Charles Lee Remington

Charles Lee Remington, (died in 2007) "the intellectual patriarch of modern American lepidopterology, the scientific study of butterflies and moths...

"Dr. Remington, a professor at Yale University for more than four decades, co-founded the field’s scientific organization, the Lepidopterists’ Society, while still a graduate student. Later, as a professor, he shaped the field by recruiting and serving as a mentor to several generations of the discipline’s leading scientists. Dr. Remington also helped the discipline grow outside the walls of the academy, working with serious amateur collectors, most famously with Vladimir Nabokov...

"During his graduate studies at Harvard, he founded the Lepidopterists' Society with an equally butterfly-smitten undergraduate, Harry Clench. What began as a party of two is today an organization of about 1,500 members from more than 50 countries. The folksy newsletter the young men wrote is now the historic first issue of the international scientific publication known as the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society.

"At Harvard, Dr. Remington also began his friendship with Vladimir Nabokov, a serious amateur lepidopterist. Dr. Remington was a kindred spirit who understood the joy of a particular catch, what Nabokov once referred to as a “fellow sufferer.”

"In 1948, Dr. Remington began teaching at Yale, where with his bolo ties he cut a colorful figure among more buttoned-down colleagues....

"As curator at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, Dr. Remington is credited with creating one of the nation’s premier insect collections. ..

"Dr. Remington’s marriage to Jeanne Remington of Boulder, Colo., ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ellen Mahoney of North Haven, Conn; his three children from his first marriage, Eric Remington, of Saratoga, Calif., Sheldon Remington, of Hilo, Hawaii, Janna Remington, of Boulder, Colo.; and three grandchildren."

"In 1958-1959 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford University, where he worked with the geneticist E.B. Ford and others...

"In addition to The Lepidopterists' Society, Remington helped found the Connecticut Entomological Society and the Xerces Society, and was a member and officer in a variety of other scientific organizations. He also helped found Zero Population Growth. In 1970, with former Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and others, he convened the Convention on Optimal Population and Environment conference in Chicago, which inspired many subsequent environmental and population conferences. Remington was a founding member of the Unitarian Society of New Haven. "