Professor Robert Mumford Smock

Uncle Bob, my dad and Dean Mumford planted seeds on our family farm in Cochranton, PA that grew into a giant stand of pine trees that came to form the border between a hay field and the two natural gas wells called Big and Little Niagara. All three loved to point the trees out to me as a boy, with great pride.

Uncle Bob grew up partly on the farm (more so than my dad) and wanted to be farmer, studying agriculture in coll;ege. He ended up getting a PhD, and considered a job at Cal-Davis in the just emerging oenology program. He had married Martha, the daughter of an old-fashioned Presbyterian minister. Developing a wine program during Prohibition was frowned on by the in-laws. He instead took a job at the NYU ag school at Cornell, becoming one of the world leading authorities on apples and fruits.

Bob  developed a technology to preserve apples by injecting them with nitrogen, to replace the oxygen. This is how we have fresh app;les in winter now. There is an apple orchard named in his honor on a hill high above the Cayuga.