Everyone knew exactly what the guy was talking about when he rolled up to that seed swap that late fall afternoon not so long ago.
“OK, I’m here for some of those world-famous West Virginia tomato seeds,” the backyard gardener said with a grin.
“If you have any left.”
The “West Virginia ‘63,” he meant.
Turns out, he got there just in time. The seeds, indeed, were going fast.
As they always do.
The West Virginia ‘63: That’s the official-unofficial name of the state’s venerable, indestructible tomato – which comes courtesy of the state’s venerable, indestructible plant pathologist, Mannon Gallegly.
Gallegly, the director emeritus of WVU’s Division of Plant and Soil Sciences, developed and bred the hearty, slightly sweet tomato in response to the same blighting fungus that brought on the Irish potato famine in the 19th century.
It was introduced after its first blush, in 1963, on occasion of the state’s 100th birthday.
Bountiful harvest
On a golden spring Tuesday afternoon that brought to mind tomato stakes and canning jars, a bumper crop of Gallegly’s family, friends and colleagues gathered in the reception hall at The Pines Country Club on occasion of his 100th birthday.
The growing cycle coming back around, as it were.
“I’m doing OK,” the guest of honor said, twinkling, “but I think the tomato might be doing better.”
Everyone in the reception hall begged to differ.
That’s because the professor and the planter is still working the soil, they said.
He’s still in the lab, and the greenhouse – and he’s not just working on tomatoes, either.
The professor with a century of life intertwined in the helix of his DNA is casting an eye toward the same in the plant population.
He’s looking for ways to safely, naturally, increase crop yields, in order to combat famine and food insecurity in the globe’s current time of climate change.
Growing up in rural Arkansas, he was a product of the social climate of his time.
American dreams (and amazing tomatoes) in Almost Heaven
He picked cotton, tended to vegetable gardens and the chickens, cows and pigs his family raised on the farm. Even so, it wasn’t quite enough during the Depression.
Then came World War II, the G.I. Bill, and stints as a student at the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a doctorate in plant pathology in 1949 – the same year a certain land grant university in Morgantown offered him a job.
The root system was set.
He fell in love with the place. He and his wife bought a house here and brought three children into the world here.
Gallegly’s son, Tom, got a big laugh in front of a knowing audience when he remembered what life was like with a dad who knew how to get down and dirty the world over.
Everything was a teachable moment, Gallegly said.
Once, when the family acquired a lovable mutt of a puppy and was searching for an appropriate name, the plant pathologist offered a suggestion, remembered Gallegly, the younger.
“Hedy,” Tom said. “Everybody just kind of looked at each other. It was, ‘OK – why Hedy?’”
The professor, his son said, was quick to answer.
“Because it’s short for ‘heterozygous,’” he said, referring to the science of layered genetic traits in any species.
“Yeah,” Tom deadpanned. “That’s a little bit of what my life was like growing up with Pops.”
Other colleagues talked about Dr. Gallegly’s legendary grilling during the dissertation defense and his off-road excursions at out-of-way farms no four-wheel-drive Subaru had ever seen.
There was work in farming and anti-hunger activism in Uganda and other spots on the globe where bellies are known to growl at night.
All that, plus Gallegly-as-neighbor: A fellow gardener always happy to literally dig in and help with that plot of tomatoes you’re trying to nuture in that postage stamp of green next to your front stoop.
“Are you ever gonna retire?” one colleague asked, all good-natured and mock-gruff.
“I don’t know,” the tomato maven said.
“I’ll have to learn how.”
And so went Mannon Gallegly’s 100th birthday.
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