Baraza

Lisa, California, on 17 Jun 2008

This is very sad news. It’s always hard when a passionate voice has been silenced. I’m sorry for this loss. Lisa

Chuck Schepke, on 09 Jul 2008

I had Hezy for numerous classes at the Fish Lake Biology Station (a field course station facility used by Wayne state University). In all my educational experience, I have never met a person with so much passionate exuberance for learning and having the abilty to pass it on to his students. Besides his passion being outwardly displayed to students, he gave them unique learning experiences to make the pursuit of knowledge more exciting and extraordinary. I can recall one field course on the last day of class’ we all wore long pants (so we would not get too many leaches stuck to us) and spent the day wading upto our armpits in marshes and swamps looking for snakes, mammals, insects, birds, plants,etc.. Another time for another class on mammalogy, I told him I passed a dead deer on the road that morning on my drive out to Fish Lake and he asked me to get it. So I did. So as a class that morning we dissected the deer, making numerous measurements on organ dimensions (and also weighing them), external morphology, etc… We recorded this information in our notebooks so did Hezy in his personal notebook. Hezy would constantly write things down in a series of personal notebooks that he kept on things he learned/explored on a daily basis. Wow, I said to myself, here is the professor learning with us. Hezy once told me, if his house was on fire, the first thing he would run into the house to get would be his notebooks. That is how much importance he put on his learning. To end the deer story, we left the deer carcasse behind the classroom building out in the woods and checked on it daily for a couple weeks and tried to roughly quantify its decomposition rate. Now some people might think this is crazy, but as a learning experience it was awesome. It made the aspect of studying nature more realistic and encompassing because he tied into the subject of taphonomy (the study of the conditions and processes of how aniamls become fossils). I recall picking him up and driving him to class at Fish Lake and back home everyday and meeting his pet hyrax (the closet relative evolutionary to an elephant that you could maintain in a condo) His whole condo was a museum for elephants. He gave me a copy of his first book for driving him in and signed it, “To Chuck, in the pursuit of knowledge in the most parsimonious( a play on cladistics) way of coarse”. I remember working with him in museums with mastodons and mammoths and making a cast of a mammoth’s hyoid bone for him. All his students at Fish Lake thought Hezy was crazy, but a cool crazy. He should us with a slide show once of how he caught cobras with his bare hands in the wild while only just wearing sandals too. He would find a cobra, slowly stick out one of his feet and slowly rock it back and forth, pivoting his foot from his heel. The cobra would be focused on Hezy’s rocking foot and while it was, he would arch one arm high in the air and move it slowly toward the cobra and grabbed it behind its head. I have been out of touch with Hezy for awhile and the last ime I talked to him was three years ago. He called me up and said ” Chuck, I was wondering if you want your paper back that I kept on the amphibian cladogram? I said, “Hezy that class was about 10 years ago.” and he said “Yes, but just like an elephant I don’t forget.”. I was just called by his wife recently and she told me that this sad incident had occurred. It has been a great shock to me, but it has triggered many fond memories. I then searched the internet the next day and found this site. I remember one of his quotes he told me. It went something like this: “I try to learn something new each day so I can justify my existance”. I would just like to say Hezy your existance influenced so many people for the better by the experiences you gave them and how you modeled passonately your desire to learn and were benevolent enough to share this desire with others. I am now a teacher myself and you have set a guidepost for me to follow so I can hopefully influence my students as much as you have influenced me.