Terry Sample Retires

The retiree as a youth.

Terry Sample, of the Resource Assessment and Conservation Engineering Division (RACE), retired 31 August 2005 after serving more than 30 years as a research fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Terry was born in Gorst, Washington, in October 1949. He graduated from South Kitsap High School in 1968, before attending Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. He transferred to the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy and finished his education at Central Washington State College in 1972 with a B.S. degree in biology and a minor in chemistry.

Terry began his federal career in 1974 with the Soil Conservation Service in Spokane. In 1975, he transferred to the Northwest Fisheries Center in Seattle as a biological technician with the Division of Marine Fish and Shellfish (which evolved into part of the RACE Division). There he joined other new young recruits including Eric Brown, Ron Payne, Skip Zenger, and Mark Wilkins. As Terry is quick to state, it was a time when the Division hired people for their strong backs rather than strong minds. Fortunately for the RACE Division, Terry and the others came with strong minds as well.

From 1975 through 1977, Terry was involved in baseline bottom trawl surveys in the Gulf of Alaska, eastern Bering Sea, Norton Sound and Chukchi Sea, and the U.S. West Coast. Throughout his career, Terry logged many days (and nights) at sea while conducting bottom trawl surveys, primarily in the eastern Bering Sea.

Terry took a detour from the RACE Division from 1983 to 1986 to work with NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) on a project developing several atlases that documented the distribution and life-history of fishes and invertebrates off the west coast of North America. Terry returned to the RACE eastern Bering Sea Groundfish Subtask for good in 1987 where he helped coordinate the annual eastern Bering Sea bottom trawl survey. In 1992, he assumed the primary role of coordinating that and other surveys and continued with that role until his retirement.

During his career, Terry was somewhat of an ambassador, having coordinated U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-U.S.S.R. cooperative bottom trawl surveys in the eastern Bering Sea. In 1981 he spent 3 months in Pusan, Republic of Korea, with the National Fisheries Research Development Agency (NFRDA), where he worked with Korean biologists to help them standardize sampling methodologies for their bottom trawl surveys. Terry continued his association with NFRDA in later years as well with scientists from Japan and the Soviet Union. He was often the first point of contact when foreign scientists visited the Center.

Aside from his many accomplishments, Terry will be remembered most for his quick wit and easy-going personality. He has a gift for making work enjoyable for all that work with him. Although Terry leaves a huge void that cannot be filled, we wish him well in his new pursuits.

By Dan Nichol


>>>more

AFSC Quarterly
Research Reports July-Sept 2005