George Frederik Papenfuss (1903 – 1981)
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eorge Frederik Papenfuss, born on 4 November 1903, grew up on a farm near Harrismith in the Orange Free State, South Africa. His father François Paulus Papenfuss was French Huguenot, his mother Margretha Aletta (née van Rooyen) was Dutch, and Afrikaans was his native tongue. After graduating from high school, he began a course in agriculture at the University of Cape Town, but dropped out in 1926 and emigrated to America to study the cultivation of cotton and tobacco. While working in various jobs to improve his English, he began an undergraduate programme in agriculture at North Carolina State University, and first became acquainted with algae in the general botany class. He switched to botany, earned his BSc degree with honours and was accepted for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There he met and on 8 June 1929 married zoology student Emma Jean Johnstone. He became interested in marine phycology at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine, and completed his doctorate in 1933 with his dissertation on the life history of the brown filamentous alga Ectocarpus. After a year teaching at Johns Hopkins, Frikkie or GFP (as he was known by many of his colleagues) was awarded a two-year post-graduate fellowship, which enabled him to work with the Swedish marine phycologists Harald Kylin at the University of Lund and Nils Svedelius at Uppsala. During 1935 to 1939, supported by the University of Cape Town, he made an intertidal ecological survey along the entire South African coast. At the onset of war he accepted the position of temporary assistant professor in the botany department of the University of Hawaii, where he was reunited with his wife. Their son and only child Theodore was born on 22 July 1941.
