Known simply as “Rupe” to colleagues and generations of graduate students he mentored at the Field Museum, where he had worked for more than 70 years, renowned entomologist Rupert L. Wenzel taught right from wrong as much as he did the world of bugs.
Dr. Wenzel, 90, died early Friday, July 7, in his Oak Park home. He was a world authority on histerid beetles and bat flies.
As a white officer commanding a unit of black soldiers in World War II, and as village trustee and civic leader in Oak Park after the war, he crusaded against racial and religious discrimination. In the 1950s and 1960s, when many in Oak Park tried to keep African-Americans from moving in, he was a leader in establishing open housing.
“He was an amazingly broad-thinking guy,” said Bruce Patterson, a mammal expert at the Field Museum. The two men had been collaborating on a bat fly project until ill health began to slow Dr. Wenzel in recent months.
The bat fly family, Patterson said, is extremely interesting to scientists. Living in the fur and skin of bats, drinking the blood of the host animal for sustenance, they harbor diseases that they can pass on to other animal species.
Through evolution, other predaceous insect groups have lost key physical attributes they no longer need because of their cozy living arrangement, Patterson said. Fleas, for example, have no eyes, and lice have no eyes or wings. Bat fly species run the gamut, some with no eyes, some sighted, some with wings, others without.
“By studying them, we can see how these evolutionary processes took place,” Patterson said. “The only reason we can do it is because of Rupe’s immense job of sorting all that diversity through his long career here.”
Dr. Wenzel was born in Owen, Wis., to the family of a lumber industry engineer. He was growing up in small lumber towns when his mother moved to Chicago so he and his brother and sister could go to better schools.
As a student at Waller High School, Dr. Wenzel was torn between a career in science or as an actor. In the 1930s, while in high school and later as a student at YMCA Central College, he was good enough to get professional radio jobs in supporting roles on serial dramas like “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.”
While attending a college play, he was smitten while watching a classmate on stage, Mary Ryan, deciding then that he would marry the actress. They were married for 40 years, until her death in 1978.
He turned his back on acting as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he was mentored by a world renowned entomologist, Alfred Emerson.
World War II interrupted his graduate studies, when he became an officer in the Army Medical Corps. One of his assignments, from 1942 to 1943, was commanding a segregated, all-black medical sanitary company in Maryland.
“He spoke with great pride for the rest of his life about that unit,” said his son Rupert Jr. “He often talked about those men and what good people they were.”
After the war, he resumed his studies, eventually receiving his doctorate in 1962. His relationship with the Field Museum, which began in 1934 as a volunteer while in college, turned into a paying job as assistant curator of insects in 1940, eventually leading to a long tenure as chairman of the zoology department. He kept an office there until his death and is credited with building up both the Field’s insect specimen collections and entomological library to become among the broadest and deepest of their kind in the world.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, he traveled the world extensively on beetle and bat fly field expeditions, including taking his wife and children on long camping trips through the American West.
“He told us to keep an eye out for dead animals along the road,” said his daughter, Judith Andersen. He would stop to look at the roadkill skin and pelts for the bugs he studied.
Her father, she said, early on planted the seed in her mind to become a doctor.
“When I came home from kindergarten one day,” said Andersen, a physician in Owls Head, Maine, “I excitedly told my mother and dad how each of us had to get up say what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said I wanted to be a nurse.
More Top Picks Best Circular Saw
“My dad looked at me quietly and said, `A nurse? Why not a doctor?’
Dr. Wenzel, she said, was passionate about Oak Park after purchasing a broken down five-bedroom Victorian home in the suburb after the war, restoring most of it himself. It culminated when he was elected to two terms as a village trustee in the 1960s, when he led efforts to form a Community Relations Commission to prevent racial discrimination and pushed for the village’s open-housing ordinance.
“He was a man of real integrity,” she said. “I don’t think I knew anyone who felt so strongly about doing the right thing and who felt so strongly about contributing to your community.”
Besides his son and daughter, he is survived by another son, Stephen; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a sister, Gladys.
Mass will be said at 9:30 a.m. Thursday in St. Edmund Catholic Church, 188 S. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park.