I regret to inform you that Richard Irwin Johnson passedaway on July 1st, at the age of 95. Hedied peacefully at home. Richard was a long time Research Associate at Harvard’sMuseum of Comparative Zoology, having started as a volunteer while still inhigh school, and his first scientific article was published in 1941, at the ageof 16. After service in the U.S. Army inWorld War II, he returned to Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College(1951), and developed an extensive publication record with an emphasis onmolluscs, particularly the freshwater bivalves of the family Unionidae. He also authored a number of biographies andcatalogues of numerous other scholars who collected and studiedmolluscs, and those publications remain invaluable references for current andfuture generations of malacologists. Theseincluded articles on Unionidae specialists (Call, Frierson, Heude, Lea,Marshall, Simpson, Utterback, and the Wrights), as well as those whosemolluscan studies included other taxa (e.g., Bequaert, Brooks, Bush, Clench,Couthouy, Fuller, Gould, Mighels, Ortmann, Pease, Prime, Storer, Turner, Verrill,and Wetherby). Richard also prepared invaluable collations of a number ofnineteenth-century publications that appeared in multiple parts over many years. He authored type catalogues of the Unionidaeholdings of several museums, including the MCZ and NHMUK, and wrote historiesof several now defunct museums, including the Boston Society of NaturalHistory, the Portland (Maine) Society of Natural History, and the Lyceum ofNatural History of New York. Richard also built, over a period of nearly six decades, whatis perhaps the largest private library of books and journals on molluscs,including antiquarian titles seldom found in research libraries. Richard was probably the oldest and longest-serving memberof the American Malacological Society, having joined the predecessor entity,the American Malacological Union, in 1941. Having known Richard for over 35 years, I have longappreciated both his extensive knowledge of the literature on molluscs and hisgreat interest in a wide range of other topics, which resulted in manystimulating late-night conversations! Alan R. Kabat
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