Elizabeth Ogren Rothra Papers

Elizabeth Ogren Rothra was born in Jamestown, New York in 1923. She graduated from Jamestown High School in 1941 and attended West Virginia University. During the 1940s, in her native Jamestown, Rothra had a radio program, "Cathy Comes Calling," for a local department store. After moving to New York in the 1950s, she worked in public relations for Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians and Prentice Hall. In 1952, Rothra went to work for Radio Free Europe, becoming assistant public relations director, a position she held for seven years. She also worked as the summer publicity director for the Chautauqua Institution in the 1960s.

In 1962, she married Dann Rothra, and they moved to Miami where she worked as a freelance writer. Rothra became interested in the life of John C. Gifford after visiting his widow in the late 1960s. Gifford, the first person in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in forestry, started his career at Swarthmore College and Cornell University. He moved to Coconut Grove, Florida, in 1903 and was involved in banking, land development, and drainage of the Everglades. He became a professor of tropical forestry at the University of Miami, and is known for introducing the Melaleuca tree to the area. Rothra put together a compilation of Gifford's writings, along with her biography of him, published as On Preserving Tropical Florida (University of Miami Press, 1972).

In 1995, the University Press of Florida published a second book by Rothra, Florida's Pioneer Naturalist: The Life of Charles Torrey Simpson. Simpson, a writer and naturalist interested in tropical horticulture, studied the endangered Florida tree snail and pushed for the creation of a national park in the Everglades. He received the University of Miami's first honorary doctorate.

In addition to writing, Rothra was a volunteer for several organizations, including the Jamestown Audubon Society, serving as both a program chairman and vice president. She divided her time between Florida and New York for twenty years before retiring in Rainbow Springs. She passed away in 2014 at the age of ninety.