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 was born in Santa Monica in 1927, and 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. After serving, he 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.
Baxter began teaching at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove in 1974, and moved to Carmel Valley.
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.
Baxter had numerous accomplishments in his storied career. His contributions in his field have also been widely recognized: In 2000, the Western Society of Naturalists awarded him Naturalist of the Year.
But more than anything, colleagues remember him as a friend. “Chuck was a mentor [for me], as he was to so many people, and a friend,” says Mark Shelley, formerly of Sea Studios. “He never gave up on any of his friends or students.”