As Rick Meyer and his crew navigated their research vessel during a 1962 expedition to India, they struggled through a hurricane near Greenland and Iceland. Waves rose 60 feet high, and they had to chip ice off the boat to keep it from rolling over. He wore his life jacket for 13 days straight.
Through his life and professional career, he’s tackled countless puzzles and research problems. That’s the scientist in him – practical, hands-on, always searching for the best solution.
Now 95, Rick and his late wife, Mary Louise Meyer, moved to BTV 19 years ago. They had been married 62 years when she died in May 2022 at age 89. Since then, he’s leaned on his family, longtime friendships and a continued drive to learn.
Rick’s many teaching and research appointments included a 29-year career at the University of Arkansas, where he taught courses in biological science, agronomy, civil engineering and environmental science. He directed the environmental science program, which, in 1972, was the first such undergraduate program in the country.
Before the Buffalo River became a national river, he and his students floated a 75-mile stretch every other week for two years. They studied organisms growing on rocks and the water’s laminar flow – the smooth flow of fluid in layers. From that, they wrote the report on water quality and algae for the Department of the Interior, which assumed responsibility once it was designated the first national river in 1972.
His research on Beaver Lake led him to contribute to the model for water management now used for reservoirs across the United States. He’s also researched the algae in the springs at Hot Springs National Park.
“You find an interesting problem and work on a solution. Some things you can solve, some things you can’t. So, that’s why life’s an adventure,” he said.
On the Lookout for Opportunities
Rick grew up in the Depression between Independence and Kansas City, Missouri, on land where his parents saw opportunity. The family raised asparagus and raspberries for regional markets, and Rick and his sister did much of the farm chores. His dad was an electrical engineer, and his mom was a private executive assistant, who traveled the world. They later retired to Fayetteville and eventually to BTV.
The family had more skills than money, and odd jobs found Rick throwing the local newspaper from his bicycle and rebuilding neighbors’ car engines with his dad in their basement. Through a union apprentice program, Rick repaired steam and diesel engines in factories and even helped develop the machine that filled Bismarck donuts.
Rick joined ROTC, became the rifle team captain and expected to serve in Japan during World War II. By the time he graduated high school early, the war had ended, and Rick trained on typewriters and adding machines in business college. Finding the business office confining, he went to Missouri Valley College to study biology, chemistry, math and education. Though his church pastor had hoped Rick would go into ministry, prayer and meditation led him to teaching.
On the way, he became a statistical quality control engineer for Westinghouse. The job required Navy clearance, and they worked on jet engines in a steel room three stories underground. After that, Rick taught high school in Raytown, Missouri. In summers, he found a teaching program at the University of Minnesota. The research station was located at Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and a faculty member invited him to be his research assistant. He soon got a faculty position, responsible for the general biology program for freshmen.
Rick researched single-cell organisms and developed a photographic developer that increased the speed and expanded the grayscale so he could photograph living cells. He was invited to write a paper on his research and present it at the International Botanical Congress in Montreal. He and his then-fiancée, Mary, moved up their wedding date so the trip could double as their honeymoon.
“We’ve had just so much fun and so many blessings,” Rick said. “But opportunity shows up here and there, and you just take it. It’s always multiple choice.”
Traveling the World for Science
While at the University of Minnesota, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rick was invited by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to go to India in 1962. He first spent that winter in Bermuda, about 650 miles off the North Carolina coast in the North Atlantic. He was chief scientist of an expedition on the Atlantis, a 120-foot wooden ketch that was converted to a research vessel.
Their wooden vessel was key to them detecting whale sounds, which have the same frequency as metal ships. The whale sounds were published in National Geographic, but they also captured the sounds of Russian ships going to Cuba. “I was there as a biologist to put a team together,” he said. “I had no control over what Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev were doing, but we had an opportunity to contribute.”
The team also took the converted presidential yacht Williamsburg through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal to work in the Red Sea. With the newest technology, they were the first people to profile the bottom of the Red Sea and see the rift that separates Africa and Asia. He also studied the process that causes the blue-green algae in the Red Sea to die and turn the water red.
On to India, the researchers worked with coastal populations along the Bay of Bengal and used their technologies to help them develop fisheries and techniques so they could add a marine food supply to their diet. “We were going into the great unknown. Everything we did was new, really exciting, every day,” he said. “So, you’re cautious, but adventuresome.”
There, Rick isolated a single-cell organism, silicoflagellates, a type of algae, and was the first person to get it into culture so it could be examined under a microscope. He also developed a delicate procedure to do cellular surgery using the sharp edge of a crystal.
A Focus on His New Home State
After finishing his graduate degree at the University of Minnesota, Rick taught briefly at California State University. But he’d caught the research bug, and environmental interests were brewing in the late 1960s. He and Mary moved to Fayetteville in 1967, where he began teaching at the U of A.
Mary taught elementary school, taking time away to raise their daughter, Jane. As Rick continued doing research in Minnesota, the family lived in the woods at Lake Itasca. They enjoyed canoeing and hiking, and even climbed Mount McKinley in Alaska on July 4, 1976, for an American bicentennial climb. With family members, Rick had spent six weeks climbing and living on the side of the mountain.
While living near Goshen, Rick joined the fire department, served as deputy fire chief and converted Army surplus trucks into brush trucks. He became an emergency medical technician, working in the emergency room off and on for 12 years, and served on the Central EMS board as chairman when they created a benefits system that retained trained paramedics, resulting in an increased save rate of patients. He also worked with CEMS and others to assign addresses for all rural routes and create the first enhanced 911 system in the state.
Rick’s research ranged from electron microscopy and surgery on single cells to major projects, such as helping move the creek — and the trout — in Bella Vista from the bluff line to the middle of the golf course so the highway could be relocated and widened in that old creek bed.
Working with the then-Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, Rick got a grant for researchers to study the streams and their connections to the state’s ecological diversity. He proposed the term “bio region” to more specifically describe this state – from the Boston and Ouachita mountains to the Delta area, from the Arkansas River Valley to the southern Gulf Coastal Plain. Arkansas became the first state to have water quality regions. He’s proud that many former environmental science students went on to work in state agencies, and says, “My greatest teachers were my students.”
Rick also chaired a new pollution control committee for the City of Fayetteville. Focused on reducing the load on the waste incinerator, his environmental science students developed a pilot program for city residents to sort their trash. They managed a statistical sampling program across socioeconomic areas, and walked those neighborhoods, logging trash in the pre-dawn hours. The students’ report helped city officials project the full-scale needs and provided the seed for what became the current recycling program.
By 1997, Rick wasn’t teaching classes but rather only supervising graduate students. After feeling unwell as he walked across campus, he had a heart attack in his office. This time, he was the patient riding in the ambulance. The UA president visited him at the hospital, and Rick decided to retire on the spot.
Mary and Rick then moved to Portland, Oregon, for about 10 years, so they could watch their granddaughters grow up. While there, he served on a parochial school’s board, and Mary played the organ and harpsichord. One granddaughter is now a conservator at the British Museum in London, and the other is in the U.S. intelligence service.
Continuing to Make a Difference
Returning to Fayetteville in 2007, Mary and Rick knew they wanted to live at BTV. They selected a cottage so Rick could have a dedicated phone line for his work as the finance committee chairman for an organization in North Carolina. As treasurer, he managed an endowment fund for Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. The society awarded $20 million a year in scholarships, grants and aid, and published American Scientist magazine, with Rick as publisher.
After Mary became ill, the couple moved to their apartment to be near more BTV services, and he retired from the organization. Then they got more involved in church work, becoming charter members of three churches in Fayetteville, Prairie Grove and Lowell. Often, Mary played the organ, and he taught Bible classes. “Mary and I tended to be hands-on in our community service,” he said. “That’s part of the adventure.”
In various leadership roles at BTV, he has enjoyed serving on the Resident Council, Finance Committee, Village Board and Foundation Board during a period of expansion and improvement at the Village.
These days, Rick values the morning group that meets by the fireplace and discusses everything but politics and religion. In recent conversations around artificial intelligence (AI), he’s still learning from the unique perspectives of fellow residents with science and business backgrounds.
Words by Michelle Parks | Photos by Stephen Ironside
