Donald Elston Fosket

Don was born on July 20, 1936 in Klamath Falls Oregon and grew up in Glendale, California with his parents Lorin Don Fosket and Edris Helene Fosket (nee Elston) and his younger sister, Elaine (Shaw). From their house in Glendale Don could walk to the Verdugo Hills where he spent his free time exploring the canyons and ridges of dense chaparral, stumbling upon ring tailed cats, skunks, coyotes, snakes, and deer and developing what would become his lifelong fascination with plants. By the time he was in high school he knew the names of most shrubs, trees, and wildflowers.

The day he graduated from Herbert Hoover High School in 1954 he took a job with the Forest Service in Idaho. When the summer ended and with it the job, he realized he’d need a college degree to get a more permanent position, so he enrolled at the University of Idaho as a forestry major, taking a spot on the football team to get a scholarship. He soon gave up football and forestry for philosophy and biology. He stayed on at the University of Idaho to pursue his Ph.D. in plant biology where one summer in the lab he met his first wife, Elizabeth (Betsy) Baker, another biology graduate student. After graduation, Don spent a year at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and then moved to Massachusetts to teach at Mount Holyoke while Betsy finished her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts. After Mount Holyoke, Don spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. During that time, he and Betsy got married and had their son, Erik.

When Don got a job at the University of California, Irvine, the family moved west and had their second child, daughter Jenny. In 1973, Besty died suddenly of a heart attack and Don became a single father. With the help of family, community, after school programs, fast food and canned soup, Don raised two great kids and built a thriving lab in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology at UCI. For twenty years he taught cell biology to undergraduates and ran a research lab where he trained graduate students and did NIH and NSF funded research on the structure and function of subcellular organelles known as microtubules. In his spare time, he gardened, ran, and took his kids backpacking, hiking, and on numerous road trips to national parks across the U.S., instilling in them the same love of nature that had inspired him as a boy.

In 1987 he went on sabbatical to Kyoto, Japan where he took Japanese classes from a woman named Yasuko. While he didn’t discover an aptitude for the Japanese language in those lessons (or any subsequent ones), he did find a life-long companion. Yasuko and Donald were married in Japan and moved back to California to start their life together. In 1994 Don took a leave from the university to work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. He and Yasuko moved to a house in Carlsbad on a corner lot with a big yard, which Donald transformed into a magical garden with fruit trees, vegetables, native plants and beautiful flowers. When he retired, he took up wood-working and soon his family was gifted with beautiful pieces of furniture. He also discovered a passion for photography and traveled the world on photography trips. He never stopped hiking and exploring the natural world, taking backpacking trips in remote and wild places as well as thousands of hikes in his own backyard. He became a volunteer with the Canyoneers, leading naturalist hikes around San Diego and contributing his photos and writings to the book Coast to Cactus: The Canyoneer Trail Guide to San Diego Outdoors.

Donald is survived by his wife, Yasuko, his children Erik and Jenny (Kevin), his grandchildren Eliza, Hazel, and Nathaniel, his sister Elaine, and nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews who loved him dearly.

A celebration of his life will be held on January 6, 2025 at 12:00 at Eternal Hills (999 El Camino Real Oceanside, CA 92054) In keeping with the spirit of a man who loved beautiful things, please feel free to bring flowers from your garden or from your favorite place to walk.