Rocknocker: A Geologist’s Memoir. George Devries Klein
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some party weekends, I periodically worked as a bar tender at fraternity parties. The job had a downside. Some of the Wesleyan men drank too much and one or more passed out while their dates watched frantically and hysterically. One of the tasks of the bartenders was to calm them down. Moreover, whenever dates came to Wesleyan on weekends, housing was usually found for them in local private homes.
At closing time, the dates of these passed out boyfriends were escorted to their temporary homes by the student bartenders because Middletown was not known as being a university-friendly community. It was mostly a Catholic working class community (Middletown had three Catholic Churches, one for those Italian descent, one for those of Polish descent, and one for those of Irish descent). Town-gown relations were abysmal. Often, stranded dates didn’t know their way back to the private home where they stayed. I started a system of logging the local addresses of everyone’s date early in the evening while their Wesleyan hosts were still sober.
There were recriminations and finger pointing when the guys sobered up. Most of us who bartended were accused of spiking drinks to “bird-dog,” go to bed, or ‘make out’ with their dates. The recriminations arose because next morning some of these ladies delighted in teasing these guys with exaggerated stories. I often told my compatriots, there’s nothing desirable, romantic, or amusing about a partly stupefied, half-drunk woman.
The semester ended and my GPA went up from a D plus to a B plus. However, another classmate earned the “Improved Freshman Prize.”
Because Wesleyan was small, it lacked certain course offerings. I was interested in taking anthropology and sociology courses and attended summer school at Northwestern University during the summer of 1951 to do so. It was a great summer and I enjoyed the coursework. I met one graduate student in the dormitory, Frank Hoodmaker. He was earning a MS degree in geology and I looked at his books and found them of interest.
Over the summer, I concluded that if I went to summer school the following summer and took a lab course each of my remaining semesters at Wesleyan, I could earn enough credits to graduate in two more years.
During the fall of 1951, I took a third semester of ‘bonehead English’ and chose geology for my lab science. I don’t recall what else I took, but the geology course changed my life. I did very well and chose to major in it. That meant a complete reorganization of my course work. It ended my plan to graduate in 1953 because I had cognate science courses to take, and complete a major from a late start.
The ‘bonehead English’ course was taught by a visiting professor, Charles A. Muscatine. Muscatine was an English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), earned all his degrees from Yale, and was an internationally recognized Medievalist. He refused to sign a loyalty oath and under California laws of the time, he was fired. Wesleyan offered a visiting appointment and he stayed until the California law was repealed three years later (See Chapter 14).
Muscatine was particularly irritating. He kept lording over us that he was a Yale graduate and implied a Wesleyan education was inferior. He acted as if he didn’t want to be at Wesleyan, although to earn his livelihood, he was fortunate to have a job there. I crossed swords with him a few times in class but I earned a B plus. I was happy that I did not have to take another course with him. Little did I know then that I would visit him at his office at UCB in 1970 (Chapter 14).
Overall, my sophomore year was a great year and I scored high grades in all my courses. I decided not to pledge at DU and instead joined the independent counterpart to fraternities, the John Wesley Club.
During my sophomore year, I competed for a campus wide public speaking prize, the Parker Prize. I intended it to be a trial run to compete more effectively my junior year. However, I won and was also told that because I did so, I could not compete for it again.
To make up for my change in major, I spent the summer of 1952 at Harvard Summer School to complete a year’s freshman chemistry course in eight weeks. I passed, but not well. I also was disappointed in Harvard because it was clearly unfriendly to undergraduates. Nor did I care for Boston. The attitude of the people there reminded me of the ‘going home” attitude I observed in Australia.
When I chose to major in geology during 1952, the Wesleyan Department of Geology was small, consisting of two professors, a technician and a secretary. The first scientist on the Wesleyan faculty was John Johnston, a Bowdoin chemistry graduate with an interest in mineralogy. He taught Natural history, including geology between 1837 and 1873. The department was founded in 1867 when its most prominent early geology graduate, William North Rice, was appointed. Rice was the first person to earn a PhD in geology from a US university (Yale) around 1870. When Rice retired in 1918, he was replaced by William Foye as professor of geology. Foye was replaced in 1935 by Joe Webb Peoples (BS, Vanderbilt, MS. Northwestern, PhD Princeton, economic geology; Mahoning Coal Company, Lehigh, Wesleyan) who stayed until he retired during the mid-1970s. He was department chairman during my student days.
Rice, Foye, and Peoples were assisted by non-tenure track junior faculty. They included Gilbert Cady from 1909 to 1910 who went to the USGS to become a distinguished coal geologist, and Ralph Digman (1944-47) who founded the geology department at Binghampton University. Norman Herz taught at Wesleyan from 1950 to 1951 and went to the University of Georgia where eventually he became department chairman. Rueben J. Ross (BA, Princeton, PhD Yale, paleontology; Wesleyan, USGS, Colorado School of Mines) was hired on the faculty in 1948 and taught me Historical Geology. Rube left in 1952. He was replaced by Elroy P. Lehmann (BS, MS, PhD, Wisconsin, stratigraphy; Wesleyan, Mobil Oil eventually VP of Exploration) who left in 1955. John Rosenfeld served on the Wesleyan faculty from 1955 to 1957 before moving on to UCLA. In 1958, Joe Weitz (BA, Wesleyan, PhD, Yale; structural geology) was added and left in 1960 to go to Colorado State University. In 1959, Gordon P. Eaton (BA Wesleyan, PhD, Cal Tech, metamorphic petrology; Wesleyan, USGS, Texas A&M Dean and Provost, Iowa State University President, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory Director; U.S. Geological Survey – Director), Joe People’s star undergraduate major, returned and left in 1962 for the USGS.
In 1972, the department’s name was changed to ‘Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences’ and began to expand. It now has a faculty of eight tenure-track professors and two research professors.
During the fall of my junior year, I enrolled in Mineralogy, Stratigraphy and Sedimentation, Physics, Calculus, and Philosophy of Religion. It was a tough grind and Physics proved to be a particularly difficult course. I liked the Stratigraphy and Sedimentation course, and decided that if the opportunity came, I should pursue a career in sedimentation, or as it is now called, sedimentology. I earned B’s in all my courses except Physics where I scraped by with a D minus.
I still sang in the Wesleyan Choir. During my junior year, our exchange arrangement was with Pembroke College in Providence RI (they later merged into Brown University). They came to Wesleyan first and on the Saturday afternoon when they arrived, we completed a rehearsal. Because by this time I was an officer of the choir, I had certain duties to complete after the rehearsal. I witnessed a conversation between the choir director, Dick Winslow, and the chapel organist, Bill Prentice. Winslow said with a panicked look on his face, "They can't sing!"
The concert took place that evening and a party was held after-wards. Some of the choir members really liked those Pembroke ladies. One of my colleagues put it well when he mentioned that those girls couldn't sing but they sure could make out.
The following Tuesday, the student newspaper appeared and one of my buddies at the John Wesley Club was its music critic. He reviewed the concert and severely criticized the Pembroke ladies for their inability to sing. Because the Pembroke choir had a high opinion of themselves, they arranged for the paper to mail them the issue with that review. On arrival at the Pembroke campus the following Saturday, we received a frosty welcome and a few choice words were exchanged. Suddenly the warmth and friendliness of the ladies disappeared.
Several of my choir colleagues were furious and wrote harsh letters to the student paper about the critical review and how it undermined their socializing. All were published, and so was a reply by the reviewer. He provided a primer on reviews and concluded by writing, "Always remember a review is the opinion of the reviewer only." I used that comment during later years when reviewing