Harry Kenyon Phinney was born to Pearl Blaine and Anna Hinkle Phinney in Grafton, West Virginia May 19, 1918. When Phinney was 11, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.
Phinney received a bachelor of science degree from Cincinnati University in 1941, a master of art degree from Albion College in Michigan in 1943, and a doctorate degree from Northwestern University in 1945. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University from 1945 to 1946; in 1946, he married Grace E. Scharf, a fellow PhD graduate of Northwest University. From 1946 to 1947, Harry served as associate curator of cryptograms at the Field Museum in Chicago.
In 1947, Harry and Grace moved to Corvallis, where they joined the faculty of the Botany Department at Oregon State University. Specializing in the study of algae, Harry researched and taught summer session coursework at the Hatfield Marine Science Center from 1966 to 1981, and was a was a member of the faculty of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology near Charleston during the summers of 1948 to 1957. He was professor of botany at OSU until his retirement in 1983.
Phinney carried on research in aquatic biology, algae and palaeobotany, after his retirement. His most recent projects were the deepwater flora of Crater Lake, and the early history of microscopy. Together, he and Grace would collect, identify, and catalog over 16,000 varieties of cryptogamic plants; images of these specimens are available online in the OregonFlora database.
Phinney was a member of a number of scientific societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Phytopathological Society of the Americas, the American Microscopical Society and Torrey Botanical Club.
Harry Kenyon Phinney died Nov 9, 1990.
Author: Rachel Lilley
