my Story
This is me emerging from a giant hollow Beech tree in a New Zealand Forest near where the Lord of the Rings was filmed. A Hobbit Tree!
Mary Bahr was born in Orlando, Florida. She grew up on Orlando’s northeast side on and in a lake that was mostly wilderness with bald eagles roosting in trees outside the breakfast table window and panthers roaming the groves next door. Her father was an outdoors-man who taught her to fish, canoe, and sail Florida’s waters. Her mother was a school teacher who provided an abundance of books and ideas at home. Her only brother roamed the woods and waters with her and grew to become an expert mechanic. He started in his early teens to rebuild old cars and high school to build and race dragsters. Brother and sister performed a series of science experiments together, from electrolysis gone wrong on the kitchen table to cloud formation and an attempt at rain in the bathroom using steam from the shower and cold winter air from the outside window. M Bahr also kept a series of wild pets from alligators in the only bathtub to a tame blackbird (a male Boat-tailed Grackle named Buzzy) who flew free but returned to land on your shoulder and stole shiny tools from the carport auto mechanics shop. Buzzy was not welcome inside the house as he successfully caught and ate the tame goldfish from their tanks, made tracks in the butter and pulled the silverware off onto the floor from the dinner table, and removed the buttons from tufted chairs and couches.
Bahr graduated from Rollins College with honors earning degrees in Biology and Chemistry. After graduation, she spent the summer living in the Everglades, where she made an insect collection for Rollins and then taught science for a year in Ocoee, Florida, before joining the Air Force to travel the world. She went through officers training in San Antonio, Texas, and 8 months of intelligence training at Lowry AFB in Denver before shipping out to Vietnam for a year. She was assigned to Air Force Headquarters at Tan Son Nuht Air Base in Saigon. It was 1968, a few months after the Tet offensive almost overran the base and everyone’s nerves were fragile. Soon after she arrived, nightly rocket attacks on the base began. She lived on base for most of her tour, working first declassifying information and then writing and publishing a weekly intelligence summary for the aircrews. She studied Vietnamese and kept a succession of pets in her bunkered quarters ranging from giant pythons to exotic parrots. Two parrots and an Indian python came home with her to SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Air Force put her photo-interpreter skills to work on Satellite photography. As her Air Force career drew to a close, M. Bahr went back to school to earn a graduate degree at Creighton University. She studied dragonfly protective coloration with a series of investigations on how background colors affected dragonfly nymphs’ color as they go through successive molts shedding their skins as they outgrow their exoskeletons. She discovered the cause of the brilliant green coloration that had started this exploration was actually a colony of green algae living inside the dragonfly nymphs’ abdomen. Oh, Nature’s wonders never cease!
M Bahr married and moved to Northern Minnesota when she and her new husband got out of the Air Force. They bought land, built a home, and began a produce farming operation. She taught school in the Winter as a substitute, which she described as living by your wits, and helped with the summer’s farming. Her daughter was born in Northern Minnesota, and they lived there until 1990 when, following a divorce, she and her daughter moved back to Florida, where she taught and helped care for her aging father. M. Bahr attended regular Summer institutes to improve her teaching practice, including a year at the University of Florida (UF) where she worked in a Biotechnology lab and learned about research and how Biotech influenced almost every department at UF. It was a view into the modern research laboratory that left a lasting impression. She continued teaching science for 18 years, earning a master’s degree in Educational Technology and a National Board Certification in Early Adolescent Science. In 2008, she helped write the new science standards for Florida. This experience focused her attention on the Nature of Science standards, and she began to study the history and philosophy of science. She also worked with a team of teachers and professors of science education on a curriculum developed under a PROMISE (Partnership to Rejuvenate and Optimize Mathematics and Science Education in Florida) grant to teach the new science standards to Florida teachers and to provide them with curriculum materials to support them in the classroom. She went on to train teachers at the district level in this curriculum. These standards drew controversy by mandating that Evolution be taught in Florida classrooms, for the first time since the era of the Scopes trial, The whole experience of being at the center of the controversy over these standards has led M. Bahr to continue to study and write on the Nature of Science. She sees a better understanding of what science is and what it can and cannot do and its important role in modern society as a key part of science education that is often missing in the classroom.
photo: Beech forest in New Zealand on the Dart River by M Bahr