Explorer-biologist John Loret dies at 82
John Loret, professor and director of the Science Museum of Long Island, on the campus of Queens College. Credit: Newsday/Tom Kitts
Explorer and marine biologist John Loret of Manhasset roamed the globe from the Arctic Circle to Easter Island, but he never forgot that the environment, like politics, is local.
"If you don't have a conservation ethic in your own area, how can you ever expect to develop a better world elsewhere?" he told Newsday in a 1990 interview in his office at the Science Museum of Long Island.
The museum will host a memorial service Friday for Loret, 82, who died Saturday of complications from heart problems, according to his son, Eric.
Loret's life was full of faraway locales. He sailed through the Fury Hecla Straits into the Gulf of Boothia in the Arctic Circle in 1948, dove into a sacrificial well in Chichen Itza in the Yucatán in 1968, and was on Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl's 1955-56 expedition to Easter Island.
It was also a life lived on the land and waters of Long Island -- studying Hempstead Harbor in 1973 while fighting a power-plant expansion, surveying Leeds Pond near the science museum and spreading the word on conservation and the environment in speeches to garden clubs, library groups and others.
"He was very concerned about education. It was important to him to bring science to everyone," Stephen Abrams, a Stony Brook University professor who worked with Loret at the museum, said Tuesday.
"He was a down-to-earth person. He would be the first one to pick up a hammer or saw and help you with a project," Abrams said.
Loret was born in Albany on Nov. 8, 1928, joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1946 and served until 1949. He earned his bachelor of science degree from New York University in 1953, his master of science from NYU in 1964, a doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 1974 and a doctor of science from Long Island University in 1994, according to his biography in Marquis Who's Who.
He moved to the East New York section of Brooklyn in the 1930s, according to his son, and came to Long Island in the 1950s. Loret met his late wife, Elissia, of Queens, on a double date and they married in 1958. She died in 2001.
He had been an associate professor at Queens College from 1968 to 1989, was active in the Nassau County Museum of Natural History, the Roslyn school system and was a president of the New York City-based Explorers Club.
Loret also is survived by two daughters, Mary Loret of Hollywood, Fla., and Leah Snyder of Hawaii. His companion, Sabina Miller of Great Neck, had helped care for him during his illness, his son said.
There will be a cremation, his son said, and the memorial service will take place 6 p.m. Friday at the Science Museum of Long Island, 1526 N. Plandome Rd., in Plandome.
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