Gary Lincoff  dreamed of becoming a writer when he moved from Pittsburgh to New York City in 1968. 

His novel would be about a draft dodger hiding out the Vietnam War in New York’s Central Park. For six months, he did hands-on research, learning everything he could about how to survive in the wild. He proved a quick study. 

Before long, he and his wife, Irene Liberman, were hosting dinners made from the weeds, seeds and other edible plants they had foraged in the city’s green patches. He was particularly fascinated by mushrooms.

In 1971, the couple went on a walk in Harriman State Park — 30 miles north of the city — with the New York Mycological Society.

“And he just fell in love,” said Ms. Liberman, a graphic artist. 

Mr. Lincoff eventually came to lead mushroom expeditions in places as far away as Japan, Siberia and Myanmar, and he also taught courses on how to identify the fungi for more than 40 years at the New York Botanical Garden in the borough of the Bronx.

He also was the authoritative voice of the go-to reference book that many mushroom hunters consider their Bible. Now in its 31st printing, his “National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms” has sold more than a half-million copies since it was first published in 1981. A two-year labor of love, it cemented Mr. Lincoff’s reputation as a rock star in the world of mycology. 

Mr. Lincoff died on March 16 in New York City after suffering a stroke. He was 75.

The elder of two sons born to Bette and Leonard Lincoff, an optometrist who in 1939 pioneered the use of contact lenses in Pittsburgh, Mr. Lincoff grew up in Squirrel Hill.

Upon graduating from Allderdice High School in 1959, he earned a bachelor in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He briefly studied law at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., before returning home in 1964 to do graduate work in English literature at Pitt. 

He met the woman he would marry on a double date in 1967. A friend of Ms. Liberman’s had fixed the art student up with the friend’s brother, but he didn’t have a car. Mr. Lincoff was enlisted to drive the couples to the movies at the old Pittsburgh airport. He ended up catching the eye of the pretty Carnegie Mellon University student in the backseat. They would move together to New York a year later, where he planned on teaching.

“But he really wanted to write,” Ms. Liberman said.

Little could Mr. Lincoff have guessed that mushrooms would be his subject.  

It takes a special kind of mind to be able to absorb all there is to know about mushrooms and their role within, and between, ecosystems. A fast learner with an affinity for Latin, Mr. Lincoff  became legendary for his expertise and ability to convince people that being careless about identification can kill them.

In 1978, after watching doctors struggle with identification when two fellow New York Mycological Society members fell ill after eating poisonous fungi, he wrote a handbook for doctors and mushroom hunters on toxic and hallucinogenic mushroom poisoning. It was so well-received, the National Audobon Society asked him to author its field guide to North American mushrooms.

He  would write three more mushroom books and contribute to dozens of others over the decades, and also write dozens of scholarly articles. Just two blocks from his apartment on the borough of Manhattan’s the Upper West Side, he found more than 400 species of mushrooms in Central Park.

He would serve nine years as president of the North American Mycological Association.

He also helped co-found one of the quirkiest mushroom festivals in the U.S. with fellow mushroom-lover Emanuel Salzman — the counter-culture Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado.  

When he wasn’t foraging, Mr. Lincoff was a devoted father to his son, Noah.

The elder Mr.Lincoff also loved to read and was an ardent hiker who traversed nearly 800 miles of the Appalachian Trail with his wife. 

Despite his celebrity in mycology circles, Mr. Lincoff never forgot his roots. Twenty years ago, he made good on a promise he made in the late 1980s to John Plischke when the Greensburg resident asked for his autograph at a Maine foray: If the master forager ever started a club in Pittsburgh, he would come back and lead walks. 

When Mr. Plischke and his son, John III, established the Western Pennsylvania Club in 2000, Mr. Lincoff showed up for its inaugural foray wearing  his signature bush hat and safari vest. The Gary Lincoff Mushroom Foray has been a fall tradition ever since. Last year, his star power helped draw more than 700 people.

What made him so beloved, the younger Mr. Plischke said, was that he lived the club’s motto of  “Fungi, Fun and Friends.” 

“He was a rock star. He could talk all day about mushrooms, with energy and enthusiasm,” Mr. Plischke said.

Mr. Lincoff even wrote poems and plays about mushrooms.

“He was tireless,” Mr. Plischke said.

Mr. Lincoff also a bit of a raconteur, said WPC member Barbara De Riso of Fox Chapel.  He was especially funny and honest when relating his firsthand experiences with psychedelic mushrooms.

“He just had a wonderful way,” Ms. De Riso said. “He never condescended.”

Club president Cecily Franklin of O’Hara recalled how Mr. Lincoff found a bolete mushroom on their first walk together in 2011. Knowing that its yellow tissue turns blue when cut, he asked her her first name.

“Then he etched CECILY into the pores,” Ms. Franklin recalled, “and handed me my very own personalized mushroom.”

Following a memorial service last week, Mr. Lincoff was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City.

The 18th annual Gary Lincoff Memorial Foray will be held Sept. 15 at North Park in McCandless. There also will be a memorial service for Mr. Lincoff at the New York Botanical Garden in early April.

Gretchen McKay: gmckay@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1419 or on Twitter @gtmckay.

First Published: March 28, 2018, 10:10 a.m.