The Ballad of Herbert Axelrod

Death of a Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man

A guest article by Jon.

I remember the first time I heard of Herbert R. Axelrod. I was in the public library, perusing free duplicate books. I happened upon a volume of exotic tropical fish. Each page was filled with color photographs of various catfish, rainbowfish, cichlids, and loaches, with in-depth descriptions of their native ecosystems and needs. This book ignited my interest in tropical fish, a suitably patrician hobby.

It was years later that I found out that the book’s author, one Herbert R. Axelrod, was one of the most prominent ichthyologists of the twentieth century. The man himself was an enigma — an intellectual all-rounder, a smuggler, a huckster, an international expeditionist — the subject of rumors and wild speculations. He had studied physics with Einstein, spearfished with Leopold III, collected rare nudibranchs with Emperor Hirohito. He owned an authentic Stradivarius violin and a private yacht. He claimed fluency in six languages and was a millionaire, to boot.

Axelrod’s life was so outlandish that it is very difficult to find verifiable information; however, I have here attempted to give an honest biography.

Early Life

Herbert Richard Axelrod was born on June 27, 1927, to Jewish/Russian immigrants Aaron and Edith Axelrod. His father was a math/violin teacher, and his mother was a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy. Axelrod’s early life is mostly undocumented, and what is known is uncorroborated. It is known that Axelrod was born and spent most of his childhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. Many of the claims Axelrod himself made about his childhood achievements are quite unusual, such as the assertion that he swam across Lake Ontario at age 10. It is known that Axelrod was quite young when he became an avid animal lover. He caught and sold blue crabs to the local Chinese laundrymen, caught goldfish at an overpopulated lake in Washington, D.C., and kept pigeons whose noise and mess once got his family evicted.

The Young Polymath

From a young age, Axelrod showed promise as a scholar. In high school, he frequently skipped class in order to listen in on lectures at Brooklyn Tech. Axelrod reportedly had an IQ of 181 and graduated from high school at age 16. At age 17, he signed on to the U.S. Army specialized Pre-Med training. Later that year, he tried to join the war in Europe by sneaking onto a troop transport boat, but he was caught and sent to Fort Lewis, Washington.

After the end of World War II, Axelrod studied mathematics at NYU, publishing his first paper in Boolean Algebra at age 19. He also taught a course in aquatic life, wherein he notoriously made his students eat samples from tidal pools and even performed a cesarean section on a guppy. During this time at NYU, he was approached by McGraw Hill to write a book on tropical fish. The subsequent book, Tropical Fish as a Hobby, was a huge success.

The Army Years

In 1950, while still pursuing a doctorate at NYU, Axelrod was recalled to the Army and assigned to a MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals) unit in Korea, where he studied hemorrhagic fever. The research involved flying blood samples from the field lab in Korea to Japan. Axelrod, seeing an entrepreneurial opportunity, began smuggling Japanese liquor back in the empty blood sample cases. The liquor was traded to soldiers in exchange for cigarettes, which were, in turn, smuggled in between the full blood shipments to Japan. While dropping off blood samples in Japan, he met the noted biologist Dr. Takahiro Abe. Abe showed Axelrod a book on nudibranchs written by former emperor and fish fanatic Hirohito. Axelrod politely pointed out an error that the emperor had made in the naming of one of the nudibranchs. Abe was so impressed that he convened with Axelrod’s superior officers to allow him to spend a week with Hirohito himself, collecting and describing nudibranchs. Axelrod initially panicked upon receiving a summons from General Matthew Ridgeway — believing he was about to be court-martialed for smuggling.

TFH and the Expedition Era

Axelrod suffered an injury to his hand in Korea and was subsequently discharged from the Army. Staying in Washington, D.C., he showed a copy of The Handbook of Tropical Fishes to Professor Leonard Schultz, the curator of fish at the Smithsonian. Schultz was so impressed with the work that he co-authored later editions. In 1952, Axelrod began distributing Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine, and in 1955, he created TFH Publications. The year 1952 also marked the first of many ichthyological expeditions to places such as British Guiana and Malaya. Throughout his life, Axelrod very likely made hundreds of such trips to various locales all over the world, collecting and studying fish. The data from these adventures allowed many species of fish and other tropical wildlife to be documented and taxonomically categorized. Almost every issue of TFH featured documentation of another adventure. These excursions made him an international celebrity. In the late ’50s, Axelrod was commissioned by Walt Disney to provide a black jaguar for an upcoming movie. Axelrod, ever the pragmatist, could not procure a black jaguar, so he instead bleached and dyed the fur of a — tranquilized — spotted jaguar. Once, on an excursion in Brazil, Axelrod chanced upon King Leopold III, former king of Belgium. The two spent a week spearfishing, after which Axelrod presented the king with a pet jaguar.

Philanthropy and Scandal

Axelrod continued to publish pet-related literature and travel to exotic locales. His other interests included rare instrument collecting, criminology, and pathology. TFH Publications was extremely profitable, making Axelrod’s fortune. Axelrod was, throughout his life, extremely generous with his money, donating tens of millions to various organizations including the Golden State Orchestra and Zurich Orchestra. Besides money. Axelrod also donated approximately $24 million worth of rare fish fossils to the University of Guelph and four Stradivari instruments to the Smithsonian.

In 1997, Axelrod sold TFH Publications to the California-based Central Garden & Pet Corporation for $70 million plus a percentage of future profit. In the following year, Axelrod sued Central Garden for allegedly suppressing earnings. Central Garden countersued and accused Axelrod of fraud. Central Garden insinuated that Axelrod had given $250,000 to the University of Guelph and written it off as a company advertising expense. They also claimed that Axelrod had secretly funneled money through offshore accounts with the help of a former employee. The employee in question, Gary Hersch, pled guilty in 2002. Axelrod also allegedly had illegal business dealings in Cuba, which included cigar imports. Central Garden presented all of this information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Out on the Lam

After an IRS investigation between 1998 and 2004, Axelrod was indicted for tax fraud, involving a scheme of diverting funds to offshore accounts. He was at the time staying in Zurich, Switzerland. A New Jersey judge issued an arrest warrant, but officials discovered that upon his return to the United States he had sold all of his property and fled to Cuba on a private boat, the Lady Eve II, which had been docked in Florida. Axelrod was discovered by reporters at a marlin fishing resort outside Havana. When interviewed, he bragged about his escape and said that he didn’t even feel like a criminal. Axelrod eventually made his way to Germany, where he was apprehended and extradited to the United States to await trial. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a $40,000 fine. The true value of the instruments donated to the New Jersey Symphony in 2002 was also brought into question around this time, and it is now believed that Axelrod inflated their value in order to write them off on his taxes.

After serving only 15 months of the original 18-month sentence in federal prison, he was released and soon moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he lived until his death in May 2017. At the time of writing, there is a genus of Amazon River fish named for him, along with dozens of species. TFH is still published under the auspices of Central Garden. Herbert R. Axelrod is considered by many to be the father of modern aquarium hobbyism.

A Life of Adventure

What can we learn from the life of an eccentric millionaire? Herbert R. Axelrod was an outlandish Renaissance man, a paragon of high culture. It behooves those of us who fancy ourselves of an aristocratic mold to view adversity with an untroubled heart. I do not submit the life of Herbert Axelrod to your consideration because I believe his morals should be emulated, but rather because he is an archetype of a true, pre-modern aristocrat.

Previous centuries were full of such men, men who saw their lives as adventures. The jovial spirit of the aristocracy had scant few representatives in the twentieth century, but Herbert Axelrod was one of them.

Life for each one of us has the latent potential for adventure. That is, after all, the purpose of the stories our mothers read to us as children. The daring adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jim Hawkins, and Robinson Crusoe, the daring ride of Paul Revere, and the heroic last stand of Davy Crockett. These stories ignited the inner desire for adventure.

None of us will likely become eccentric millionaires capable of sailing the world in yachts. On the contrary, our future looks quite bleak. The remaining decades of the twenty-first century stretch before us like a winding and uncertain path. We may be called upon to perform daunting and grim tasks to save our people and civilization. Some of us may have to give up our lives or rot away in solitary confinement. Come what may, we live in a great adventure. We must strive with every remaining breath to make it an exciting and memorable tale so that someday our stories may be told.