A quick human interest story: The author of the short farmers bulletin on millets/1 cited in the first post on "ankee" millet this month - one Thomas A. WIlliams - was an agrostologist who studied at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and taught there and at the Agricultural College of South Dakota (now SDSU). He was later at USDA and edited the Asa Gray Bulletin./2

Following his untimely departure, research interest in "ankee" waned, and the Asa Gray Bulletin ceased publication for a number of years..

Everyone has a story, of course, and that's certainly true of the early researchers who wrote about millets. But this promising but abbreviated career - which is outlined in the obit cited below/2 - seems particularly poignant.