Founding Member Don Obee No Longer With Us

Dr. Obee

We recently received news that IAS Charter Member Donald J. Obee passed away last August 19th. A full obituary appeared in the Idaho Statesman and is posted online.  A brief item, with a link to the same obit appears on the Boise State University web site, which includes a nostalgia-inducing photo of Dr. Obee as a young professor.

The obituary provides a nice overview of Don’s life, mentioning his wife Doli, who died in 2005. The remembrance includes the sentence: “In 1946 Don and Doli and their two children relocated to Boise, Idaho, where Don began a thirty year teaching career at what was first Boise Junior College, later Boise State College, and finally Boise State University – serving most of that period as Chairman of the Life Sciences Department.”

That simple statement perhaps downplays the significant role Don Obee played in the growth of that Boise institution from a struggling junior college to thriving university. Even with the huge influx of veterans attending under the G. I. Bill, enrollment was only around a thousand during Obee’s first years at the school. In 1975, two years before he retired, the school topped 10 thousand students for the first time.

The obituary also said, “He loved to dance – both square dancing and ballroom – literally dancing into the last months of his life.”  Glen Barrett’s history of Boise State has a passage about when the school began growing its intramural sports program. It’s cool that, in 1984, Barrett wrote, “Biologist Donald Obee assisted with dancing as well as tennis.”

Don’s legacy at BSU carries on today with the “Donald J. Obee Biology Scholarship.” The BSU Annual Report for 2006 noted that Dr. Obee had added another $25,000 to that endowment during the year. We are also pleased to report that Don left a generous bequest to the Academy among his final wishes. (Executive Director Gene Stuffle received the check this week.)

In fact, Professor Obee played a major role in the birth of the Idaho Academy of Science. More than just a Charter Member, Don must be considered a “Founding Member.” According to the Academy history compiled by Professor M. Jerome Bigelow, the idea for a state science academy was literally “in the air” during the spring of 1958. Bigelow wrote, “Accordingly, an organizational meeting was called for May 10, 1958, Donald Obee kindly offering the hospitality of Boise Junior College (now Boise College) for the meeting.”

Obee, of course, attended that meeting, and was among the Charter Members enrolled when the Academy became a reality. (Not everyone who attended that first meeting became members, by the way.) Don continued to help during this formative stages and, for many years, chaired the Botany section for the Annual Symposium.

In 1962, Don became President of the Academy. The Retort contained a message to the membership that’s worth repeating:
“Not too many decades ago, it was the custom for trappers and Indians from miles around to congregate at some previously selected trading post for an annual 'rendezvous'. Everyone came, even though it often entailed traveling long distances on horseback over rough and hostile terrain. At the rendezvous, they exchanged furs, tall stories, firewater, etc., and then departed their respective ways, looking forward to the following year when they would convene again.
“Today, through our Idaho Academy of Science, a similar opportunity is afforded in this state, for those interested in scientific endeavor, at our fourth annual spring meeting. Ours is the only organization in the state that provides this rare opportunity of meeting our colleagues for an exchange of papers, ideas, and good fellowship. As was the case in olden times, some of us will have to travel some distance to reach the campus of the University of Idaho, but today we don't have to rely on horseback as our only means of transportation.
“It is my fervent hope that the entire membership of the Idaho Academy of Science will make a concerted effort to attend the coming meeting, April 27-28, at Moscow. The Program Committee under Dr. Malcolm Renfrew has lined up an excellent program for us, and I am sure the time and effort expended to attend this ‘I. A. S. Rendezvous’ will be more than well repaid.”

Three years later, The Retort reported that the Annual Meeting “is scheduled to be held at Boise Junior College, Boise, on Friday and Saturday, April 23 and 24, 1965.” Obee worked diligently on the organizing committee for that meeting, and again chaired the Botany sessions. It seems somehow fitting that by the time of the meeting, BJC had become “Boise College,” authorized to offer a full four-year curriculum. (Four years later, it became Boise State College.)

Summer Biology Workshop, 1970. Obee standing at far right. BSU photo.

Over the next several years, Dr. Obee served on the Executive Committee of the Academy, and contributed to various Academy initiatives on science education, and conservation and the environment. That included running a summer Outdoor Education Workshop.

He was also the “Academy representative on the Advisory Committee to the State Department of Education on Conservation and Outdoor Education.” In 1970, the Academy President appointed Don to be Chairman of a “Committee on Environment.”

Records show that, in 1974, Professor Obee brought his interest in a better environment close to home: He helped manage a major campus cleanup program at Boise State using student volunteers. He retired in 1977. In 1986, he first endowed the Obee biology scholarship, whose fund had grown to $125 thousand by 2006. As noted in his obituary, he and Doli “traveled extensively” before relocating to Colorado Springs.