Conversations from the Hall of Fame

Ray D. Jackson,  animal physiologist, interviewed 2006

(Time: ~16:10 minutes)

I'm Ray Jackson, I'm was a research physicist with Agricultural Research Service in Phoenix Arizona. I went to Phoenix in 1960 thinking I'd be there for five years of course I retired from there in 1993. Total I had 36 with ARS, four with the military ended up with 40 years of federal service. 

Born on a farm north of Shoshone, Idaho was there in Shoshone until junior high and we moved to another farm south of Jerome, Idaho and my mother had passed away when I was five years old. When I started high school my father became ill so I quit school to take care of him and he recovered, I started back to school went two years of high school. I dropped out again. So I dropped out of high school twice. Because always we were quite a close family I would live with my sister for awhile and one brother and another brother but they had families so it was time for me to get out on my own so I joined the Marine Corps. A little bit before I legally could but I did. Spent three years in the Marine Corps this was right after World War II and I learned discipline in the Marine Corps. I learned that you could do what you put your mind to do and I learned that you needed an education.

So I got out and went back and was going to finish high school and the principal arrange for me to take a GED test two week after I was out I went to college which I'd never expected to go. College was out, finances and everything else, farm kid, no way that I could go to college but I did. I went. A year at Idaho State College and the Korean War broke out and my buddies were going to Korea so I had to join them so I went back in the Marine Corp spent about a little over fourteen months, six months in Korea. I came back I didn't to back to college immediately because I was well you know after Korea it took a little settling down so to speak and I was working as a plumber's helper and I got to let me tell you this is not the way to go. So I started back to college and this time it was in earnest I wasn't just fiddling around. I took a lot of math courses that I had not taken earlier. I went on through undergraduate work at Utah State, went to Iowa State picked up a master's degree and I ran out of GI bill at that time. I was offered a job with the ARS in Fort Collins, Colorado which would allow me to do research but also attend classes and get my PHD which I did and I was the first PhD graduate in the College of Agriculture at Colorado State. 

From Fort Collins, I was sent to Phoenix, Arizona for a new laboratory in water conservation there and I thought that I would probably be there about five years and would go somewhere else. It turned out a great job and I stayed there until I retired.
 
I can honestly say it couldn't have asked for better job anywhere. It is a very rewarding career. I thank the Marine Corps for giving me the discipline and the GI bill to go. I doubly thank ARS for providing me with great people to work with and just let me do the research that I wanted. It's been a very rewarding career.

When I first started back to college I wasn't quiet sure what I wanted to do but I wanted to take difficult courses if I had the backup I could. I took a lot if chemistry, math, physics and soils and I wanted it to relate to agriculture because I grew up on a farm. Then as my career progressed the technology improved then I got involved in remote sensing applying aerospace technology to agriculture if you would. One of the first things we got involved with was evaluating crop water stress requirements by use of infrared thermometry and spectral reflectance of crops. So, it was in the ground work on developing remote sensing as applied to agriculture but we had, it was team work. It wasn't just me. It was a team that did this work and it got to the point I was visiting the NASA installations I was on the experiment team for one of the NASA satellites it just evolved in some of the most interest work anyone would ever want to be involved with.

Reason for Hall of Fame Induction

Well, I don't think it's because of any great scientific discovery that I personally made. 
For some reason I had the ability to get young people involved and use their brains if you would. You know sharpen their pencils and get out of their way. I was involved with many young scientists not just in ARS but the universities, NASA, world wide. France, quiet a few students in France and it was putting all this together getting them interested, in helping their careers as much as anything else.  
As much as me doing one great scientific discovery. So I think it's more the people that I was able to get involved in the work as much as anything.

Why are you called "Father of Remote Sensing?"

Because I was one of the early ones and I was able to get people involved so to speak. I was a research leader. We would, there was four of us would meet almost every morning for about maybe five minutes or maybe all morning kicking ideas around and it wasn't the case where I needed the credit, the credit was the whole group's credit I guess that I just got enough people involved in it that they think I started it. I'm not sure that I did. 

Pride

I think I'm as proud of some of the young people that I have helped in their development of their scientific career. One, who's an outstanding ARS scientist now, I was her dissertation director and worked with her for quite a few years and just to see how she is evolved in the career it's very rewarding to me. As far as any particular discovery, or something of this nature, early on in my career I was instrumental in developing what we called the desert survival skill which is just a take a piece of nonredible plastic and you dig a hole in the ground and you put the plastic over and make a cone out of it and you can get a couple of quarts of water a day out of wet soil or cactus plant material, things like that. That's a very simple thing. It's quite a long story on how it was serendipity more than anything else watching somebody else do something well that's too complicated let's make it simpler and things of that nature but any one particular thing it just has to be that I get the good people around me, we work together.

Advice to Young Scientists 

Set your goals. Work hard. Don't worry about the clock never do science in an 8 hour day
but don't worry about promotions or rewards if you do good work they will come, you don't have to worry about it. If you worry about them, you want to get this or get that you not going to have time for science. Do your science. Forget about other things. They will come about.

Reflections on a Career

I had the best job anybody could ever want. Very rewarding career. But I got to the point, people thought I was on the top but I was slipping down the other side so to speak. I wasn't getting the ideas that I was thinking. I was getting paid a lot more than I was worth in the sense and it was just I could see it was time to step aside and let these younger people take over.

Retirement 

I got involved with a group called the Veterans of Underage Miliary Service. Those of us who shall we say fibbed a bit to get into the military before we could legally do so.  

There are some outstanding people who did this. For example, one of the members of our group was a former Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield. Mike Mansfield joined the Navy at age 14, the Army at 15 and the Marine Corps at 17. 

The people of that stature, one former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was a former chief of naval operations joining the Navy at sixteen.  

So with this group, I had never joined the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars but this group was different. This is people who had done something quiet different and their stories have never been told and so my wife and I decided that we would edit a book of stories of these people. 

We published a 660 page book, two hundred stories of young men and women who had went in the service before they could legally do so. The first book was in 97' and in '02 we did volume two. Never again. Well, last year we did volume three. Some of these men and women had never told their families of these stories. Because nobody knew what they did, they never talked about it. 

So my contribution since retirement is getting possibly six hundred stories of men and women who did a very unique service to this country. 

Quite a few of the reasons they went in was because they were hungry. There might be ten or twelve people in the family and not enough food to go around, the military offered they called it "three hots and a cot".

One of the members is a Medal of Honor recipient, five days after his 17th birthday he was award the Medal of Honor at Iwo Jima went into the Marine Corps at age 14. 

A very close friend of mine, went in the Navy age 16, put three years in the Navy, got out went to the University of Nebraska, graduated from dental school, went in the Air Force spent a career as a periodontist in the Air Force, retired from the Air Force wanted to go with Doctors Without Borders, they said we don't want dentists we want medical doctors. So he went back and got a medical degree
 did a lot of humanitarian work.

One young women joined the WAX at age 13, served for two years and they caught up with her. They kicked her out at age 16 at Fort Sam Houston in Texas and General Eisenhower happened to be there and he was given the discharge papers and he said to her, "Young lady the army needs soldiers like you. Go home, grow up and come back."

Working for ARS 

I'm just very grateful for the ARS. I mean as I said it's ... I had the best job anyone could ever want. 
It was fun. Sometimes you'd put sixty, eighty hours a week don't worry about it just anxious to get back to work. It wasn't, "Oh, I got to go to work this morning." "Get out of the way I'm going to work." So I couldn't ask for a better career, really and to be honored as a member of the Hall of Fame with some of these icons that I see over there that I've known in the past and it's very humbling.