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Robert Joseph Bandoni
Professor Emeritus Robert (Bob) Joseph Bandoni passed away
peacefully on May 18, 2009 at Mountain View Manor Extended
Care Unit in Ladner, B.C. Bob was born November 9, 1926
in Weeks, Nevada to Giuseppe and Albina Bandoni, and graduated
from high school in Hawthorne, Nevada. He earned degrees
from the University of Nevada at Reno and the University
of Iowa before joining the faculty of the Department of
Botany at the University of British Columbia in 1958. Following
his retirement from the Botany Department in 1989. Bob maintained
an active presence both within the Botany Department and
in the wider mycological community. He is survived by wife
Alice-Ann (Webb) of 20 years, daughter Susan (Thomas) Muench
of Geneseo, New York, stepsons Danai (Angela) Bisalputra
and Rabin Bisalputra, and sisters Margaret McGhie of Nevada,
Evelyn Smith of Illinois, and Mary (Frank) Fahrenkopf of
Virginia. Predeceased by wife Inger (Van Nostrand) of 30
years, and siblings Estelle Perry, Grace Bandoni and Alfred
Bandoni.
A celebration of Bob’s life will be scheduled for September.
Condolences can be expressed on line at www.deltafuneral.ca.
In lieu of flowers, please send contributions to the Delta
Hospital Foundation (5800 Mountain View Blvd., Delta, B.C.,
V4K 3V6, or www.deltahospital.com).
As a biologist, Bob was drawn to strange, diverse, and
inconspicuous basidiomycete fungi. He was both a superb
naturalist and an attentive scientist. By searching in places
where no one else looked, he found many of the ‘duck-billed
platypuses’ of the fungal world, fungi with astonishing
and unexpected combinations of characters that helped reveal
patterns of early fungal evolution (Bandoni and Oberwinkler
1981; Oberwinkler et al. 1990).
Bob specialized in the Tremellales, and Jack Maze recalled:
I first became aware of Bob while taking
a course in Mycology at U. Wash. from Dan Stuntz. When
we got to the Tremellales, Dan and one of his students,
Hugh Klett, spent a great deal of time praising Bob Bandoni
and the quality of his work. Thus when I arrived at UBC
in 1968 I was quite excited to realize I'd get to meet
Bob. I did and my first thought was, "Geez, he's old."
Bob then was in his early 40s but I was a mere kid of
31, an age at which anyone over 35 was suspected of having
ridden in on a glacier. It was always pleasant to encounter
Bob. In the hall, he could extract the glumness from a
typical day in academia with humor or just an irrevant
comment, often in more colorful language than is commonly
heard in the halls of academe. In meetings, Bob's comments,
while rare, were also a pleasure to hear, and were often
useful. He usually kept his own council in meetings, aside
from private remarks on various things, some of them germane
to the meeting. But when necessary he had the ability
to use a few pithy remarks to place a discussion in perspective,
usually in the context of what was being discussed was
a waste of time and, if the ideas presented were carried
out, would be an even greater waste of time. These opinions
were based on a combination of knowledge and experience,
things at which Bob excelled.
--Jack Maze
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