There have been many great women bryologists. Here we will publish stories and memories about some of these. We will start this series with Nancy Slack.
Nancy Slack
1930-2022
Nancy Slack spent her professional career teaching at Russell Sage College.
She was a botanist, bryophyte ecologist, and later added botanical history to her research interests.
Nancy Slack in London, 2013
From Janice Glime:
Nancy and I met at a meeting of the American Bryological Society. It was one of the many meetings held at a university, and the organizers facilitated finding roommates for us. I was fortunate that they put Nancy and me together. We were bryophyte ecologists while American and Canadian bryologists were still struggling with determining the North American flora. We were pioneers. I had recently finished my Ph.D. and Nancy was finishing hers. It was a wonderful opportunity to have discussions about our mutual interests. We became lifelong friends, and after that whenever Nancy came to the meetings without her husband, Glen, we shared a room. For some unknown reason, whenever I shared a room with Nancy at a conference, the air conditioner didn’t work! We both preferred a cool room.
Nancy was my great supporter throughout my career, and I found that she spent much time at meetings encouraging young bryologists, bringing them along to meals, introducing them to other bryologists, and generally making them feel they were part of the professional group.
Nancy made every minute count. She seemed to have an endless supply of energy. Shortly before her death on 21 December 2022 she was planning fieldwork on Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, for the next summer, but she said it would probably be her last year of research there. In less than a week she was gone.
She was known for hosting bryologists in her home. She invited me to do a stream bryophyte study in the Adirondacks and hosted me at her home before and after the trip. I know that other bryologists enjoyed similar hospitality.
From Noris Salazar Allen:
I do not recall where I first met Nancy for the first time, maybe in Alberta while doing my Ph.D. She has always been very supportive throughout my career and with my students who were lucky to share with her a field trip she did to Panama. She has an incredible energy and always kept a diary of her travels. She used to send me her interesting books autographed.
She was my roommate in the field trip to Malaysia after the symposium. She was the only one who did not get sick with fever and stomach problems though she ate the same as everyone else. Her spirit and energy were remarkable and chatting with her until late at night was so rewarding. I invited her to come to Panama to see our forest. She said she would, and sure enough she came. In our way to the field, we stopped in a small restaurant along the road that served our typical Panamanian breakfast. She tried it and was delighted. Afterwards, we spent a whole day botanizing in El Copé cloud forest, part of the Atlantic Biological Corredor of Panama. It was drizzling all day, but she was so enthusiastic looking at the bryophytes and at the animals of the park encouraging the students who came with us. We also gave her a tour to Panama City before leaving. Once I visited her at her home and spent an enjoyable lunch with her late husband talking about everything from physics to botany and many other themes. Every time I met her at a bryological meeting she was very cheerful, asking about my research and supportive. Although she invited me to the Adirondacks, I could never make that trip. She used to write to us every Xmas and I looked forward to her letters. I miss her, an inspiring bryologist, teacher, and a very good friend.
From Dale Vitt:
I first met Nancy at the University of Michigan Biological Station in 1969. She had come to the station to learn bryophytes from Howard Crum. Howard taught the bryophyte and lichen courses there for a decade or two. At the time, Howard was writing his book ‘Mosses of the Great Lakes Forests’. Also at the station during the summers of 1968-1969 was Norton Miller, along with visits from Lewis Anderson and Wolfgang Maass. It was during these times of long afternoons and evenings at the microscope and days in the field with Howard, Andy, and Norton that I learned bryophytes. Nancy tagged along trying to keep up with the taxonomy, but in hind-sight Norton, Howard, and I teased her daily – but she never wavered and it was then Nancy and I became life-long friends. Spurred on by Howard I think, we all had a particular interest in Sphagnum and that led me down the path of peatland ecology. The next summer Howard was again scheduled to teach his courses at the station, but illness prevented him from doing so, and I was asked to replace him, so in 1970 my wife and two young sons spent the summer at the station. Nancy again was there and together we began our first peatland ecology study – doing quantitatively what Howard had observed during many previous years. Nancy was very good at the vascular plants and we spent the summer surveying fens of the area. We learned together the beginnings of multi-variate analyses and in 1975 our first joint paper was published (Vitt and Slack 1975).
Back in Alberta, I personally was more and more intrigued by fens and bogs and how these wetlands were so dominated by bryophytes. I asked Nancy if she would like to do some more vegetation surveys and in 1976, she joined me and a new student, Diana Horton, for the month of August. During her visit to Alberta we first worked in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains surveying the vegetation and chemistry of extreme-rich fens and then traveled northward to the subarctic and studied permafrost-dominated bogs in the Caribou Mountains of northern Alberta – where she met, with a close encounter, her first woodland caribou. During this time I learned that Nancy has much more energy than I do, and can go non-stop from five in the morning (when she woke me in the tent by turning pages as she read waiting for everyone else to wake up) to late at night identifying plants by firelight. We published the results of these field campaigns in 1979-1980 (Horton et al. 1979; Slack et al. 1980).
During this time, both Nancy and I became interested in bryophyte niches and how to define better the microhabitats where species of bryophytes occurred. In 1981, I was asked to teach a field course in bryophytes at the University of Minnesota Itasca Biological Station. Having read Eville Gorham’s and Paul Glaser’s work on the Red Lake peatland in northern Minnesota, Nancy and I thought this would be a great opportunity to study the habitats of Sphagnum and in August of that year, supported by NSERC, we rented a helicopter and spent much of August visiting Sphagnum-rich habitats in the Red Lake Peatland. Here I learned that despite Nancy having much shorter legs than I, she could still move from hummock to hummock much faster than I. We published this work in 1984 (Vitt and Slack 1984). Nancy was a great contributor to all of these papers. Her writing skills were excellent and she could synthesize results amazingly well. One drawback – remembering the days when writing was done by pen and paper, anyone who has received one of Nancy’s hand-written Christmas cards with very small writing – first in lines across the card, and then wedged around all four edges in script that could make one go blind, the same was true of her manuscript writing.
After the early 1980’s we both moved on to other topics – Nancy working with Claire Schmitt on bryophytes and lichens on trees in the eastern part of the continent, and with Janice Glime on stream bryophytes. But over the years, Nancy and I would spend time together in Jamaica, and at various ABLS meetings. We attended the International Botanical Congress in Berlin (together with her husband Glenn and my wife Sandi) – it was there that on the subway Nancy (sometimes a little disorganized) left her purse with passport, money, and credit cards. After determining that without speaking German we could report it to the police, Nancy and I took the subway and reported it to the local police. Luckily, the next morning the purse was turned into the police (without money, but with the passport!).
Nancy was a wonderful friend and great colleague. Her boundless energy, always helpful attitude, and knowledge of all-things ecological will always be remembered. I will miss her.
Dale H. Vitt, School of Biological Sciences, Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901, email: dvitt@siu.edu
Nancy Slack in Nestow, Alberta, Canada in 1976.
References
Vitt, DH and NG Slack. 1975. An analysis of the vegetation of Sphagnum-dominated kettle-hole bogs in relation to environmental gradients. Canadian Journal of Botany 53: 332-359.
Horton, DG, DH Vitt, and NG Slack. 1979. Habitats of circumboreal-subarctic Sphagna. I. A quantitative analysis and review of species in the Caribou Mountains, northern Alberta. Canadian Journal of Botany 57: 2283-2317.
Slack NG, DH Vitt, and DG Horton. 1980. Vegetation gradients of minerotrophically rich fens in western Alberta. Canadian Journal of Botany 58: 330-350.
Vitt, DH and NG Slack. 1984. Niche diversification of Sphagnum, relative to environmental factors in northern Minnesota peatlands. Canadian Journal of Botany 62: 1409-1430.