Rocknocker: A Geologist’s Memoir. George Devries Klein
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(BS, Toronto, economic geology) and Ernie Dechaw (BS Witwatersrand, South Africa, economic geology). I ignored them and whenever they complained to me, I responded, “Look, I just got here. I’m a mere wheat kernel blown in from Kansas during the last tornado.” John Sanders told me that summer that the faculty was aware of their carping, and enjoyed my response.
I’ll always remember Jim Allen’s last day at Yale. When he gave his PhD thesis defense presentation and passed, he immediately left the building. His wife met Jim at the front door. She had sat in their car during his defense with all their belongings and they left right then and there.
At the end of spring vacation, I took the written comprehensive exam and passed. When the semester ended, I earned “Honors” grades in both Flint’s course and the stratigraphy course. I was awarded the Sterling Fellowship by the graduate school for the next year. It included a tuition and fee waiver, and paid enough to live on, or as one of my friends put it, “starve graciously”.
During the academic year, we had a weekly colloquium. One of the speakers in February, 1958, was Dr. L. M. J. U. Van Straaten from the University of Groningen, Netherlands. We read his papers on the tidal flats of the Dutch Wadden Sea in the stratigraphy course. Sanders arranged for me to meet him to show some slides from the Bay of Fundy, but he wasn’t interested. Sanders and the stratigraphy class took him on a field trip to the Connecticut coast and he did not mix with the graduate students. We concluded that graduate students were of no interest to him. That attitude cost him dearly later when the Dutch government closed the department of geology at the University of Groningen during the early 1970’s.
When classes ended, I took a field trip led by Carl Dunbar to all the major North American Paleozoic type sections in New York State. It was a memorable experience with Dunbar recounting many stories about the pioneer paleontologists who worked there and also saw some excellent geology.
The day after the term ended, everyone undertaking thesis field work was expected to leave for our field areas. I left on returning from Dunbar’s field trip.
I returned to Nova Scotia, settling in Digby to complete field work at the south end of the Annapolis Valley. Once that was completed, I returned to Hants County and worked east towards Truro in Cobequid Bay. NSRF continued my support, but the NSDM said they would send me monthly payments. After receiving the first check, they terminated funds for all US geologists supported under the arrangement with M.I.T. When John Sanders visited to provide field thesis supervision, I explained the funding cut off. John advised I write Flint for a supplemental grant. Flint sent a check a week later from the Donnell Foster Hewitt fund.
Sanders and I visited all critical locations. He observed other things that were outside my thesis topic and suggested I do research on them. I realized if I did, I would never finish. He did suggest that I expand my reconnaissance of Bay of Fundy intertidal zone sediments which I did and in time this paid off. If I learned anything from John it was that one should take advantage of all the research opportunities an area offered.
At the end of the summer, I returned to Yale. Fifteen new graduate students were enrolled, including one third without financial aid. Flint mentioned that enrollments increased because of the recession. Half of these new students were gone by the end of the year.
I developed a friendship with B. Clark Burchfiel (BS, MS, Stanford, Structural Geology) who later became a professor at Rice University and moved in 1975 to M.I.T. Later, Clark was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and served on the Board of Directors of Maxus Oil Company. He is the recipient of the 2009 Penrose Medal, the highest award of the Geological Society of America. I also met Gil Benson (BS, MS, Stanford, Structural Geology) who had an educational leave from Texaco. He taught me a lot about the operational side of an oil company. He taught at Portland State University.
Also in that class was Brock Powers (BS, Southern California). He was on a fully-paid leave from Aramco to earn a PhD on Aramco data because he was to be their next chief of geological research. His predecessor was ill and Brock was picked to replace him. Aramco required their research directors to have earned PhD’s. Brock made a tour of the US geology PhD programs to find which would accept a thesis on Saudi Aramco’s data on Saudi Arabian petroleum geology. Yale was the only university to agree with this stipulation. Brock worked under Sanders’ supervision on carbonate petrology of the "Arab D” reservoir at the famous Ghawar field. Once a month, a team came from the Aramco office in New York to meet with him.
I reconnected with another member of the entry class, Ed. Belt (BA Williams, MS, Harvard). Ed was a TA at the M.I.T field camp in 1956 where we met. After service in the army, he decided to go to Yale to work with John Sanders. Ed and I spent a lot of time together reviewing common interests. Ed taught first at Villanova, and then at Amherst College.
Also among that group was Larry Ashmead (BS, MS, Rochester, petrology) who was terminated after two years and became a senior editor with Random House. Ed Hansen (BA, Princeton, structural geology) was a late arrival after the rock and mineral exams were completed. Ed was a bright guy (probably the brightest of all the graduate students) but lacked discipline. He finished his PhD, earned a Post-doc at the Geophysical Laboratory, and then left geology to become an artist in Greenwich Village. He died young.
Ashmead and Hansen palled around with Mike Carr, and ingratiated themselves with John Rodgers. Neither Hansen nor Ashmead were comfortable with my self-disciplined approach to graduate work partly modeled after my perceptions of Ray Moore’s work style. They thought it unscholarly. The three spent considerable time talking about contemporary literature at the Hall of Graduate Studies dining hall. Whatever their concerns, clearly my determined working style learned from Ray Moore put them off.
I enrolled in Structural Geology with Rodgers, invertebrate Paleontology with Dunbar, and thesis credits. The structure course was difficult because we had to translate a book by Jean Goguel written in French. The paleontology course was problematic because it required a lot more memory than I could to handle. I passed both courses.
At the end of spring break, I took the written part of my qualifying exam and my orals a week later. Sanders asked questions to start the exam and focused on topics that he knew with which I would do well. Next was Gregory who asked questions in an off-putting monotone. After adjusting, I answered them. Rodgers was next and I answered his questions. Walton was the last member of the committee and I had difficulty understanding his questions. I passed, but felt I could have performed better. Walton said as he left the room after the committee vote, “George you did very well.” Cy Field told me later that Jensen told him I had scored the highest on the written qualifying exam because I had also done well on the section on economic geology in addition to fields I knew. Jensen was unaware I completed three semesters of economic geology with Hambleton.
Because of funding uncertainties in Nova Scotia, I applied for a Penrose Grant from the Geological Society of America (GSA) for $2,800.00. Bob Shrock at M.I.T chaired the committee that year and GSA awarded me $2,000.00. When the grant list was published, I received the largest grant nationwide and more than Ernst Cloos at Johns Hopkins, and the famous stratigrapher, G. Marshall Kay, a distinguished professor at Columbia.
Near the end of the year, we received notices about our financial aid package. Mine was cut because of my less than stellar performance in paleontology and structural geology, and I wondered how I could make it. It consisted of a tuition and fee waiver and a quarter time assistantship teaching field methods with Gil Benson as instructor. Tom Williams’ funding was also cut, and because he had a wife and two children to support and the GI Bill didn’t cover all of it, he accepted a faculty appointment at SMU. However, it delayed his PhD by three years, which had a negative cascading effect on his subsequent career.
I read a posted notice about a faculty opening at Willimantic State College in Willimantic, CT, and discussed applying for it with Joe Gregory. He told me every grad student took some cuts because endowment income dropped in a recession climate. He added that my situation was unlike Tom Williams who had a family to support. If I needed to borrow money from Yale, Gregory offered to countersign the loan. His comment was a morale and confidence builder. I took his advice.
I returned to Nova Scotia and finished my field work. Around Labor Day, I returned to Yale knowing