Source:
http://www.theledger.com/article/20071203/NEWS/712030395/1004/News
Published: Monday, December 3, 2007
MONDAY PROFILE | WILLIAM GRIERSON
By Kevin Bouffard
The Ledger
WINTER HAVEN
Listen to William Grierson, and you may discern the cultures that shaped him. "I'm a child of three cultures - British, Canadian and American," said Grierson, 89, of Winter Haven. The easiest influence to spot comes from his accent - the broad vowels and stress differences betray his native Britain, at least to American ears.
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WILLIAM ROBERT FRANCIS GRIERSON
Born: Dec. 15, 1917.
Age: 89.
Residence: Winter Haven.
Birthplace: Boscombe, England.
Education: Bachelor's degree in horticulture from Ontario Agriculture College (now the University of Guelph); master's degree in plant pathology from the University of Toronto; doctorate in pomology (fruit science) from the Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Occupation: Retired in 1993 as a professor of postharvest research at the University of Florida's Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.
Academic honors: Author of more than 250 academic papers, articles and other texts, primarily on citrus packinghouse procedures. Inducted into the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame in 1993. Also wrote "We Band of Brothers," a memoir of his World War II experiences as a navigator/bombardier for the Canadian Royal Air Force.
Family: Married Agnes Cray of Guelph who died at age 96 in September 2006. Two sons: Peter, a retired accounting professor, and John Patrick, who died in 2003.
Hobbies: Gardening; reading, particularly history; writing poetry; and repairing books.
Favorite meal: "I have a weakness for Indian food," particularly with curry.
Favorite beverage: Beer.
Favorite television show: News and documentaries like "Nova."
Quote: "I'm totally immune to fashion. I have one suit, and I wear it for funerals."
But when he visits family and friends in England, they tell him he sounds like a Canadian, said Grierson, a retired scientist from the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.
Grierson left Britain at age 16 and moved to Canada, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in horticulture and plant physiology, respectively, by age 21.
His American side comes through not so much in pronunciation, but in attitude. Friends and colleagues describe a person who loves to challenge conventional wisdom in the Florida citrus industry and will turn in a moment from his genteel British nature to a fierce, combative advocate against defenders of the status quo.
Certainly Yankees at least as far back as 1776 can relate to that. Grierson has been a U.S. citizen for 50 years.
Jim Ellis, a citrus grower and former packinghouse manager, said Grierson has been an innovator as long as he's known him dating back to 1958, when he was a student at Florida Southern College taking Grierson's course in packinghouse procedures.
The class was full of students who grew up in the citrus industry and thought they had learned all about the subject at daddy's knee, said Ellis, now a citrus licensing and bonding official with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Winter Haven.
"He would tell it like it was, and sometimes it rubbed people the wrong way," he said. "A lot of those guys came from the families of citrus pioneers, and for someone to come in and say they were wrong - a Canadian no less - that was damned near heresy."
William Robert Francis Grierson-Jackson was born Dec. 15, 1917, in Boscombe, England, an English Channel coastal town about 100 miles southwest of London, to Edward James Benedict Grierson-Jackson and Winifred Burridge, whose family included several members of the British Raj that ruled India.
His parents added Jackson to his name at the insistence of a wealthy grandmother of that name, who threatened to disinherit them without it. Although his name appears as Grierson-Jackson on many English documents, he has never used Jackson since leaving the country in 1934.
The family never got the promised inheritance from Grandmother Jackson anyway, Grierson said.
He was born to very modest circumstances. At the time, his father was still recovering from mental and physical injuries he received two years earlier in the historic World War I Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey.
Those injuries would bear negatively on his father for the rest of his life, Grierson said. The family lived on the edge of poverty because his father was irresponsible with money, in part to support his chain smoking.
"He was not a companionable person. He was very strange," he said. "He was the sort of person who would be invaluable in a shipwreck. The only problem would be he caused the ship wreck."
Before the war, his father had owned and operated a pear farm in Oregon, to which the family returned when he was an infant. His earliest memories are from that farm, where he would help his mother garden, which became a lifelong hobby, Grierson said.
Always close to his mother, he also learned from her a love of art, literature and history, he said.
The Griersons moved back to England in 1922 after a maid of German ancestry set fire to the farmhouse, an act of post-war revenge against his military father, he said.
Always a good student, Grierson, then 13, won a scholarship to a local private school, where he had to contend with bullies. He was a natural target because of his slight build and because he was very much a "swot," the British equivalent of "nerd."
"I became a very mean fighter. I wouldn't quit," recalled Grierson, who came away from the fights bloodied and beaten, but unbowed - a pattern for the rest of his life.
The bullies eventually left him alone.
Although he passed the entrance exam at England's prestigious Oxford University at age 16, scholarship money was rare during the time of worldwide economic depression.
But the Ontario Agricultural College in Canada, now the University of Guelph, offered him a full scholarship, which Grierson accepted. As he did in England, however, Grierson had to work various jobs - including stints as a laborer at a local farm, a tutor and an ice cream shop waiter - to earn his living expenses.
After excelling at Ontario, he studied for his master's degree in plant physiology at the University of Toronto. Grierson had finished the program by 1940, but he wouldn't get the degree officially for another five years because he volunteered for the Canadian Royal Air Force at the outbreak of World War II.
Months before leaving, he met his wife, Agnes Cray, but also had to put off marriage for the war. She wasn't interested in the short, scrappy Brit initially, but Grierson won her with daily flowers and affectionate notes and, finally, a dozen roses on Christmas Eve 1939.
As a navigator/bombardier on 49 missions over occupied Europe over two years, Grierson found himself as a leader and innovator, he said. He introduced several new navigation techniques, including a simplified method for keeping logs, and finished the war in Canada as head of the RAF flight navigation school.
Upon his discharge in 1945, he taught at the University of British Columbia for four years before getting a chance to study for his doctorate in pomology (the study of fruit) at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He received his degree in 1951.
On to Florida
By that time, however, there was no job available at Canadian universities. He found one at a small research facility then called the Citrus Experiment Station in Lake Alfred, where he was assigned to work on postharvest handling and packaging of fresh citrus fruits.
Grierson revolutionized procedures at Florida's fresh citrus packinghouses, according to former student Ellis and some of his Lake Alfred colleagues - John Attaway, the retired director of scientific research for the Florida Department of Citrus, and Eldon Brown, a retired plant pathologist at the research center who worked on Grierson's fresh citrus research group.
His first and perhaps best known innovation was refining the degreening process.
Early season oranges and tangerines don't have that bright orange color, nor the grapefruit a golden yellow hue desired by consumers. Then as now, packinghouses stored the fruit in a cold room filled with ethylene gas until the fruit lost all traces of green.
But in the early 1950s, a significant portion of the fruit came out of the degreening room damaged. Scientists at the time focused on finding a safer substitute, but Grierson found the problem lay not with ethylene but in the concentrations being used, he said.
"To get degreening out of the dark ages was my first big accomplishment," Grierson said. "I'm an innovator. You need new ideas, and you've got to sell them. That's been my role."
His colleagues agreed.
"It (Grierson's degreening work) was very critical for the fresh citrus industry because the longer the citrus remains in the degreening room, the more it damages the fruit," Brown said. "He did a lot of work on degreening and the design of packinghouses."
Grierson's work is still part of standard texts for citrus packinghouses, including "Fresh Citrus Fruits," the industry manual. His work earned him induction into the Citrus Hall of Fame in 1993 - 11 years after he retired from the research center.
Grierson paid a personal price for his professional success, said Peter Grierson, 62, a retired accounting professor who lives with his father in Winter Haven. Growing up, he remembers his father's absence more than his presence.
"He was a '50s dad who was involved in his work. He was like so many '50s dads - busy in the corporate world," Peter Grierson said.
While he expressed pride at fighting for his citrus innovations, Grierson acknowledged he hadn't always shown patience with those reluctant to accept change.
"At times I do find it difficult to be patient. I have a minimum of patience with bureaucracy," he said. "I have been told I should learn to suffer fools gladly. Unfortunately there's a lot of them around, and some in high places."
