The Montlake Laboratory of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and its biological research, 1931-81

Marine Fisheries Review, Fall, 1988 by Clinton E. Atkinson

In 1944 Tom Barnaby was named the new Director of the Montlake laboratory. In the following year, Lionel Walford replaced Elmer Higgins as Director of Research for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in Washington, D.C. Elmer Higgins had been head of biological research programs for the Bureau in Washington since 1927 and played a key role in the selection of the site and construction of the Montlake laboratory and in the development of the research program at Stanford and at Montlake. He was especially interested in the problems of the salmon fisheries of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. He frequently visited these areas and developed a research program aimed directly at problems of management. Higgins' professional career was almost entirely in the administration of fishery research and he was a very good administrator.

Walford's background and experience were completely different from Higgins'; he was a graduate of Stanford University and had received his doctorate from Harvard. He was a scientist in every sense of the word and his primary interest was in the marine sciences and the marine fisheries. Walford was not happy with most of the research programs of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries at the time he was appointed Director of Research; he deplored the lack of publications and set about to reorganize the entire research program. He was almost obsessed with the policy of creating new and exciting" research programs and of bringing into the scientific staff new blood with new ideas. He encouraged transfers of scientific staff between laboratories and programs or into other Divisions of the Bureau.

Sam Hutchinson transferred to the Portland office in 1945 to become the Assistant Regional Director for Fisheries. As a result of Hutchinson's transfer, Mitchell Hanavan was placed in charge of all pink salmon research at Little Port Walter and southeastern Alaska. Eugene Maltzeff and Paul Zimmer also transferred to Portland in 1945, Bill Peck and Mark Morton in 1949, and finally Tom Barnaby, Harlan Holmes, and Zell Parkhurst in the early 1950's. Ed Dahlgren transferred to Washington, D.C., in 1950 to become Chief of the Marine Fisheries section in the Division of Research under Walford.

In the latter part of this period, new faces began to appear at the Montlake laboratory. Ralph Silliman transferred in 1945 from the California Sardine Investigations at Stanford University to be in charge of a study funded by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers on the population dynamics of salmon spawning in the tributaries of the Columbia River with John Hodges, Harlan Johnson, and Mark Morton. The project ended in 1949 and Silliman moved back to Washington, D.C., to become Chief of the Anadromous Fisheries section in the Division of Research.

Ken Mosher, who had a long experience with the determination of the age of fishes on the Pacific coast, transferred to Seattle in 1949 to read and analyze the large collection of salmon scales accumulated from previous Alaskan and Columbia River studies.