OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1995:

Jo Stallard, 74, remembered by
the San Jose Mercury-News as “one of the
most determined environmentalists, conservationists,
and animal rights activists ever to
grace the Monterey Peninsula,” died
November 10 of cancer in a Monterey hospice.
Stallard “rarely let anything distract her from
her commitment to animals,” the Mercury-
News continued, “which she said deserved
first consideration because they preceded
humans on the planet. She always had an
SPCA-special dog or cat in her home, often a
canary, too,” and a tortoise, E.T., with a
warning sign in her window: “Patrolled by
attack-tortoise.” An officer of the Monterey
County SPCA, Stallard also co-founded the
Animal Rights Council and at various times
led the Monterey Peninsula Chapter of the
National Audubon Society, the Big Sur

Preservation Commission, and the Ventana
Chapter of the Sierra Club. She was among
the first trained docents at the Elkhorn Slough
National Estuarine Research Reserve, and an
active participant in the American Cetacean
Society’s Beach Watch Program. But
Stallard’s most important legacy may have
been her role in winning Congressional designation
of the 5,312-square-mile Monterey Bay
National Marine Sanctuary. “Jo was instrumental
in helping all of us persuade government
officials on both sides of the aisle,” said
Rachel Saunders, Pacific habitat conservation
director for the Center for Marine
Conservation. Stallard, a practicing Buddhist
who came originally from Pennsylvania, settled
in the Monterey area in 1947, after World
War II duty as a Women’s Army Corps telegrapher.
Her longtime friend Leon Panetta,
formerly a California Congressional
Representative and now President Bill
Clinton’s chief-of-staff, recently dedicated the
120-acre Jo Stallard Wilderness Area on Las
Palmas Ranch in Monterey County.

R. Tucker Abbott, Ph.D., 77,
director of the Bailey-Matthews Shell
Museum, died November 3 at home on
Sanibel Island, Florida. Author of American
Sea Shells (1954), which The New York
Times credited with “turning a casual hobby
into an organized mania,” Abbott produced 30
follow-up books while struggling to reconcile
his role in sparking an often ecologically
destructive collecting boom with his concern
for little known and less appreciated clams,
conchs, oysters, snails, squids, and octupi.
During a long career including stints at the
Smithsonian Institution, the Academy of
Natural Sciences, and the Delaware Museum
of Natural History, Abbott personally discovered
about 1,000 of the estimated 100,000
known mollusk species