By Tom Grace
Cooperstown News Bureau
---- —
The Otsego County Conservation Association will honor Willard "Bill" Harman tonight at a dinner at the Otesaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown.
Harman, 73, is the longtime director of SUNY Oneonta's Biological Field Station on Otsego Lake.
"He's done a great job monitoring the lake and building the internship program," OCCA Executive Director Martha Clarvoe said.
Blending academic knowledge and practical on-the-water skills, Harman has run the field station program since soon after he was hired by the State University College at Oneonta in 1968.
"The head of the Science Department biology group told me they wanted to create a field station, and that sounded perfect to me," Harman said. "I never wanted to work in a city."
Harman, sitting on the porch of a rustic building at the 500-acre Rufus Thayer Upland Interpretive Center, said he's always loved the water. He grew up on Seneca Lake, and he said his boyhood fun on it helped instill an appreciation of other freshwater lakes.
"I was always in the water," he said.
After an unsuccessful year at Hobart College, Harman enlisted in the Navy as a diver, where over the next six years, he would examine life underwater.
When he came back home, however, Seneca Lake had become contaminated with Eurasian milfoil, he said.
This invasive species forms massive tangled mats along and below the water's surface, clogging open areas.
"That was hard to take," he said. "When I saw that, I knew I wanted to do something about it."
He enrolled in Cornell University to study biology, and by 1968 he was looking for a job. After finding one in Oneonta, he started the program from a property on the west side of Otsego Lake, near The Farmers' Museum.
To that, the BFS has added the Thayer property in the town of Springfield, donated by the late Rufus Thayer. The old farm buildings, from the sap house to the boat house, have been restored outside and converted inside into classrooms, office space, laboratories and a dive locker.
Harman said he was looking forward to the dinner as a chance to thank all the people who have helped the BFS program grow.
"A lot of very good people have been involved over the years," he said.
Tickets for today's event, which starts at 5:30 p.m. with cocktails, are $175. Proceeds from the dinner will help establish the Willard N. Harman OCCA Biological Field Station Internship Endowment Fund, Clarvoe said.
The endowment is meant to ensure that the BFS intern program operates for the foreseeable future, she said.
Harman said he has no plans to retire.
"None whatsoever," he said. "Right now, a lot of things are coming together, and it would be the wrong time to go. I feel great, and I love this job."
