About Adrian

My father was the 4th of 6 sons born to a Viennese Railway engineer, Karlo Juttner, in the steel town of Zenica in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1904.  Karlo ran the narrow-gauge railway line that snaked southward from the connection with the Orient Express through to Sarajevo and down to Mostar, the Neretva River canyon and the Dalmatian coast.  The old track bed is still visible from the funicular that runs from downtown Sarajevo to the top of Mt. Trebbevic.  My grandmother, Terezia Miklody was the daughter of a Hungarian count who fled to Sisak, Croatia after the 1848 revolution.  My dad was present when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 30, 1914, touching off World War I.  By 1927, he was a captain in the Yugoslav army and a government official, working for King Alexander in Ljubuski, Hercegovina.  He finished architecture training at the University of Zagreb and was a practicing Bauhaus architect when he met Jean Perdan, an American opera singer, married and came to Cleveland, Ohio in 1934.  Divorce and the start of WW II left him stuck in America, separated from his family.  Nevertheless, he worked on defense projects and the design of Muroc Field (Edwards Air Force Base) in California.

 

My mother, Anne Bruder was born in Budapest in 1909 of Schwabisch (not ethnic Hungarian) parents.  She emigrated to Ogilvy, Manitoba with her family in 1929, as a result of her father's vision that there would be a second world war.  She eventually moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she met my dad and I was born in 1946.  This story is laid out in her novel "Evike", published in 2009. (www.evikebook.com).

My kindergarten was at the Nathaniel Hawthorne School on West 130th, famously shown in the movie "Christmas Story" where Schwartz froze his tongue to the flagpole.  We moved to the German neighborhood of south St. Louis, where I graduated from Cleveland High School.  My school was built in the unfortunate year of 1917, so we were called the "Cleveland Dutchmen".

 

I went off to the University of Missouri to study forestry.  During the summers between academic years, I took seasonal jobs with the U.S. Forest Service, cruising timber, fighting forest fires, surveying roads, setting up nature trails on National Forests in the west.  By my senior year, inspired by the chestnut blight story, I wanted to study tree diseases.  After Christmas break 1967-68, details of my schedule were to be worked out with Dr. T.W. Bretz. Returning from St. Louis to Columbia, I was shocked to learn that Dr. Bretz had died suddenly during the break.  It seemed that, over the years, he had been surface-sterilizing plant material with a solution of Mercuric chloride.  Over the years, this poison had built up in his body with enough strength to kill him.  The effects of chronic mercury poisoning were becoming news in the media, but that created a problem for me: either change majors, or move to another university.  I took a scholarship under Dr. W.J. Stambaugh at Duke.

The fall of 1969, saw me wandering around in a world of independent study several months that took me into the microbiology department of the Duke Medical School.  I was trying to break up cell walls of a tough little root rot fungus.  This organism could take up to 900 pounds of deadly Methyl bromide gas fumigation and still come through to kill off the young trees planted there.  I figured that if a little alfalfa, tree root extracts or pea soup were added to the soil, the fungus could be lured out and burned up before the trees were planted.  This was biological control of a pest.  About the same time, while writing a paper for the entomologist, Dr. Anderson on the entomophthoralean fungi, I found the termite killing fungus that I use today.

1970 was a year where there was a dearth of employment in forestry and natural resources, so I cooled my heels, sold Fuller Brushes door-to-door and worked summers as a Forest fire control technician in Washington State.  Professors at the Duke medical school suggested medical mycology and, I came to the Tulane Medical School to work under Dr. Lorraine Friedman.  As a Navy Commander, she had worked out the science behind Coccidioides immitis, a dangerous lung disease that was sickening recruits in California.  In culture, it was so infectious that it could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.  It had to be cultured in a secure location – not in New Orleans.  So, I worked on other fungal disease of humans for two years.  Having to sell my blood to make ends meet, I could see my future as a never-ending series of low-paid post-docs and possibly a decade before even finishing at Tulane.  There was no motivation to matriculate students.  So, I quit and started Adrian's Tree Service which ran tree crews from 1972, through the Katrina period up to May 2008, when the tree crew was dissolved.

My mother died in 1966.  Through a chamber-music performance at Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri in 1967 by the group "I Solisti di Zagreb", my dad finally re-connected with his lost family in Yugoslavia.   The same year, through my job on the Umatilla National Forest in Oregon, I re-connected my father with an old friend, Marie Zorn, who he married and spent the rest of his life in the Portland area.  During the Bosnian War of 1981-3, Adrienne and I brought my cousins, the Kacmarcik family, out of Sarajevo and sponsored their re-settlement in the United States.

My wife and I adopted 2 babies from Korea, Raphael Kyo and Annie-Sun and raised them to majority.  We lived happily with Adrienne's parents at the Donner Lodge in Algiers for about 20 years.

Concern about the safety of the levee system and seeking a quieter life style and more reasonable insurance costs in retirement, Adrienne and I moved to Abita Springs.

A budding conflict over my biological control methods for Formosan termites and other concerns about the management of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture & Forestry led me to run for the office of "Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture & Forestry" in the elections that were set for October 24, 2015.

I ran under the Green Party banner with a total budget of just $3000. for a statewide campaign and ended up with 36,000 votes, the highest total in Louisiana Green Party history – even more votes than Ralph Nader got.

At the present time I am semi-retired, do horticultural pest control, beekeeping and consulting.  Various aspects of this work are highlighted in this website.

~ Adrian S. Juttner, Tree Specialist, LLC