Below is the remainder of the transcript of our conversation with Carrie Marsh and Bryan Whitledge
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. When I sat down with Kerry Marsh and Bryan Whitledge from CMU's Clarke Historical Library a few weeks ago, I had no idea that talking to them about the late Robert Kohrman would provide so much to share on this platform. Yet here we are, part three of our conversation, and we learn about a sporting goods company founded in Southwest Michigan. More about the Grayling, the fish! Remember, that's where we started? And final thoughts on his passion for protecting our abundant state waterways…
Carrie Marsh:
He never talked with me in particular about that question, but I know that for him it was really important to understand where current questions can be traced back to those original conversations.
DN:
Bryan, you mentioned already a couple of times remembering a few of the particular stories. Was there something else along those lines that he was still hoping to find out or was talking about digging for the answer to fill in the blank?
Bryan Whitledge:
Oh, absolutely. Spalding, the sporting goods company, was located in Southwest Michigan. He was looking at anything about the origins of Spalding (who) made various rods and reels and whatnot. He was looking at anything he could find about that in December and January of this year. And so I don't think there was ever a day in his life where he wasn't curious about something, but the bigger questions were definitely always there driving it as far as what do we know about the health of our streams and the health of our waterways And where can we trace that back to? I really liked that he had a very holistic view of the fault. People would say, well, the grayling died because X. And he could complicate it and add nuance and even give the grayling, the poor fish, a little bit of blame and say, you were too greedy and hungry and you bit at lures too easily. You should have been a little smarter like the brook trout, which are a little I guess less gullible or maybe less greedy. So, the nuance that he brought to it, I really appreciated because we know from what we do as our profession that history is not cut and dry. It's full of nuance. And he brought that skepticism with him to, or that lens of nuance with him to everything that he did.
CM:
One thing that he was really interested in and was on top of current efforts to introduce a different strain of the grayling to Michigan rivers and those experiments. And he always knew like, oh, this person's doing something, they did something last month on this and this is what they're finding. And so, he was really interested in what's happening now too.
DN:
Would assume that there are still unanswered questions. And this is just a little bit different look at that aspect of it. Do any of you inside the Clarke have the curiosity, the time to pick up where someone, in this case, Professor Khorman left off with some of these unanswered questions? Or is there a search on for somebody or maybe somebody's coming forward that says, I want to continue the work he started? Have we found that person or somebody to pick up the baton from there?
CM:
I wish I had the time to do research on the job, but I will say that he was very keen on making his collection with the Reed Draper collection and all of the Clark's collections make it accessible to students, faculty, staff, and other researchers, community members, that it was a collection meant to be used to the point that he set up an endowment. to help us with things like digitizing, with adding new items to the collection, any kind of outreach efforts to get the word out there. We have this very generous endowment to help us in those efforts.
DN:
Remembrance of Professor Robert Khorman for his contributions to research and very unique aspects of research into the Great Lakes and angling. Carrie Marsh and Bryan Whitledge, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. We appreciate it.
BW:
Thank you.
CM:
Thank you.
