Costa Rica, ca. 1995. Photo by Kerry Dressler

Robert Louis Dressler was born on June 2, 1927, and raised during the Great Depression in rural Taney County, Missouri. Taney County is in the Ozark Mountains, a fiercely independent but poor people. His father, Mryl, was an electrician who farmed 30 acres of rocky ground to put food on the table. While cutting wood in 1937, Myrl’s electric saw kicked back and cut his arm, and he died four days later of a pulmonary embolism. So at the age of ten Bob (as he liked to be called) became the man of the family and helped to take care of his two younger sisters and mother. The family later moved to Inglewood, California, where his mother worked as a stenographer for an insurance company.

Horz01

Publishing
Works: 

The Pre-Columbian Cultivated Plants of Mexico:

The Pre-Columbian Cultivated Plants of Mexico

In recent years many important papers have been published dealng with cultivated plants, their origins and their relationships to human cultures. These studies have served to increase greatly our knowledge and understanding both of the plants and of the people by whom they were used, as well as to point out some of the areas where further research is most urgently needed.

Middle America, especially from central Mexico to Guatemala, was one of the two great centers of agriculture in the New World, the other being the Andean area, and a very considerable variety of cultivated plants were to the peoples of this region. It now seems, therefore, worthwhile to attempt an enumeration of the plants which were cultivated in this area, with a discussion of the pertinent botanical literature as to their origins, distributions and importance.

Professional
Attribution
Attribution: 
Universidad de Costa Rica
Wikipedia
Personal

Country of Origin:

Birth / Death: 
Thursday, June 2, 1927 to Tuesday, October 15, 2019