The Forgotten Books of Eden (Used)

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. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1918. 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. 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, 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. 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 and a specialist in land and water resource policy for urban areas.