor provided the ingredients for fair and direct handling of all points of view.” She served on 27 university committees or advisory boards. She was an invaluable resource for the Plant Disease Clinic (now called the Iowa State University Plant and Insect Diagnostic Clinic) and other Iowa Extension agencies, as she made identifications, grew out cultures and dispensed advice. She was a staunch supporter of the Iowa Academy of Science, serving a term as president in 1977–1978, and encouraging her students to present their research at meetings. She with her students were frequent contributors to the Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science (formerly the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science) with 36 research articles. She served on a number of committees of the Iowa State chapter of Sigma Xi and was president 1978–1979. She served on the MSA Council, as well as a number of MSA committees. She served on the Mycology Committee of the American Phytopathological Society and was a member of the editorial board of Mycopathologia. She was appointed by the governor of Iowa to two terms on the State Preserves Advisory Board and served more than a decade on the DOT Roadside Management Technical Advisory Committee.

Dr. T received a number of honors and awards including MSA’s W. H. Weston Award for Teaching Excellence in Mycology (first recipient, 1980); Distinguished Iowa Scientist Award from the Iowa Academy of Science (1982); Governor’s Medal for Science Teaching (first recipient, 1982); ISU Teaching Excellence Award (1989); Regents Award for Faculty (1990), Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame (1991); distinguished professor, ISU (1994); Distinguished Service Award, Iowa Academy of Science (1994); Anna Pate Award, Women in Science and Engineering, ISU (1999); and Honorary Outstanding Service Award, North Central Division, American Phytopathological Society (2009).

After retirement, Dr T retained an office and small lab at Iowa State. She intended to continue working as long as she could contribute but vowed to quit “when it becomes work.” Evidently that time never came because she was active until the day before her hospitalization after a fall on August 27, 10 d before her death.

She is survived by three children, five grandchildren and one great grandchild. In 1994 many of Dr T’s graduate students honored her with a large paver rock at the entrance of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at ISU. The words that summarize her academic life were inscribed: “Eminent mycologist, teacher extraordinaire and mentor: Her graduate students honor a pioneering woman whose dedication, tenacity, nurturing spirit, determination and independence of thought has inspired mycologists, academic peers and students.” She will be missed by her family and many students, colleagues and friends.

Fig. 1. Dr Lois Tiffany at the microscope in 2003.

Writing about a career as long as Dr Tiffany’s required the input of many colleagues, former students and friends, all of whom are warmly thanked. In particular the authors thank Jean Tiffany Day for her help with details and for sharing her unique perspective.