Rutherford Platt

Rutherford Hayes Platt, Jr. (11 August 1894, Columbus, Ohio - 28 May 1975, Boston) was an American nature writer, photographer, and advertising executive. Platt served in WW I as a lieutenant in Battery F, Three Hundred Twenty-Third Field Artillery and, with McDonald H. Riggs, wrote a history of his unit.[2] He received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1918.[1] In the early 1920s he was employed on the editorial staffs of The World's Work and of Doubleday Page & Company. He then became a...See more

Rutherford Hayes Platt, Jr. (11 August 1894, Columbus, Ohio - 28 May 1975, Boston) was an American nature writer, photographer, and advertising executive. Platt served in WW I as a lieutenant in Battery F, Three Hundred Twenty-Third Field Artillery and, with McDonald H. Riggs, wrote a history of his unit.[2] He received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1918.[1] In the early 1920s he was employed on the editorial staffs of The World's Work and of Doubleday Page & Company. He then became a corporate officer of Platt-Forbes, Inc., an advertising agency which represented several food and industrial companies, including Chance Vought Aircraft Corporation. In the mid 1950s he became president of Platt Productions Educational Films, specializing in nature films.[1] He attended classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and by 1930 had become keenly interested in nature and, in particular, photography of plant life. For many years, Mr. Platt's two-page spread of color photographs of mushrooms and other forms of fungi appeared in the Mushrooms article of the World Book Encyclopedia; some of these images also appeared in an article on mushrooms that he wrote for the August 28, 1944 issue of Life magazine Rutherford H. Platt, Jr.'s father was a son of a sister, Fanny Arabella née Hayes, [4] of Rutherford B. Hayes. Rutherford H. Platt, Jr. died at age 80 and upon his death was survived by his widow, several children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. One of his great-grandchildren is Kiran Platt. At age 42, he divorced his first wife, Eleanor. In 1937 he married his second wife, Jean Dana née Noyes.[5] There were two children from the first marriage and three children from the second marriage. One of his sons, Rutherford H. Platt, III, became a professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst[6] and a specialist in land and water resource policy for urban areas See less