He was in Mather Auditorium to talk about Maine's pioneering amateur botanist, Catherine Furbish, but Dick Eaton hadn't even begun his remarks before Nancy Viehmann snuck into the room with a surprise cake. Dick was humbled by the public recognition of his 89th birthday, but quickly recovered. "I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to present to you today."

Dick told the 20+ people gathered for the September Lunch n Learn that Kate Furbish is his first cousin, four times removed. She was born 1834 in Exeter, New Hampshire and spent much of her life in Brunswick, Maine, but often visited Wells, where she stayed on Drakes Island with family. She traveled the whole state, though, trudging through every habitat in search of plants to study and paint. On the edge of the St. John River in 1880, she discovered an endemic and rare plant that would later be named after her, the Furbish lousewort. The presence of this endangered species later stopped the proposed Dickey-Lincoln hydroelectric dam project, thereby preventing 88,000 acres of northern forests from being flooded.

Dick presented an interesting biography of Kate Furbish, then showed slides from the family collection representing more than two dozen species of flowering plant of particular interest to Kate. Dick shared that Kate's watercolor drawings are now displayed at Bowdoin College in the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, and her collection of 4,000 plant specimens are housed in the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University.