My Biographical Sketch
After putting his mother through 36 hours of labor, Curt was born
at a very young age in Belmond, Iowa, on August 27, 1966. Although he
remembers very little about that day or about most of the events in
his early childhood, his parents, Harvey and Marlene Blankespoor,
tell him that as a little boy he had a virtually unquenchable
curiosity about life and an unusual (other parents would have called
it an unhealthy) interest in insects. This comes to no surprise to
Curt, whose earliest memories involve rides on the hood of his
parent's car while holding a butterfly net and nightly insect
collecting trips to the mercury vapor lights of a local school.
After living in the large university cities of Ames (Iowa), Chicago
(Illinois), and Ann Arbor (Michigan), his family finally settled in
1976 in the small college town of Holland, Michigan. In fifth grade,
Curt began his tenure in the Holland Christian Schools system. Two
months before graduating from high school, he began dating Carmen
Vander Ark, whom he would marry four years later. After graduating,
Curt chose to continue his education at Hope
College, partially
because of its strong commitment to undergraduate research, but
mostly because he didn't have to pay any tuition. Despite being a
member of the men's varsity soccer and volleyball teams, Curt was
able to graduate summa cum laude from Hope in 1988 with a Bachelor's
of Science degree in both Biology and Mathematics.
In August of 1988,
and being married only 2 months, he and Carmen
moved to Ithaca, New York, where Curt began graduate study in animal
behavior/chemical ecology at Cornell
University under the direction
of Thomas Eisner. In 1991 Curt and Carmen became parents for the
first time when their son, Mitchell
Taylor, was born. Two
years later the couple had a daughter, Jenna Elizabeth. Curt graduated
from Cornell in August 1994, and moved with his family to Grand
Rapids, Michigan, where he providencely found his dream job--a
faculty position in the Biology
Department at Calvin College.