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Remembering Harry: Mark Jacobs and John Latimer

  I think it was in the early nineties that at a hardwood management workshop that we put on...he showed up for that. And he took an interest and said, is it OK if we hook up and bring our students out to some of your project areas that you showed on the field tour?...I think it was twenty two or twenty three consecutive years, he brought his students out every spring to to look at the same piece of land and and talk about how it changed and... logging practices...and that was my first exposure to turning over old rotten logs and looking at red-backed salamanders.And he was an expert at finding them and talked a lot about how much total biomass and salamanders are in those rich hardwood forests. - Mark Jacobs 

Mark Jacobs is the retired land commissioner of Aiken County. He joined John Latimer and reminisced about our friend Harry Hutchins this morning.

He he was an amazing person...thinking back, I recall a panel that we were on in the local high school and we were talking about climate change. And Harry was pretty adamant about climate change and about the way that we tend to pave the parking lot, you know… and,  he finally had had enough. There were people on both sides of the issue, and finally, he just had had enough and he blew up. He just spoke sternly from his heart ...and there must have been one hundred applauded him for just talking about exactly what the issue was and laying it out pretty clearly that things needed to be done and that talking around them and dressing up the edges wasn't going to help. And that was Harry to a T.. He was pleasant, he was honorable, but, boy, he held by his positions and he wasn't going to back down just because there was a lot of people who didn't agree with him.He was quite the guy...He'll be missed. - John Latimer

We miss you, Harry. 

As a mail carrier in rural Grand Rapids, Minn., for 35 years, John Latimer put his own stamp on a career that delivered more than letters. Indeed, while driving the hundred-mile round-trip daily route, he passed the time by observing and recording seasonal changes in nature, learning everything he could about the area’s weather, plants and animals, and becoming the go-to guy who could answer customers’ questions about what they were seeing in the environment.