The Monterey Bay community lost a shining light Friday, Aug. 19 when Chuck Baxter, a co-founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and longtime marine biology instructor at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, died after a long bout with cancer.
Baxter had an unorthodox path into the field: He was born in Santa Monica in 1927, and though his family moved when he was 6 to Washington state—where he enjoyed collecting clams and oysters with his family on weekends—he continued to visit Santa Monica in the summers, and started working in his grandfather’s machine shop, helping make parts for the aircraft industry as World War II was ramping up.
After a semester at Santa Monica Community College, he was drafted into the Army two months after hostilities had ceased and served for two years. He returned to SMCC for another semester after serving, then transferred to UCLA as an engineering major. Before his senior year, he took a year off to earn some money working at Douglas Aircraft, and during that time was invited to go diving off the breakwater at Venice. It changed his life.
After another dive, this one in Palos Verdes, he picked up a copy of Ed Ricketts’ groundbreaking marine biology book, Between Pacific Tides, to help him identify what he was seeing, and the trajectory of his intellectual pursuits set a new course.
“[I] decided I was a lot more interested in things I was seeing in the kelp bed than I was pounding a calculator for airplanes or the engineering type things,” Baxter said in 2016, in an interview with Susan Maher of the Stanford Historical Society’s Oral History Program.
Three years into an engineering major at UCLA, Baxter transferred to a zoology major after returning to school following his year at Douglas. After graduating, he became a lab instructor for UCLA’s introductory zoology classes, and he took a similar position at Stanford University in 1961. Baxter took a particular interest in invertebrates, which he would carry with him throughout his life.
His ties at Stanford ultimately led him to the university’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, where he began teaching in 1974, and he relocated to Carmel Valley that same year.
Steve Webster, Baxter’s longtime friend and colleague who was also a co-founder of the Aquarium—along with Robin Burnett and Nancy Packard Burnett—says that Hopkins teachers and students often used to hang out on Friday afternoons at the former Hovden’s cannery where the Aquarium was later built, opening in 1984.
“All the students at Hopkins knew how to break into that old cannery,” Webster says, adding that, on one margarita-fueled night in 1976 in either Carmel Valley or Big Sur—the founders diverge in their memories of where, exactly—the idea was hatched to turn the cannery into an aquarium.
“We all loved that cannery,” Webster says. “We thoroughly loved the kelp forest, the tide pools, so the idea of a little aquarium over there was natural.”
The Aquarium became a sensation from the moment it opened, attracting over 2 million visitors in its first year. The initial vision, Webster says, was to take visitors on a walk through Monterey Bay’s various habitats, much in the same way Ricketts did in Between Pacific Tides, which is what Webster suspects sparked the notion.
“I think the habitat path approach may have been engendered in our brains by all of us having digested Between Pacific Tides,” Webster says, adding that it wasn’t in their notes following the initial meetings about the Aquarium idea. “I think it just kind of boiled up with our common experience with Ed Ricketts and his book.”
Webster says Baxter was beloved by students throughout his career. Referring to Baxter’s casual style, Webster says, “a more low-key individual I could not imagine.”
Baxter had numerous accomplishments in his storied career. Aside from his time as an instructor, he worked part time at the Monterey Bay Research Institute in Moss Landing from 1988 to 1996, studying the organisms that live in the depths of Monterey Canyon.
In the early 2000s he collaborated with one of his former students, Mark Shelley and the Sea Studios Foundation, on a documentary series about invertebrates, The Shape of Life. He subsequently consulted for National Geographic’s Strange Days on Planet Earth, a four-hour PBS documentary series, hosted by Edward Norton.
And in 2004, with shipmates that included fellow Hopkins professor William Gilly and John Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw, he retraced the legendary Steinbeck and Ricketts expedition to the Sea of Cortez in 1940.
Baxter’s contributions in his field have also been widely recognized by his colleagues: In 2000, the Western Society of Naturalists awarded him Naturalist of the Year.
But more than anything, his colleagues remember him as a friend. “Chuck was a mentor [for me], as he was to so many people, and a friend,” says Shelley, who adds he became a Baxter “groupie” as a Stanford student in 1969.
Shelley recalls going on scuba trips with him in those early years, exploring the sewage outfalls in Monterey Bay and trying to understand their impact on marine life. “He never gave up on any of his friends or students.”
Shelley was among Baxter’s friends who helped gather his writings to create a book, Natural History of Cognition, which was published in 2020.
“He thought more than anyone I know,” Shelley says. “He absolutely loved thinking, and trying to understand the underlying truth of the universe, really.”