Harold S. Turkel Obituary

Bob Jeanne Bob Jeanne '60 said:

In the tenth grade (1957-58) at GC High I had the good fortune to take biology with Mr. Harold Turkel. Not only was he a particularly enthusiastic and engaging teacher, but he took us on field trips to local natural areas—a rarity on Long Island—and encouraged us to make collections, mainly of plants. It was this class that first opened my eyes to the appeal of science and made me realize that one could do more than just marvel at the diversity and adaptedness of the natural world. Mr. Turkel’s passion for his subject was so contagious that two years later when I enrolled as a freshman at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, I declared a major in biology without hesitation. Upon arriving at Harvard in the fall of 1965 for graduate study in biology I was astonished to see Harold Turkel's name on the department secretary’s list of active graduate students! His position at the top of that list meant that he was the longest-enrolled, so apparently he had been teaching at GCHS during the school year to support himself and working on his graduate degree during the summers. Unfortunately, my efforts to track him down failed because the two of us were never in Cambridge at the same time, he away during the academic year and I in the field in the summers. I never did learn whether he completed a degree at Harvard, but I think of him often and have been indebted to him ever since for encouraging my first step toward a career in teaching and research in biology, ultimately at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Robert L. Jeanne
(GCHS class of 1960, but moved to Ohio at the end of our junior year)