Walter Huber Meyer papers

Walter H. Meyer, 85, Harriman Professor Emeritus of Forest Management, died in New Haven on November 18, 1981, of an infection after an operation. He had been quite well and active until then; he had retired in 1963 after 24 years as a faculty member.

A native of New Haven born in 1896, Professor Meyer received B.A., M.F., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, in 1919, 1922, and 1929, respectively. As an undergraduate mathematics major, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and to Sigma Xi as a senior. Following the completion of his master's program, he was granted an American-Scandinanvian Foundation Fellowship and studied at the Royal Institute of Forestry in Stockholm in 1922-1923.

Professor Meyer entered the U.S. Forest Service in 1923, on his return from Sweden, and served on the staff of the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station at Amherst, MA until 1926, when he was transferred to the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station, Portland, OR. During his career in the Forest Service he did a number of studies of the mensuration, growth, and yield of such species as Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, and red spruce that remain in use to this day.

Walt spent a leave in 1928-1929 at Yale doing the work that led to the first Ph.D. degree awarded under the aegis of an American forestry school. From 1936 to 1939, he was professor of forest management at the University of Washington. He returned to Yale to fill the vacancy left on the faculty by the retirement of Dean Graves.

His initial duties at Yale involved teaching forest economics and policy as well as statistics and forest mensuration. When Professor Herman Chapman retired in 1943, Meyer took over instruction in forest management and finance which he continued for the rest of his career. However, there was a hectic period during the resumption of instruction in 1945-1946 when he taught all of the courses listed here and also steered the resumption and relocation of the southern field instruction at Crossett, AR. Of all the many things that he did, there was nothing that brought more mutual pride and satisfaction to Walt and about 250 students than 17 spring-semester sessions at Crossett. Some of the students stayed in the western South and the others carried what they learned to many distant places. In this instruction and in his research, he pioneered in introducting many methods of mathematical analysis, now commonplace, into practical application in forest management.

His publications included five technical bulletins and other major publications of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and four bulletins in the Yale Forestry series. He was joint author, with H. H.Chapman, of two standard forestry textbooks published by McGraw-Hill Book Company: Forest Valuation (1947) and Forest Mensuration (1949).

While in the Pacific Northwest, he served as chairman of various committees and organizations, including the Puget Sound Section of the Society of American Foresters and the Forestry Committee of the Washington State Planning Council. He was chairman of the SAF Committee on Civil Service from 1942-1948 and a member of the SAF Accrediting Committee in 1948 to 1954. He was honored by election as a Fellow of the Society of American Foresters in 1959. He also served on the Board of Directors of the American Forestry Association from 1944 through 1952. He was for many years forestry consultant to the Crossett Company and the Fordyce Lumber Company in Arkansas, and the J. Neils Lumber Company in Washington and Montana; this relationship continued with the Georgia-Pacific Company after it acquired the Arkansas companies.

He is survived by his wife, Constance B. Meyer of Hamden, CT and a son, Walter, Jr., a Bureau of Land Management forester who lives at Eagle, ID, and by two grandchildren.

From: Yale Forest School News, vol. 70, no. 1.