During the time he was in Pearl Harbor, he expanded his artistic range by making plaster casts of reef fish he speared with Joe O’Leary who later followed him to MCZ in the late 1950’s. After preparing casts, he painted them according to the colors of the living specimens.  These are three of those creations. Standard collection data is on the back of each cast:

It is obvious, I think that he got a great deal of satisfaction from preparing these fish. I have dim memories of him explaining to people who visited us and got buttonholed by him about how quickly he had to work in order to preserve the colors and to give him time to reproduce them. I was particularly fascinated by the SUrgeon fish, the third one above. The red circles on its tail are razor sharp that have a poison on them and when threatened, the fish cuts his initials in the intruder with those little blades. (Unfortunately, all of these were lost in the 2005 home sale fiasco but at least I had been able to get images, as rough as they are, in Feb. 2003 when I went down for 2 weeks to commit mom to an Alzheimer Unit.)

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