3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

98 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
collections of Polynesian birds, research for which he is especially qualified by his
field experience while a member of our South Sea Expedition” (8 October 1931)
and requested an extension of his leave of absence for another six months which
was granted on 12 November. When the Rothschild collection began to arrive
in New York in the spring of 1932, Mayr got the position of Associate Curator
of the Whitney-Rothschild collections without limit of time and terminated his
employment in Berlin, effective on 31 July 1932. 4
As Mayr recalled (pers. comm.), he encountered a certain amount of jealousy
among young American ornithologists who in the depression years were without
a job and quite naturally resented a German “intruder.” However, everybody more
or less realized that he was indeed the person best qualified for this position.
He was elected a Fellow of the AOU remarkably early (1937) and later never had
any problems when organizing meetings, societies and journals in evolutionary
biology. Mayr was a staff member of the AMNH until 1953, when he accepted an
offer as an Alexander Agassiz professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology of
Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
In an interview on the occasion of his forthcoming 100th birthday, Mayr related
in detail how he came to be attached to the Whitney South Sea Expedition in the
Solomon Islands, how he was offered a position in New York and which projects
he worked on there; he also described his colleagues in the bird department and
his influence on the development of American ornithology (Bock and Lein 2005;
CD-ROM in Ornithological Monograph 58). Mayr also recounted his life story
for Peoples Archive, a London-based company that filmed the reminiscences of
famous scientists and artists (www.peoplesarchive.com).
A Manager of Large-scale Ornithological Projects—
Dr. L.C. Sanford
The transfer of the Rothschild bird collections from Tring to New York as well as
Mayr’s employment by the AMNH in the early 1930s were due to the efforts of Dr.
Leonard C. Sanford (1868–1950), a wealthy physician in New Haven, an influential
member of the New York upper class society, and a Trustee of the AMNH (Murphy
1951; LeCroy 2005). He was not only the family doctor of many prominent families,
but also a welcome associate as a splendid tennis player, an excellent bridge player,
a superb raconteur, and a good friend (Fig. 3.2). Nobody ever wanted to disappoint
him.
Through his activities during the 1910s and 1920s the bird collections of the
AMNH had become the richest in the world and its Department of Ornithology
a global center of research. It was Dr. Sanford who, so to speak, offered to Ernst Mayr
the collections which enabled him to carry out a comprehensive research program
on geographical variation, zoogeography, and speciation. This fatherly friend for
4 This explains why the year of Mayr’s emigration to the United States is sometimes given
as 1931 (when he started his temporary assignment in New York) and sometimes as 1932
(when he terminated his employment in Berlin).