The Journal of California Anthropology

Kathryn Klar in her redargution appearing in the last issue of the Journal seems to have gotten her dander up a bit over what she sees as my "bitterness" in some remarks I made about John Peabody Harrington, a man who I barely knew and who she knows only through the aggeration of his field records. My apologies to all readers for not acknowledging Tom Wolfe as a qualified judge of JPH as a genius and book sales promoter—I stand corrected on Wolfe and by Klar. Am I faulted for remembering only Harrington's unusual typewriter? But wait; I also recall a lot of gravy stains on his shirt, though this little intimacy is perhaps of even less interest. I am also cast, unfairly I think, in the role as an apologist for C. Hart Merriam who was admittedly as eccentric as JPH, though CHM carried a lot of weight with North American naturalists, was the founder of the U.S. Biological Survey, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. I think that CHM also had many of the faults of JPH, among these a suspicion of professional anthropologists, or perhaps better, anthropological linguists. And surely Merriam was no linguist at all, but rather an abecedarian word list collector.