Guy T Pinkard came to Sea Cliff while still working for his masters from NYU in fish biology.  He came with a strong rural Southern accent and a belief that science should be a hands-on class.  He opened the long closed lab for experiments and soon had students entering science fairs.  He founded the National High School Biology Exchange Club and Sea Cliff's Alpha Chapter began exchanging dried horseshoe crabs and seaweeds with the Beta Chapter in Milltown, Alabama where Guy T had grown up and where his father ran a small general store with a hand cranked gas pump on the porch.  

He was the first deep South teacher in Sea Cliff and the first teacher I know of who took students to visit his home.  For Easter vacation in April 1955 he loaded Serge Yonov, Nik Epanchin, John Storojev and me in his '51 Ford and drove non stop to Milltown, Alabama.  The week became a mini-course in Southern culture--everything from black-eyed peas and biscuits to evangelical preaching by Brother Friday in a rural church.

The Pinkard family spread out in the pine woods and fields and Guy's two brothers Ray and Howard as well as his father took on the job of teaching us how to behave and understand the South.  

The inscription on Guy T's gravestone says, "A tender brother and a faithful friend."

All the Pinkards we met are dead and not a single Pinkard lives in or near Milltown as of 2011.  The president of the Milltown high school biology club, however, lives only a mile from the house where she and I spent many hours in a porch swing shelling peas and coming out of our teenage shells.  She became a nurse, recently retired and operating her own 90 acre cattle ranch.