Dale Pontius, Chicago Bird Watcher and Centurion

Dale Pontius at home with his Beecher glasses in 2004.

By Carolyn A. Marsh

Dale Pontius is a long-time Chicago birder and retired political science professor at Roosevelt University. He has been birding in and around Chicago, and his Hyde Park neighborhood since 1947. Pontius shared his stories with Carolyn Marsh, a birder and environmental activist from Whiting, Indiana over the course of several interviews conducted about three years ago in his third-floor walk up apartment in Hyde Park. Pontius was 97 years old at the time the interviews were conducted.

Pontius mentioned that before his time, author Saul Bellow once lived his apartment building on Harper Avenue. He knew the renowned ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice, who lived almost across the street. Both lived once in Columbus, Ohio and knew many of the same naturalists in the legendary Wheaton Club, which focused on ornithology. Nice and her family moved to Hyde Park in 1936 and to Harper Avenue in 1944.

Pontius still has his bird notebooks from his early years and generously allowed me to take home his Chicago records for close review. Six 4 x 7 inch notebooks, 693 pages, contained 1,555 daily entries. He always recorded the days weather conditions. His first Jackson Park entry was dated May l, 1950.

Pontius was no ordinary educator. While his generation produced many leaders who led conservation struggles, he bravely stood on higher ground and distinguished himself from many of his colleagues when he campaigned for world peace during the Cold War.

Formative years - I was born and raised on a farm owned by my grandfather near Groveport, Ohio. I began birding in Columbus with my cousin, Harold S. Peters, who was four years older and was an assistant Boy Scout master. When I became 16, my parents gave me a pair of Zeiss glasses, which I still have and use today.

Harold and I frequently went birding with a leading birder, Arthur Harper, and with the number one birder in Columbus, Edward S. Thomas. Thomas, originally a lawyer, was curator at the Ohio Museum. He was also an excellent entomologist, especially interested in grasshoppers and wrote a nature column for a local Columbus paper. We knew Milton Trautman, originally a plumber with his father, who wrote The Birds of Buckeye Lake, a comprehensive account of birds in central Ohio.

My cousin Harold collected birds to study a parasite, mallophaga that feeds on the feathers of birds for his masters degree in entomology at Ohio State University. Later he became an ornithologist and co-authored a book with Thomas D. Burleigh, The Birds of Newfoundland (illustrated by Roger Tory Peterson).

In 1921, Thomas and Harper co-founded the Wheaton Club, organized for central Ohio bird watchers and naturalists. One other teenager and I were among the original members. It was limited to only males. I point this out because Margaret Morse Nice began her epic study of the Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia) near her house above the flood plain of the Olentangy River at the edge of Ohio State University campus. She was not allowed to join the Wheaton Club because of the rule males only. That was a thorn in her side. In Nices autobiography, Research Is a Passion With Me, she wrote: I had finally been admitted to the monthly meetings of this [Wheaton] club as an unofficial honorary member. Blaine [her husband] had just been elected to the presidency of the club.

In the summers, for about 12 years, I was a naturalist counselor at the Columbus Boy Scout Camp and later at camps in New Jersey and Maine.

Scholastic period - I thought I might go into zoology or something, but I became interested in politics, its funny the way things happen sometimes. I graduated from Ohio State University and did graduate work in Political Science at Harvard University on and off for ten years. During graduate work at Harvard, I studied political science for one year in Berlin and Heidelberg, Germany. It was during the economic recovery from the World War I, in the 1920s, before the Nazi party came to power.

For one year I taught political science at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I then participated in a gull banding expedition on the Isles Shoals, N.H. in July 1938.

Professional and military careers - After my doctorate at Harvard, I lived in Philadelphia studying state and local employment figures under a WPA and Bureau of Labor Statistics joint project. From there I went to Washington D.C. to the National Resources Planning Board, a New Deal agency.

I was drafted into the U. S. Army during World War II in 1942. I was assigned to the New Guinea and the Philippines, in the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, where I received a Bronze Star. I worked in Civil Intelligence on political problems in the Philippines and also in Japan during the occupation.

After I was discharged in 1946, I was on the faculty of Tulane University in New Orleans. I didnt like living in the segregated south and returned north to Chicago in 1947. I became an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University.

Controversial years - I was interested mainly in global politics, not so much local politics. During my career, I was rather controversial. I was arrested for heckling the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy while he was making a speech at the Palmer House in October, 1952 and fined one dollar for disorderly conduct. Most notable was a speech I made in Moscow at the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace. This landed on the front page of the New York Times, U. S. professor assails Soviet before 2,000 at Kremlin rally, July 10, 1962. I criticized both Russian and American policy. That was what made the speech unique and it got world attention.

Retirement: I retired from Roosevelt in 1971 at age 65. Many years later, I served as president of Chicago Ornithological Society from 1986 to 1988. Birds will always be of great interest to me. I just visited Starved Rock with my son Eliot after visiting the Quad Cities to see Bald Eagles.

Highlights from Pontius notebooks:
• May 17, 1964 - Wooded Isle, 150 Pine Siskins.
• April 19, 1969 - Promontory Point, 150 Franklins Gulls.
• May 4, 1974 - Lakefront to Meigs Field, 200 Bonapartes Gulls.
• May 17, 1975 - Eggers Woods, Purple Gallinule.
• May 8, 1976 - Wooded Isle, Bewicks Wren and Kentucky Warbler.
• May 22, 1977 - Skokie Lagoons, COS, two Yellow Crowned Night Herons on nest and Prothonotary Warbler carrying food to nest.
• Nov 20, 1977 - Planetarium to Montrose, Townsends Solitary.
• Dec. 18, 1977 - Morton Arboretum, 20 Pine Grosbeak, parking lot #8 in deciduous tree tops.
• May 12, 1978 - East Chicago/Gary IN, 30 Dunlin, 1-ad.Marbled Godwit, 1- ad.Hudsonian Godwit, 2 Wilsons Phalarope.
• Dec. 2, 1978 - Watch for Rosss Gull, North Avenue Beach, with Doug Anderson.
• Oct. 18-Nov. 1, 1994 Philippines, Whiskered Tern, 2 Philippine Turtle Dove, Sooty Woodpecker, Blue Rock Thrush.