The Teacher Whose Students Would Not Go Away

I had been trying for what seemed like forever to get into the class, which had had a waiting list almost since it had begun.  A hundred and sixty students, from far and wide, were turned away each semester.  Finally, in 1980, I was one of the favored thirty-six or so admitted into Scientific Illustration, taught at the University of Arizona by Donald Bennett Sayner, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Sayner, I quickly discovered, was like no other teacher I had had before.  He was like no teacher I have had since.  He resembled a character from a Dickens novel, W. C. Fields with a bolo tie, Charles Darwin with sandals.  When he smiled, his eyes looked to the side.  He willingly posed for us so we could practice our photography skills.

He was gentle, yet authoritative, organized in his disorganization, focused in the midst of chaos.  During his "lectures," which seemed more like a series of thoughtful asides, he passed around photographs, maps, bones, feathers, shells, sticks, plants, old cameras, film clips, calipers, templates, grids.  His voice was soft, but he clicked along with enthusiasm and a kind of suppressed glee.  Students murmured constantly throughout his presentations, but Sayner was not perturbed.  He seemed to regard this chorus of katydids as pleasant background.  

In his laboratory, the chorus continued, combined with movement.  Sayner was not confused; in a white lab coat with a magnifying glass dangling from his neck, he moved, too, among the cluttered tables and cabinets with meditative ease.  Sometimes he took a student's pen and made a stipple or two, or dipped a crow-quill pen into India ink and drew a little thick and thin line on a student's piece.  Sometimes he licked his little finger and made a deft dab.  His office was stacked neck-high with books and papers, the telephone's ring muffled in the bunker, but he could always locate something, or direct us:  "Right side of desk, third stack, about a foot down."  

We were to create two portfolios, in technical drawing and in photography, both as a reference for ourselves and a demonstration to others of what we could do.  After basic exercises, which included drafting a map of Baja California and treating it six ways from Sunday, we were free to follow our bliss--into archaeology, botany, entomology, geology, medicine, museum displays, advertising, and so on.  It was a beehive of activity, sometimes with a real beehive and real bees.  And who were all those strange people bustling around, unrolling drawings, making diazo slides, moving back and forth from the enlarger to the darkroom?  

"My students won't go away," Sayner said.  "The old students come back and keep the place going at night for the new students."  One of his assistants was a Yaqui Indian who wore thick glasses and played the harpsichord, and whose ancestor had published a Tucson Spanish-language newspaper, El Mosquito.  Amazing line drawings flowed from the end of his pen.  He designed his own concert tickets and publicity posters, printed them on a printing press in the corner of the room, removed the legs from his harpsichord, loaded it in his pickup truck, and went on tour.

In her short piece, "How to Be a Writer," Lorrie Moore notes that in college you notice that there are people who are dumber than you are and people who are smarter than you are, and that's pretty much how it will be your entire life.  Whereas I wasn't exactly erasing holes in my drawing paper, my skills were less than mediocre in comparison with those of fellow student Paul Mirocha.  Paul's illustration work was awesome, and I've watched it appear over the years on posters, book covers, and his own pop-up books.  A few years ago I opened the cover of Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Prodigal Summer, and saw Paul's moth drawings on the endpapers. 

Sayner--that's what everyone called him--did not have a college degree.  He was born in 1914 in Odebolt, Iowa, "the popcorn capital of the world."  His mother, an artist and illustrator, also managed hotels, and Sayner helped her with everything, including entertaining guests.  He came to Arizona to study anthropolgy, but after a little time at the University of Arizona and working on digs on the Apache Indian Reservation, he ran out of money.  It was the 1930s.  He and a friend began barnstorming airplanes, chopping out landing strips in the middle of nowhere.  On the Navajo Reservation, they drove around in a beat-up car playing "The Japanese Sandman" and telling the Indians where to come for an airplane ride.  

When barnstorming gave out, Sayner joined the Air Corps Reserve and went to Oklahoma to train as a reconnaissance pilot, then was called into the regular Air Force.  He spent most of WWII in Albuquerque, teaching B-29 engineers.   After the War he answered an ad for a statistician at the Scripps-Howard Institute of Oceanography.  He flunked the numbers test, but they hired him to survey and map.  At Scripps, he gathered information at sea, then came back and drafted reports on seasonal changes, currents, beach erosion, and submarine geology.  After seven years, he returned to the Southwest, where he worked on mineral surveys and drilling projects.

In 1956 he came back to UA, invited by Professors Chuck Lowe and Albert Meade of the Zoology department, to help students illustrate their scientific papers.  He began with his own equipment and a handful of students.

"Scientific illustrators don't decorate," Sayner said.  "They amplify the text.  They help the reader understand the writing.  They capture what a photographer's lens sometimes can't."

It was a practical effort, but Sayner clearly understood the passion behind representing nature, accounting for every feather, every petal, every scale.  "My students dearly love the plants and the snakes," he told a newspaper reporter in 1982.  "They have to love them, or they couldn't draw them."  He could see computers coming, but he was emphatic that human intuition and experience would always be important in illustration.

When I finished Sayner's year-long course, computer-aided design was still in its infancy, so with my newly acquired skill I hired out to illustrate scientific publications.  Irrigation projects from Senegal.  Cotton plant research.  Toxicology apparatus.  Insect behavior.  I drafted charts and maps by the dozens and dozens, expert with Mylar, Pounce, Zip-a-Tone, Rapidograph pens, K&E templates and proportional dividers.  I drew most of the distribution maps for Jim Brown and Art Gibson's book, Biogeography.  I went back to Sayner's lab when I had questions or problems.

When Sayner officially retired in 1985, he had trained more than 4000 illustrators (New York Times, June 16, 1991).  Many had gone on to distinguished and award-winning careers.  That year, former student Chris Kohler Smith (who illustrated my book, Senses and Sensibilities), helped organize "A Salute to Sayner," an alumni exhibit and party, in the UA Student Union Galleries.  Sayner's old students came from everywhere, with drawings, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, bronzes, textbooks, T-shirts, and more.  Sayner arrived at the opening in an antique car, decked out in vintage costume, and a great time was had by all. 

I had written a little piece about Sayner for the short-lived Gecko Echo newsletter, and he referred me his "biographer."  Sayner came to my wedding at the Arizona Inn in Tucson in 1990, and charmed my new husband.  "I see we have the same barber," he said to Ronn.  

Every year until his death in 2004 I received a handmade Christmas card from him and his wife, Lillian.  One was a map of Baja California.  Inside it read, "Baja, Humbug."