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Published quarterly from 1953 - 1955

About the Author: Frank N. Young

Any of us who took a traditional biology course in high school back in the days before John Dewey's philosophy curtailed the use of anatomy as a tool for secondary school teaching, will recall dissecting a great grasshopper to learn about its spiracles, antennae, exoskeleton, etc. Perhaps we may recall even that this enormous insect was the lubberly locust, a native of the southeastern states. We who live in south Florida know the great locust in life, occasionally plucking the lubberly fellow from a favorite plant in our yards. We also know the pleasure of coming upon a group of the hallowe'en-colored immatures. Through the whimsical recollections and rich experiences of author Frank N. Young who wrote THE LUBBERLY LOCUST-PREDATORS BEWARE, we learn now an answer to how so fleshy a creature can afford to be so slow and clumsy (lubberly) in a world keyed to the survival of the fit.

Born in 1915 on the slope of Blount Mountain in Oneonta, Alabama, author Young came to Miami at the age of five. Here he grew up a boy naturalist, collecting first butterflies, then grasshoppers, bugs, and finally scarabs. Going to the University of Florida in 1934 he became interested in water beetles, and through his graduate work there he became the authority on water beetles of Florida. Entering the armed services with a Ph.D. degree in 1942, he went to Mississippi and Louisiana, then Panama, then to the Pacific with the 222nd Malaria Survey Unit. He collected insects in Panama, Hawaii, Ulithi, Eniwetok, and Okinawa, and has deposited most of these in the United States National Museum. After the war author Young taught biology at the University of Florida and was editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Florida Academy of Sciences until he was attracted to his present position at the University of Indiana.

As a graduate student, author Young became acquainted with Frances Norman, who was working toward a master's degree in biology. They married and now have a six-year-old daughter, Betty, and a five-year-old. son, Chip. The Old Block informs this column that the Chip already collects insects on his own.

Author Frank N. Young of THE RIM OF THE EVERGLADES is already somewhat known to readers of this magazine for his article THE LUBBERLY LOCUST-PREDATORS BEWARE which appeared in the June issue of Everglades Natural History, and from the comment in Background Notes on Authors of that issue. According to the grapevine, the vacancy on the faculty of the Zoology Department of Indiana University which author Young filled about five years ago, was the vacancy created by a fellow entomologist who had decided to give up study of insect life and teaching to devote all of his time to the absorbing study of sexual behavior of man. This was Alfred Kinsey into whose vacated teaching and research niche author Young has stepped.