This obituary in the Toronto Globe and Mail caught my eye.

Here’s a few highlights:

• Leonard Butler was born the day the Titanic sank, in 1912.
• The only thing his father was ever quoted as having said to his mother was: “You’re pregnant. I’m gone.”
• There were only 2 books in his home (growing up),  The Swiss Family Robinson and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he read hungrily.
• He quit school at 14 and took a job as a wagon-repair apprentice.
• A year later, his mother died of pneumonia.
• He left England and went to Canada.
• After working as a farm hand, he went to college and earned a PhD in genetics.
• In 1946, Dr. Butler accepted a position for a year as assistant professor in the genetics department at McGill University.
• Dr. Butler retired (from teaching) in 1977 and became a consultant with the Upjohn pharmaceutical firm, where he bred diabetic Chinese hamsters in Kalamazoo, Mich.
• He died suddenly on June 30, 2008 at 96 years of age.

I would have loved to ask Dr. Butler how reading Pilgrim’s Progress prepared him for his journey.

Journal of Heredity - 1953

Several of Dr. Butler’s scholarly articles are available on the internet, including this interesting article entitled: A New Eye Abnormality in the House Mouse. I might have called it “Three Blind Mice”, but that’s a song for another day.

I never met Dr. Leonard Butler, but I admire his courage, tenacity, skill, and accomplishments.

“I am going to my Father’s, and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it…. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death, where is thy sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is  thy victory?  So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ” – from Pilgrim’s Progress