Dr. Leonard Butler - Pilgrim's Progress

[BigDog]

Re-posted from: http://vvn.net/wp/2008/08/22/dr-leonard-butler-pilgrims-progress/

This obituary in the Toronto Globe and Mail caught my eye.

Here’s a few highlights:
* Leonard Butler was born the day the Titanic sank, in 1912.
* The only thing his father was ever quoted as having said to his
mother was: “You’re pregnant. I’m gone.”
* The only books at home, which he read hungrily, were The Swiss
Family Robinson and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
* He quit school at 14 and took a job as a wagon-repair
apprentice.
* A year later, his mother died of pneumonia.
* He left England and went to Canada.
* After working as a farm hand, he went to college and earned a
PhD in genetics.
* In 1946, Dr. Butler accepted a position for a year as assistant
professor in the genetics department at McGill University.
* Dr. Butler retired (from teaching) in 1977 and became a
consultant with the Upjohn pharmaceutical firm, where he bred diabetic
Chinese hamsters in Kalamazoo, Mich.
* He died suddenly on June 30, 2008 at 96 years of age.

I would have loved to ask Dr. Butler how reading Pilgrim’s Progress
prepared him for his journey.

Several of Dr. Butler’s scholarly articles are available on the
internet, including this interesting article entitled: A New Eye
Abnormality in the House Mouse. I might have called it “Three Blind
Mice”, but that’s a song for another day.

I never met Dr. Leonard Butler, but I admire him for his courage,
skill, and accomplishments.

“I am going to my Father’s, and though with great difficulty I am
got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been
at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me
in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it….
When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to
the Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death, where is thy
sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy
victory? So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on
the other side. ” - from Pilgrim’s Progress