I had an email from Liz Breslin who is the editor of a mountaineering lifestyle magazine called ‘’1964”, the journal title being the year Mt Aspiring National Park was established. The Liz asked the origin of the name of the hotlips puffball and that all it said in mine and Don Horne’s book it was named after a character in the television comedy M*A*S*H. Liz had done her homework and new the character was Hotlips Houlihan.
I started to seriously learn about the larger fleshy fungi when I began my PhD in 1986. The go to, and only books really, was Marie Taylor’s 1970 “Mushrooms and Toadstools in New Zealand”, and “1982 “Mushrooms and Toadstools” in the Mobil New Zealand Nature Series both published by Reed. Marie described Calostoma rodwayi as a small puffball with a “star-shaped mouth is bright red” and “the red, lobed mouth”. Notably Matie didn’t provide a common name which she did for other species where one was used. As a by- the-way Calostoma comes from the Greek and means calos = beautiful and stoma = mouth, the puffball with the beautiful mouth.
I also started going to what was to become the annual New Zealand Fungal Foray with the first held in 1986 just outside Thames in the North Island. It is also where I met Marie for the first time. It was during one of these annual forays, in the late 1980s or early 90s, that Calistoma would have been collected and Marie would have talked about it having these beautiful red lips, then someone would have piped up with the name of “hotlips fungus”. And the name caught on. However, I can’t say with any certainty that this originated in New Zealand as we had many American and Australian mycologists on these forays so it may have come from that source as well as they are all knew M*A*S*H as well as we did.
But why hotlips? At that time everyone in New Zealand had watched M*A*S*H as there were only two TV channels and M*A*S*H had been both long running and repeated several times. For those too young to know M*A*S*H was about the staff of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital operating behind the front line in the Korean War. It began as a series of novel, became a movie, then a long running TV show. The TV show ran from 1972 to 1983, three times longer than the Korean War. So, everyone in New Zealand knew the character of the chief nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan played by Loretta Swit. Her popularity was such that she was even brought out to Dunedin as the drawcard for there annual Festival Parade in 1978.
Coincidently, I was forwarded some photos of Calostoma rodwayi taken by Ian Flux at Ngapukeariki. East Coast, 2 October 2023.
References
Breslin, Liz 2023. Of M*A*S*H and mushrooms. “1964: mountain culture / aotearoa“ journal 15: 25-28
Dunedin City Council Facebook page 19 November 2019. Loretta Swif, Hotlips Houlihan from M*A*S*H, attended the procession in 1978. https://www.facebook.com/profile/100064874970571/search?q=loretta
“1964: mountain culture / aotearoa“ journal. https://1964.co.nz/
Spores, moulds, and fungi 