I charge you therefore to join the battle with courage, working with all the judgment and skill you possess for the harmony and the mutual confidence of men based on a passion for freedom and tolerance, forever strong to insist, firmly, rationally, respectfully, on all that makes for a free and civilized society, on all that can encourage the fulfillment of men in terms of their nature, their conscience, and the will of their God.”
A framed autographed copy of that charge hangs in my office. Looking back, it still strikes me that during my time at Wesleyan something (perhaps the Davidson Bequest) changed Butterfield’s view about the role of Wesleyan graduates. It changed from just returning to New England small towns and becoming pillars of the community to something where I was perhaps more main-stream with respect to Wesleyan’s aspirations for its graduates than when I arrived.
LESSONS LEARNED:
1. Be willing to mentor those who follow you and help them achieve their success.
2. Be aware of how the values and goals of an institution change. The Davidson bequest changed Wesleyan forever.
3. When attending university as an undergraduate, explore what the place offers and be prepared to follow your interests, even changing majors to do so. In my case, switching to geology changed my life and I never regretted it.
4. If told to remediate deficiencies, look at it as an opportunity to improve oneself. My bonehead English experience provided me with a critical skill. Professor Cowie did me a favor advising me to take it.
5. Never be afraid to ask questions or get advice from people who are more experienced. At the same time, be willing to do the same for those who are younger.
6. If you need to earn expenses through part-time employment, find out what’s available in the department of your major. I did, curating mineral and rock specimens, mounting maps, and storing laboratory materials. The experience reinforced my desire to continue in geology, particularly during moments when I had momentary doubts.
Chapter 5
Two Summers in Newfoundland and Johns Hopkins University (1954-1955)
During my senior year at Wesleyan, I explored my career options and graduate schools. I decided I wanted to do research and that meant earning a PhD. I focused on sedimentology and sedimentary petrology and narrowed my possibilities to Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern and Wisconsin.
During winter break, I visited Princeton and met Franklin B. Van Houten (PhD, Princeton, sedimentary petrology; Princeton) who was their sedimentologist/sedimentary petrologist, and Harry H. Hess (BA, Yale, PhD Princeton, Petrology, marine topography, plate tectonics; Princeton) the chairman of the department and a distinguished scientist. Hess was a Princeton fellow graduate student of Joe Peoples. When my visit ended, Hess suggested I look at their bulletin board to see if any summer jobs were of interest. If I found any, Hess suggested I mention he suggested I apply. I appreciated his interest. It was a kindness I never forgot and subsequently learned to extend to others.
Next I visited Johns Hopkins. I met Francis J. Pettijohn (BS, MS, PhD, Minnesota, sedimentary petrology; Chicago, Johns Hopkins) whose textbook I had read. I found it difficult to communicate with him. I also met the department chairman, Ernst Cloos (PhD, Breslau, structural geology; Johns Hopkins University), a famous structural geologist, German immigrant, and incoming president of the Geological Society of America.
I chose not to visit Wisconsin.
I was accepted by Johns Hopkins with no financial aid. Ditto for Northwestern. Princeton and Wisconsin turned me down. I found out later that Wisconsin’s sedimentologist, William H. Twenhofel (PhD Yale, sedimentology; Kansas, Wisconsin) was retiring in two years and was not accepting new students.
After visiting Princeton and Johns Hopkins, I wrote letters about the summer jobs I jotted down during my Princeton visit. One was a senior field assistantship with the Newfoundland Geological Survey. Within a week, I received a telegram offering me a summer job and I accepted.
Closer to the departure date, I received a letter with instructions to meet my field party in St. George, Newfoundland, enclosing an airplane ticket. I flew first to Montreal from New York, connected to Halifax and then connected on another flight to Corner Brook, in western Newfoundland. After an overnight stay, I took a combination freight train with a passenger car to St. George.
The train reminded me of the Porepunka local. A 60 mile train ride took five hours with shunting and off loading of freight cars. There were no amenities so I arrived in St. George extremely hungry. I was met by my party chief, Bill Fritz, a PhD candidate at Michigan, and the cook. The two junior assistants, who were undergraduates at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, joined us two days later.
The province of Newfoundland was Canada’s youngest province. Originally a British colony, it was transferred to Canada in 1948. It was a neglected region subsisting on fishing, lumber and mining. The people were hardy but on a level comparable to the working poor of the USA.
Western Newfoundland was originally settled by French prisoners who were off-loaded and left to fend for themselves. They intermarried with the native ladies and were considered a wild bunch. The French lost their claim on Newfoundland during the French-Indian war.
Our assignment was to make detailed maps of Mississippian-age gypsum deposits with a plane table and alidade. Because I learned plane table mapping at Wesleyan, that became my job. The assistants did sampling, took turns holding the stadia rod for me, and other scut work. Bill completed regional maps to go with the detailed mapping I was doing. We established camp on the edge of St. George’s and went to work. During the summer we moved camp twice to map two other gypsum deposits.
The Director of the Newfoundland Geological Survey, Don Baird, visited. He was a knowledgeable geologist but too bureaucratic and jocular. He arranged rapid payment of our monthly salary checks which had fallen behind, so I couldn’t complain. Baird later left Newfoundland to head the geology department at the University of Ottawa. Ten years later, he took a job in the Canadian government.
Field work was completed in early September, just as it got cold and ice appeared on the water buckets in the cook tent. I returned home and enrolled at Johns Hopkins a week later.
As a first year student, I was required to take Cloos’s Maryland geology field course consisting of Saturday field trips around Baltimore and other parts of Maryland. He used it to teach his detailed mapping methods, including orientations of deformed oolites, cleavage-bedding relations, fold axes, faults and so forth. The emphasis was on metamorphic and igneous geology. We examined two outcrops of Triassic red beds, one of Ordovician carbonates, and one of Carboniferous sandstones.
In addition, I enrolled in year-long courses in stratigraphic paleontology (regional stratigraphy and index fossils) taught by Tom Amsden (PhD. Yale, paleontology; JHU, Oklahoma Geological Survey) during the fall term, and Harold Vokes (PhD, University of California, Berkeley (UCB), Cenozoic molluscan paleontology; JHU, Tulane) during the spring term, geophysics with Byerly (PhD, UCB, Seismology; Johns Hopkins, USGS), and a semester course in crystal morphology and crystal chemistry taught by Jacques Donais (PhD Louvain, Belgium, crystallography; JHU).
Donais’ course was a killer and I barely passed. On one exam, Donais wrote next to one of my answers, “Will you admit to yourself this is pure bluff and you do not know the answer?”
During the second term, I took a hand-specimen petrology course taught by a fellow graduate student, Ollie Gates. Ollie was a World War II vet, and had worked at the U.S. Geological Survey. His course was well-taught.
I wanted to take Dr. Aaron Waters’ (PhD, Yale, petrology; Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UC-Santa Cruz) course on petrogenesis. Waters required every