Euell Gibbons
| Euell Theophilus Gibbons | |
|---|---|
Gibbons circa 1960
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| Born |
September 8, 1911 Clarksville, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | December 29, 1975 (aged 64) Sunbury Community Hospital Sunbury, Pennsylvania |
| Cause of death | Ruptured aortic aneurysm due to Marfan syndrome |
| Spouse(s) | Freda Fryer |
Euell Theophilus Gibbons (September 8, 1911 – December 29, 1975) was an outdoorsman and proponent of natural diets during the 1960s.
Gibbons was born in Clarksville, Texas, on September 8, 1911, and spent much of his youth in the hilly terrain of New Mexico. His father drifted from job to job, usually taking his family (a wife and four children) with him.
During one difficult interval of homesteading, young Euell began foraging for local plants and berries to supplement the family diet. After leaving home at 15, he himself drifted relentlessly through the Southwest, finding work as a dairyman, carpenter, trapper, gold panner, and cowboy. The early years of the Dust Bowl era found Gibbons in California, where he lived as a self-described “bindle stiff” (hobo) and, in sympathy with labor causes, began writing Communist Party leaflets. Later in the 1930s he settled in Seattle, served a stint in the Army, married, and worked as a carpenter, surveyor, and boatbuilder.
During the late 1930s, Gibbons was still giving "more time to his political activity than to his work, and more time to wild food than to politics." After Russia invaded Poland in 1939, however, he renounced Communism and spent most of World War II in Hawaii, building and repairing boats for the Navy. His first marriage, Gibbons recalled, became a "casualty of the war," and in the postwar years he chose the life of a beachcomber on the Hawaiian Islands. After entering the University of Hawaii as a 36-year-old freshman, Gibbons majored in anthropology and won the university's creative-writing prize. In 1948, he married Freda Fryer, a teacher, and both decided to join the Society of Friends (the Quakers), stating "I became a Quaker because it was the only group I could join without pretending to beliefs that I didn't have or concealing beliefs that I did have."
The couple relocated to the mainland in 1953, where (after a failed attempt to found a cooperative agricultural community in Indiana) Gibbons became a staff member at Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center near Philadelphia, cooking breakfast for everyone every day. Around 1960, through his wife's urging and support, he was able to follow through on his earlier aspirations and turn to writing.
At the urging of a New York literary agent, Gibbons agreed to rework the draft of a novel (about a schoolteacher who wows café society with opulent meals of foraged foodstuffs) into a straightforward book on wild food. Capitalizing on the growing return-to-nature movement in 1962, the resulting work, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, became an instant success. Gibbons then produced the cookbooks Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop in 1964 and Stalking the Healthful Herbs in 1966. He was widely published in various magazines, including two pieces which appeared in National Geographic Magazine.
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