Donald Aylor

Donald Earl Aylor was born on December 22, 1940, to Raymond Gordon and Hazel Caroline Aylor in Hunt, New York, a small farming community in rural western New York State. He was the fourth of five children in a loving, close-knit family where nightly attendance at the dinner table was mandatory.

Don was a curious child, a trait that frequently earned him the admonition from adults that “curiosity killed the cat.”

In secondary school, Don's academic interests settled firmly into science and mathematics. During the summers, he found employment on surrounding local dairy farms, doing everything from milking cows and cultivating corn to baling hay. It was through this manual labor that he gained a deep, lifelong appreciation for farmers, for agriculture, and for the land.

He attended the newly established science and engineering college, SUNY at Oyster Bay (which later became SUNY Stony Brook) on Long Island, New York. There he met his future wife, Ruthann Brody. The couple fell in love and were married on June 7, 1964—which also happened to be their college graduation day.

After graduating with his B. S. degree in engineering, Don was awarded a four-year National Science Foundation Traineeship and was accepted into graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook for space science engineering.

During his time there, his natural curiosity directed his attention back toward plants; which was sparked by an accidental laboratory experiment. One weekend, while conducting a long, tedious experiment involving a vacuum chamber, he cut a leaf from a jade plant that Ruthann (his wife) had given him. He fully expected it to burst open and leave a green mess all over the chamber. Surprisingly, it didn’t look like anything happened at all.

This discovery prompted him to travel to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES), where scientists were actively studying the pore cells (stomata) that prevented the plant explosion. The encounter eventually led Don and Ruthann to move to CT so he could take a permanent position at the Experiment Station where he spent 37 plus years doing what he loved.

Don’s early assignments at CAES were to study outdoor sound attenuation by plants, and Southern corn leaf blight. He helped develop a groundbreaking computer model of the disease, establishing a method to predict its spread based on regional weather conditions.

Later, Don studied the spread of several devastating plant diseases, including apple scab, tobacco blue mold, and potato late blight, as well as detailed studies of corn pollen dispersal. Along the way, he was fortunate to have opportunities to collaborate with other Station scientists on a variety of problems.

In addition to his primary research, he stepped into leadership, serving as the Department Head for two separate departments at the Station: Ecology and Climatology (1972–1980) and Plant Pathology and Ecology (1980–2007).

He received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which took the whole family to England for a half a year in 1980. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of SUNY Stony Brook and was awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Biometeorology Award by the American Meteorological Society.

Additionally, he was elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Phytopathological Society.

In 2007, Governor Jodi Rell officially proclaimed April 1, 2007, as Donald E. Aylor Day in the State of Connecticut (and the family never minded the fact that it also fell on April Fool’s Day).

After retirement in 2007, Don continued to work on several scientific research projects and on his book “Ariel Dispersion of Pollen and Spores”, which was published in 2017.

While Don loved his work, his proudest joy was his wife and his family. Don and Ruthann’s first child, Adam, was born in 1969 and by 1972, the family was complete with the birth of his daughter, Rachel. As soon as Rachel was old enough to be "back-packable," Don and Ruthann resumed their beloved family hikes in the woods and nearby parks.

Don also enjoyed participating in sports (especially soccer), hiking, fly fishing, marksmanship, motorcycle riding, camping, and driving his sports car at several race tracks in the Northeast. Don and Ruthann loved to travel and traveled all over, including to Europe, New Zealand, South America, and all across the U.S. and Canada. They loved learning about different cultures; especially their cuisines. Don considers his most important life achievements to be marrying Ruthann, and together raising, their two wonderful children, Adam and Rachel.

Calling hours for Don will be held on Thursday, October 1st from 4pm until 7pm at our Swan Funeral Home, located at 852 Boston Post Rd, Madison, CT 06443.