Bona, Al

Al Bona was born in Chicago in 1929. He enjoyed an idyllic early childhood wandering along the Des Plaines River and through the extensive Forest Preserves of Cook County, where he learned to identify more than 100 native birds by sight and sound. His childhood was unburdened by the knowledge that the United States and the entire industrial world was plunged, in the year of his birth, into a great economic depression. He struggled mightily to earn two degrees from the University of Illinois. By some administrative mistake, unexplained and unexplored, he was admitted into the graduate school of...