In the Shadow of Jane

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Jane Goodall has been much on my mind since her passing on October 1st. As a teenager, I first read about Jane in the copies of National Geographic Magazine that I shared every month with my grandmother. 

Those articles in Nat Geo sparked an interest in Africa and in animal behavior. I read Louis Leakey, the Kenyan-British paleontologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist who first sponsored Goodall's work in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Tanganyika as it was then,) books by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who is considered to be the father of ethology (animal behavior,) and those articles and books led me to read Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. (I think I still have my tattered paperback copies of both of those books. 

I found it fascinating that Jane, a young woman of twenty-three from Bournemouth, had accepted an invitation to visit a friend's family's farm in Kenya. Once there, she got a job as a secretary and on an impulse, telephoned Louis Leakey, with whom her friend was acquainted. She wanted to talk to him about animals. He wanted a chimpanzee researcher. Leakey hired her as his secretary, but he had another purpose in mind. Three years later he sent her to Gombe Stream National Park, where her groundbreaking work would establish her as the first of the great female primate researchers.

In 1971 Jane Goodall published In the Shadow of Man, the story of her time in Gombe. At the time, I was nineteen and had already failed spectacularly in my first try at university, where I'd enrolled as a history major. But reading about Jane, some spark was lit and I began to wonder if I could, in some small way, follow in her footsteps. By the time I transferred a year or two later to the college that would become my alma mater (go Roos!) I'd decided to major in biology, specializing in animal behavior.

Even though a career in zoology was not ultimately to be my path (another story!) I did graduate with a hard won bachelor of arts in biology, and even more importantly, a very good liberal arts education. It's this I credit with any degree of success I've had as a writer of detective novels. It taught me to think rationally and critically, to love research, and to stick with projects. Some of my journey, however winding, must trace back to that teenage girl pouring over Jane's accounts of her adventures. 

Dear Reds and readers, has there been someone in your life who inspired you to take a road you might not otherwise have followed?

P.S. Speaking of research, I went down a serious rabbit hole reading about the Leakeys–Louis and his son, Richard. What wild and adventurous lives they led–I highly recommend looking them up!