Claude W. Hibbard, 1905–1973

OBITUARIES CLAUDE W. HIBBARD, 1905-1973 275 Claude W. Hibbard, better known as "Hibbie" was born on 21 March 1905, in Toronto, an agriculturally centered southeastern Kansas community on the Verdigris River. Early years on his parent's fann endowed him with a working knowledge of biology and the habit of rising early in order to complete chores prior to school. Subsequently, he was one of the few persons who could get a "late" start at 4: 15 in the morning. As the eldest of five brothers and one sister, he also assumed partial responsibility for operating the farm. Immediately upon graduating from Fall River High School in 1923 he attended the summer session at Emporia State Teachers College, obtained a teaching certificate, and became principal of the grade school in Thrall, Kansas, that autumn. At the time Thrall was a booming oil town and the primary grades were populated by the children of migrant roustabouts and roughnecks. If the children were lacking in fonnal education, they compensated for it in age, many being as old or older than their green principal. Order was established rapidly behind the outhouse by effective but currently out-of-vogue methods. Hibbie's bout with education increased his interest in academics and he entered the University of Kansas in the autumn of 1926. With his father's encouragement, Hibbie enrolled as a pharmacy major and was exposed to the academic side of zoology. These courses, kindled by his boyhood experiences as a trapper, led him to a career in zoology. His ability as a naturalist was recognized early and as a Junior he began his long tenure as a Museum Assistant in the Museum of Natural History (1928-1934), working part time during the academic year and full time during the summer. During the school year he earned his board by cooking in a Lawrence cafe and his room by firing the furnace in a business building. Relaxation frequently took the fonn of collecting trips. He also corresponded frequently with Faye Canfield (B.A. Zoology, KU-1932) whom he met in E. H. Taylor's 1931 mammalogy class. During the summers at the University of Kansas, Hibbie accompanied H. T. Martin on many trips to collect fossil vertebrates in Kansas and Nebraska, initially holding the position of camp cook and collecting fossils as time permitted. On the 1928 excursion, he noted a rodent jaw in the spoil pile of the Edson Quarry. Over lunch, he fashioned a basket Ollt of a piece of screen wire, filled it with "spoil" and recovered a handful of microvertebrate remains. "Hibbard, you have enough rodent bones to satisfy the needs of every museum in the country for 10 years, get back to work," was the verbal response to this enterprise. His enthusiasm for microvertebrates, however, only was checked, not dampened. By the time he received his B.A. in Zoology (1933) he had collected numerous specimens and published three papers; a description of a lower Pliocene Bassarisclls, a record of two new coelacanths, and his first checklist of Recent Kansas mammals. However, fossil microvertebrates were still on his mind. After receiving his M.A. in Zoology (1934) from the University of Kansas, Hibbie became a Wildlife Technician for the National Park Service. His correspondence romance with Faye Canfield blossomed into marriage, in Louisville, Kentucky, in September of that year. The couple moved to central Kentucky to survey the Recent fauna of the proposed Mammoth Cave National Park. Upon completion of the report in the summer of 1935, the Hibbards fulfilled a promise to H. H. Lane by returning to Lawrence, Kansas, to oversee the transfer of natural history specimens from temporary storage back into the newly remodeled Museum of Natural History. Hibbie gained the title of Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology. The following summer he was back into the field, as his own boss, centering his search for fossil vertebrates on localities discovered earlier by CCC workers during construction of a state lake in Meade County. The University of Kansas did not provide field expenses for the Museum of Paleontology in 1936. A summer without field work was incongruent with the personality of C. \V. Hibbard, so he  Claude w. Hibbard, 1905-1973 Vol. 56, No.1 JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY 276 February 1975 OBITUARIES 277 arranged through the Museum of Zoology to mount a neontological collecting trip to western Kansas. This agreement was no obstacle to the paleontological aspirations of the early rising Assistant Curator. Traps customarily were worked at dawn and dusk, specimens were put up early in the morning and logically there was ample time for fossil collecting to proceed as originally planned during the day. Judging from his notebooks this was a bargain for Kansas, involving hundreds of Recent vertebrates as well as a wealth of paleontological material. This trip was historic for several reasons-I) the Hibbards camped on the Rexroad Ranch, now world-famous for its late Pliocene fauna and the type locality of the proposed Rexroadian Land Mammal Age; 2) it was the beginning of 39 nearly consecutive field seasons based in the abandoned Meade County CCC Camp; as described by University of Michigan Dean F. H. T. Rhodes, "his field expeditions, carried out faithfully in the High Plains, were a living legend" in vertebrate paleontology (obit., Ann Arbor News); 3) it was the first paleontological-neontological collecting trip sponsored by the Museum of Natural History, University of Kansas; 4) it represented the prelude to development of Hibhard's technique for collecting microvertebrate fossils. Early in the season Hibbie wormed the location of a fossiliferous sand (Rexroad 2) out of an amateur, relocated Cragin's old quarry, visited the Cudahy Ash Mine, and was shown a favorite collecting locality of CCC moonlighters near the deer pens (Deer Park local fauna) in the State Park. The richest locality, Cragin's Quarry, was in the recently established federal land bank and not immediately available for excavation. As the quarry by the deer pens was in danger of continued looting, Hibbie's crew began "sifting" for microvertebrates and collecting mastodons. They simultaneously fought a hot, dust-bowl sun, and mosquitoes from the nearby artesian spring. The mosquitoes are reputed to have produced welts the size of quail eggs. Hibbard's lips were swollen to the point that he could not close his mouth. but sifting and collecting did not stop. The following summer (1937) Hibbie returned to the recently deactivated Meade County CCC Camp with Joe Tihen, Harry Jacob, and Faye Hibbard and doggedly began to sift the Rexroad localities for microvertebrates. In 1938 the party discovered an abundance of mollusks, in a clay lense at Rexroad Locality 2. F. D. Baker had requested Rexroad mollusks, but sifting proved difficult, and 4 July was selected as a good day to offset the slow rate of recovery. On a whim, Harry Jacob collected a test sample, washed it in a screen basket, and in a s (...truncated)