John MacRae Obituary, Death – h 5m79hf088m oSsendropt4aii96ah 7 14mg8c 1 607m5g6t20mcct45c0f468m At the age of 80, John Rollin MacRae passed away in his South Austin home on Thursday, July 6. He was the third of six children born to Lucy Ellen MacRae, a trained nurse, and William Stanley MacRae, a traveling leather goods salesman, in Edinburg, Texas, on May 26, 1943. Before the family relocated to San Antonio in 1948, he would always cherish the memories of his early boyhood spent with his grandparents in the Rio Grande Valley among their orange groves.
They first moved in to the Hot Wells Spring Bath House, then to a house on Los Arboles, and in 1960, they finally settled on Kaine Street. He participated in lengthy Sunday discussions there with his father in the He continued to work at Moore’s Feed while enrolled in Saint Mary’s University. He had happy recollections of working in the store for Old Man Moore with his older brother Bill, his buddy James Mabry, and later his younger brother Mike. Even in his advanced years, he enjoyed recalling chemical compositions, naming specific farms and neighborhoods in San Antonio, and debating whether it had been a wise idea to have pursued all those crop dusters.
Around this time, he and Mabry founded M+M Pets in the backyard shed of the family home. They bought exotic snakes and lizards from mail-order catalogs and sold them to customers of all kinds. He has always been interested by reptiles. After earning his degree, he was employed as an environmental consultant by a young engineering company, where he worked on a variety of national projects as well as initiatives closer to home, such the Barton Springs watershed project. Rollin started a 27-year career with the State of Texas as a biologist and ecologist at Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1982. For his commitment to the public’s interest, his management of the state’s resources, as well as his integrity and the care he put into all he did, he was well appreciated by colleagues both inside and outside the agency. His work on dredge disposal regulations would pave the way for the useful restoration of state wetlands and marshes using dredge material. He made a crucial contribution to
