Journelism

Indulge Your Passions: Entomology Doctor Jim Miller Rises from a Mennonite Farm Childhood to the Forefront of Entomological Research (Part 1)

Jim grew up on a Mennonite farm. Children from this background are born with their lives planned: they are to keep with the church and grow up to manage the farm, as well as to live the same life as their father, their father’s father, and so on. But a passion for nature and its workings took on a life of its own and led Jim away from his preordained life path. With the help of several dedicated educators and a lot of enthusiasm, Jim broke free from early bindings to follow his calling.

Jim stands at a lab bench, cutting apart a plastic test tube in his attempt to build a better moth trap. He may have a head of gray hair and a bristly toothbrush mustache, but when his ideas work out as planned, he looks like a little boy playing with LEGOs; he bounces up and down on the balls of his feet and chuckles to himself. I am working at the other side of the lab bench, completely distracted from my work by his display of energy and glee; he looks up at me and says, “I’ve always thought science should be like kindergarten rekindled.” For Jim, who has loved experimentation and investigation from a very young age, it surely is.

His journey to become a scientist, a Doctor of Entomology, to have his name on the door of a research lab at an acclaimed university, was not an easy one. “I am where I am today because of other people.” I can’t say I completely agree with this statement—I’ve seen him work, and obvious passion for his profession played a part—but after hearing his story, I wonder whether he’d be plowing fields today rather than studying insect behavior if it weren’t for the supportive educators who urged him onward.

Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania within a Mennonite farm family, Jim knew his future was to follow in his father’s shoes and run the farm. But though he enjoyed the freedoms provided by farm life, agriculture never excited him. He was much more interested in investigating the activity of nature happening all around him. “I always loved biology and science,” he recalls, remembering his first systematic experiment at age four observing flies feeding off of DDT bait dishes in the barn. As he entered school and started having more responsibility on the farm, suddenly his scientific curiosity was put on hold.

Attending Mennonite parochial school, Jim found no inspiration to work at his studies. “I really rebelled for the first two years of school. My school reports said, ‘James refuses to apply himself fully.’ And the reason was I hated school. I went from having freedoms of being on the farm… to my personal liberties greatly diminished by school.” But after Jim learned to read, he suddenly found something he was excited by—the worlds provided by books—so he started to apply himself. After reading every book in the school’s small library, he “was digging in closets looking for books…to satisfy my curiosity.” In one such closet, he found a stack of science books and a box of scientific equipment that changed the course of his education. Jim begged his teacher to have science class, and after reviewing the books, she approved teaching science but forbade the class to read Chapter 3. “I said, ‘Oh, I promise, I promise’, but I was really instigating, so I got the book and took it home, and even though I promised—and for a Mennonite boy, it is very difficult to do this, to lie—I couldn’t help myself. I had to read Chapter 3. She couldn’t have flagged it any more.”

Chapter 3, about the age of the planet, hinted at evolution. Jim knew that if his little parochial school wanted to hide this chapter, there must be some larger truth in it. This intrigued him. Between this new desire to find truth from science, along with the joy he found with scientific exploration in class, Jim had a new passion; he left Mennonite school and entered public high school.

Jim flourished there. Even though he lacked the basic elementary science education that his classmates had (“I still to this day have these crazy gaps in my scientific knowledge”), he surpassed many of them, especially in biological fields. And his teachers took note of this. One pulled him aside and asked what he wanted to do after high school; he said, as was the expectation from his family, “Farm.” The teacher shot back, “Wrong answer.” He went on to encourage Jim to pursue making a living with his mind. Jim didn’t know what to make of this encouragement—“Why was he singling me out?”—but the idea of having a job in science excited him. However, that was not enough to make him chase after it. Thankfully, this teacher was not the only one to push Jim toward a future outside of his confining Mennonite farm life.

During his senior year of high school, after most students had already been accepted to college, Mrs. Leviss, who Jim calls his most influential educator asked, “Where are you going to college?” He sheepishly replied, “I’m not.”  She “flew into a rage,” he recalls. Several weeks later, Jim was called to the guidance counselor’s office, and here, the safe “farmboy” future Jim saw for himself officially met its end. He explains, “It was really intimidating because six of my favorite teachers, including Mrs. Leviss, are standing around the room, like sentinels, with their arms folded. And the counselor is sitting on this chair and spread out in front of him is the Bible. And he proceeds to preach to me about the Ten Talents… he mercifully gets to end of this sermon—which I knew—and said, ‘Son, you’ve got ten talents and if you don’t use them, you’re more or less going to hell.’”

The counselor then slid at Jim an almost completely filled-in application to Millersville State College. The teachers even pooled their money and paid the application fee. He got in.

Click here for Part 2, Jim’s College years and progression to top Entomological researcher