Rocknocker: A Geologist’s Memoir. George Devries Klein
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Tokyo) one of Nagata’s students, as an Assistant Professor of Geomagnetism, Joe Lipson (PhD, U. Cal, Berkeley) as an associate professor of geochronology, and me. Staying on were Norm Flint, Tracy Buckwalter (PhD Michigan, Petrology; Pitt), and Martin Bender (MS Pitt, U.S. Steel exploration geologist; Pitt) who taught physical and historical geology. Flint taught stratigraphy and structural geology.
During the next month, I held several conversations with Frederickson. He grew up in a working class neighborhood in Seattle doing odd jobs to help the family survive. He had a summer job at age 16 on a floating fish cannery working off Alaska. One day they were in a bay near port. Fred took the day off and climbed a nearby hill to view the scenery. As he looked at the boat, it suddenly exploded, sank and killed everyone on board. He was one of three survivors. Fred returned to Seattle, ran errands for the Teamsters Union and described graphically how the labor bosses kept the rank-in-file in line. He graduated in mining engineering from the University of Washington and fought in World War II. On returning, he earned a Master’s in Geology and went to M.I.T to earn a PhD in Mineralogy. Part of his PhD preliminary exam consisted of identifying 40 white mineral specimens.
After M.I.T, he taught at Washington University, St. Louis, for seven years reaching the rank of professor, went to Pan Am Research as director of exploration research and joined Pitt in 1960. I discovered later that Washington University fired him, even though he had tenure, over a charge of financial mismanagement of research grant funds.
Returning from my trip east, I met again with Frederickson. He told me that during the fall term I would teach a graduate course in sedimentology and an undergraduate course in mineralogy. In the spring, I would teach a graduate course in sedimentary environments. My salary was $8,500 (Approximately $54,000 in 2009 Dollars) for an eleven-month academic year. The goal was that all of us would raise grants to reimburse the university for the 2/9 summer supplement.
I began course preparation. The sedimentology course was straight forward. I asked Norm Flint to take me on a local field trip and selected several great outcrops for a Saturday trip. Some of them were textbook cases for Glenn Visher’s Vertical Sequence concept. Glenn Visher mentioned that at Northwestern Krumbein took his sedimentology class on a field trip to sample a beach on Lake Michigan next to the Northwestern Campus. The class used those samples to learn laboratory techniques and write an integrative report. I adopted this approach too and used a beach on Lake Erie. I also ran a bedrock trip illustrating the concepts covered in class and I could tell the students understood the linkages between modern and ancient sediments.
The mineralogy course was a struggle, so I asked Frederickson for advice. He had one suggestion. It was to review my undergraduate and graduate mineralogy course notes and pick what was important and the rest would follow. I did and quickly discovered that if I covered crystal chemistry, crystallography, silicates and carbonates, I could teach a useful course. Later, I discovered Don Peacor at Michigan developed a similar outline and it became the new way undergraduate mineralogy was taught nationwide (See Chapter 15). In the past, the focus was on sulfides, oxides, and native elements. Silicates and carbonates were covered in petrology.
Before the semester started, Joe Lipson arrived and because he and I were “Frederickson’s boys,” we hung around a lot. Fred met with just the two of us to decide departmental matters, excluding the others. Kobayashi arrived in Mid-October.
The department had one secretary, Mrs. Kinch, who was there at least seven years. Before Frederickson arrived, she was almost a defacto department head, and adjusting to Frederickson, Lipson and me was a major change. Socially, she interacted with Buckwalter, Bender and Norm Flint. I recall handing her an NSF proposal to be typed and her comment was, “Assistant professors shouldn’t be applying for research funds.” When nothing happened for a week, I informed Frederickson and she got it done and did a very good job. I realized she was capable of doing good work, but was too involved in what clearly was a split department.
Buckwalter, Bender, Mrs. Kinch and some of the graduate students often met for lunch in Buckwalter’s and Bender’s shared office complex. I walked by one day and they were playing parlor games. I realized then that upgrading the program was that much more difficult.
In mid-September, I attended a coastal marine geology conference at the Oceanography program at Johns Hopkins University. I arrived the afternoon before and stopped by the Department of Geology and visited with Pettijohn. I then paid a visit with Aaron Waters. Our conversation went as follows:
Waters: It’s good to see you Klein. Why are you here today?
Klein: I’m attending a coastal conference in the department of oceanography which starts tomorrow.
Waters: Well, they never notified the department here. Oh well. What are you doing now?
Klein: I started a faculty appointment at the University of Pittsburgh and have been teaching now for a month. Before then, I worked for a year at Sinclair Research.
Waters: OK, Klein, since you are now teaching, I’m going to give you some advice. First, try not to stay in one university for more than ten years. Second, always take a sabbatical; even go into debt to do it because it will always pay off later. Third, always buy a used car, about one or two years old. You can get them for half the original price, and just run them into the ground.
I thanked him for his time. His advice proved to be golden and some of the best I heard, particularly the one about sabbatical leaves.
The GSA meeting that fall was in Cincinnati, OH. I joined a pre-meeting field trip that started in Chicago and went to the meteorite impact structure at Kentland, IN, the Silurian Reefs of Indiana described by Shrock, and the Lower Ordovician McMicken Hill Section in Cincinnati. The last stop at McMicken Hill was next to a public housing development. While digging into soft shale to extract fossils, we were joined by about 12 African American children who really knew their fossils. One found an Olonellus (Trilobite) and correctly identified it.
During the first seven years of my career, I went on a pre-meeting field trip before every GSA meeting to broaden my experience and see new geology. The slides I took were helpful for both research and teaching.
I presented my paper on the Keuper Marl to a sedimentology session which I co-chaired with the eminent carbonate geologist, Albert V. Carozzi (BS, MS, PhD, University of Geneva; carbonate petrology; Univ. of Geneva; Illinois) of the University of Illinois. Carozzi knew John Sanders so we had common ground to get acquainted. The session was attended by Phillip H. Kuenen who received GSA’s highest research award, the Penrose Medal. During a mid-session break, he talked with me about my paper and was pleased I identified lacustrine turbidites. I previously met him in Copenhagen and he recalled meeting me.
On arrival in Pittsburgh, I joined the Pittsburgh Geological Society. It was smaller than the Tulsa Geological Society. Both were affiliated societies of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).
One individual I met was Vint Gwinn, a geologist working for the Pittsburgh exploration office of Mobil. Vint graduated from Rutgers in geology where he received a baseball scholarship. On graduation, he was offered a contract by the New York Giants baseball team, but declined to attend Princeton where he earned a PhD in 1960. Vint developed a thin-skinned hypothesis for the origin of the Appalachian overthrust belt and also had done thesis work in sedimentology. He and his wife and I socialized and became good friends. He was curious to know how I moved from Sinclair to a faculty appointment at Pitt because he had similar goals and complained he was not getting help from Princeton.
Early after my arrival, I arranged to visit the Gulf Research Lab via one of my Yale fellow graduate students, Bob Hodgson (BS, MS. Wyoming, PhD, Yale) who completed a definitive thesis on jointing in the Colorado Plateau and was offered a job as a research structural geologist. On arriving at the lab, I first met Mel Hill, the director of exploration research. Mel handed me an organizational chart and then turned me over to their geological oceanographer, Jack Ludwick (PhD, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; coastal sedimentation processes; Gulf Research, Old Dominion University) who worked with coastal sediment models. Jack later introduced me to Wayne A. Pryor (BS Centenary College, Louisiana, MS, Illinois, PhD. Rutgers, sedimentology; Illinois Geological Survey, Gulf Research, Univ. of Cincinnati).