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Chapter 4

Wesleyan University (1950-1954)

I arrived in Middletown, CT, to start my college career at Wesleyan University, an all-male institution, in Mid-September, 1950.

Wesleyan University was founded in 1831 by the Methodist Church. The university focused on liberal arts, including science, and broke its ties with the Methodist Church in 1937. Founded as a male institution, it was coeducational between 1872 and 1912. Alumni pressure terminated the arrangement and it reverted to a male institution in 1912. The ousted female students established The Connecticut College for Women in New London, CT to continue their higher education. Wesleyan became coeducational again in 1968 and likely will stay that way in perpetuity.

My dorm room was in Clark Hall and consisted of a three room suite. At the front was a larger room with four desks and in the back were two bedrooms with bunk beds. Arriving early, I took the lower bunk bed in one of the rooms.

Soon the three other roommates arrived. Andy Maggatt was a party boy who flunked out by mid November. John Stacey was a quiet individual. He left Wesleyan after a year to attend business school. The person who shared my room and took the upper bunk was Mowbray (Mo) Dietzer. He came from Syracuse, NY, and graduated from a private school, Pebble Hill in upstate New York. Mo and I graduated and Mo made his career with The Wall Street Journal.

The freshman orientation included registration, opening up a local bank account, hearing pep talks from Alumni Trustees about Wesleyan’s virtues, a physical education screen, a cursory medical exam at the university health center, and participating in Fraternity Rush. This was an experience for which I had no preparation as I moved from fraternity to fraternity trying to scope it out.

My three roommates were pledged to various houses. Maggatt was pledged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, Stacey to Sigma Chi, and Dietzer to Alpha Delta Phi. I was not invited to pledge any fraternity but received invitations to join the eating clubs of Delta Tau Delta (DTD) and Delta Upsilon (DU). Although initially disappointed, it gave me more time and options to assess the fraternity system.

Wesleyan fraternities were limited by the number of freshman pledges they could accept so those who were considered “alternates” were invited to join their eating club (one dined there and participated in all their social activities). If all went well, one was pledged the following year. I chose DTD for the Fall Semester, and then switched to DU during the Spring Semester because I liked it better. DU told me at the end of my freshman year that I was on their sophomore pledge list and to return in the fall.

I signed up for the usual distribution requirements expected of freshman: English, Spanish, Humanities, Biology (with lab), and a general social science course. The general social science course overlapped a lot with what I had learned at Scotch College. The Humanities course was of marginal interest mostly because we were trying to divine what the professor in charge wanted us to think was important.

In reality, I was untypical of the students at Wesleyan. I was one of two immigrants in the class of 1954. The other, Sigmund Franczak, spent most of World War II in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland and later in Germany. He was separated from his family and did not know if they survived. An American Army Captain arranged to adopt him and he went to high school in St. Charles, MO. He was accepted to Wesleyan on a scholarship studying pre-med.

Sig spent a lot of time trying to locate his family. During his sophomore year, he finally heard they were all alive. He and his adoptive father arranged for them to move to Middletown where his father got a job.

Most of the student body at Wesleyan during the early 1950’s came from small New England towns. Sig and I were the first immigrants they ever met. During Freshman Orientation, the university president, Victor Lloyd Butterfield, told the class that the aim of a Wesleyan education was to acquire a liberal arts background so we could return to these small towns and become community leaders. My goal was different. I originally planned to become a marine lawyer which required Law School and practice it in a major port city like New York or Los Angeles.

The student body at Wesleyan was also very turn-of-the-20^th-century, ‘old-style’ Republican. During the 1952 Presidential Primary season, a mock primary was held. 79% of the students voted for Robert Taft, a staunch Ohio Republican conservative Senator. Except for one black classmate who later became a federal Judge and three black students who arrived in 1955, the campus was anything but diverse. In fact, diversity was a concept that was not on the minds of the Wesleyan Faculty, administration, or student body. It was a New England, white, Protestant campus.

I auditioned for and was accepted to the chapel choir, a plum assignment that paid $1 per hour, and simultaneously enabled me to meet the college chapel requirement (10 per semester). I also tried my hand at debate, and found the faculty member in charge a phony and dropped it.

My English professor, Dr. Cowie, told me after a month of classes that I had absolutely no writing ability. Thus, he was transferring me to a special English class to improve my writing. Colloquially, it was called “Bonehead English”. I discovered much later that it was a game-changer for me and one of the best things that could have happened. I took the course both semesters. It was taught by a Dr. Cochran who tutored us individually as well as in class and did a great job.

By the middle of the fall semester, my academic performance was not good and I received a warning letter of impending probation. Although I applied myself more rigorously, I could not turn it around and ended the semester on probation. That meant I had to drop my extra-curricular activities. I filed an appeal to continue with the choir because I earned part of my expenses that way and it was approved.

The choir experience was a good one. To balance it, ladies from Middletown participated. We went on local tours with them. However, the men’s section also did an annual joint home-and-home engagement with a choir from one of New England’s many women’s colleges. Some of my choir-mates met their wives that way.

One cloud on the horizon was the Korean War. I observed my fellow students of all classes facing draft notices. They chose instead to enlist in Officer’s Candidate School (OCS). Many left Wesleyan during the middle of the semester and returned to complete their studies after I graduated. I estimate 15% of the student body departed that year to Navy or Air Force OCS schools.

As an immigrant, I was required to register for the draft. If called up, I had the choice of being drafted and receiving citizenship quickly. If I declined, I would be ineligible for US citizenship. A system of deferments for science and engineering students and professionals was established during the summer of 1951. Such deferment was at the option of the local draft board. My draft board deferred me until age 35 when my eligibility for military service expired.

When the second semester started in 1951, I resolved to improve my grades and compete for the prize of “The most improved freshman.” I worked hard studying in the library to avoid distractions. The only memorable thing that semester was that in the biology class, we dissected a baby piglet. Biology labs for the freshman course were all on Wednesdays, and that evening all campus fraternity houses served roast pork for dinner. It was no accident.

During 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 scientific manuscripts for journals or book publishers, proposals for funding agencies, or writing book reviews for scientific journals.

During the Spring Semester, 1953, I took petrology, structural geology, second semester physics, second semester calculus, and a seminar in Marine Ecology. Again, Physics was a struggle although I did well when we reviewed optics and acoustics. Still, I earned a D. I did better in the other courses, earning a mix of B’s and “A’s”.

The Marine Ecology seminar was basically a tutorial and I did well. The instructor, Dr. Haffner, gave me some interesting advice. He advised that when I started publishing papers, I should stop, reassess, and write a summary review paper and cite my own papers extensively. I discovered when doing so that more people read such review papers than the original detailed one.

During spring vacation, we took a one-week field trip to southern New York State and the coal mining regions of eastern Pennsylvania, including a trip down a mine-shaft to examine underground operations. Prior to the spring field trip, we went on afternoon field trips in the Connecticut Valley. During every class before the field trip, Joe Peoples reminded us to bring hand lenses on the spring trip, which we did.

The first stop on the spring trip was in the Peekskill Norite. After using our rock hammers to get samples, we peered at them with our hand lenses. However, “Doc’ Peoples was wandering around with a sheepish look on his face. He called us together and said, “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. After haranguing you all week about bringing hand lenses, I left mine at home. Can I borrow one of yours please?”

We traveled in two cars. I rode with Doc Peoples. On the way back from Pennsylvania, we drove past New York City to drop people off so they could take trains home to visit their parents. I rode to Middletown because my parents were in Europe. I used the time to inquire about how to develop a career in geology, what my options were, what would be required to get there, and above all, what it would take to be successful. He answered all my questions and gave me lots of good advice. It was a good mentoring session. Joe Peoples taught me not only valuable things I would not have learned any other way, but also how to develop mentoring skills in the future.

After my parents returned from Europe they called. My sister, Marianne, was getting married in July to someone I had yet to meet. He was H. George Mandel, a Yale PhD in chemistry, who was an assistant professor of pharmacology at George Washington University Medical School. George was born in Germany. His father had been a director of the Deutsche Bank, but left in the late 1930’s. His parents lived in Scarsdale, NY, and were both pretty haughty and not the most pleasant people to know. Fortunately, Yale had rounded and humanized George Mandel and he was, in fact, a reasonable gent.

I attended their wedding where Georges Mandel’s mother was trying to match me to some of the daughters of her friends. They were very high maintenance and didn’t interest me. George’s mother berated me on a regular basis but her continued efforts to pair me up always ended in failure, for her.

That summer, I took a required geology field camp to learn geological mapping and field methods. I enrolled at Northwestern’s field camp because their course started in latest July and ended just before Labor Day. That enabled me to first accept a summer job as an engineering helper with the Connecticut Highway Department. The state was building a highway bridge in Middletown. My job was to stand next to a steam-driven pile driver, count the strokes and when the number of strokes reached six per inch, tell them to stop and go to the next one.

Sig Franczak had a job with the contractor at the same work site so we ate lunch together and visited on weekends. One day, he walked on a cross-walk over an empty sewage holding tank. He fell, landed on his head and ended up in the local hospital. I visited after work while a Catholic priest was administering last rights. I explained to the nurse that Sig was Methodist; she notified the priest who left. Sig died that night. It was a great shock to all of us.

I left in late July to join Northwestern’s field camp in Duluth, MN, where I rendezvoused with the two professors teaching the course and the other students. We examined the Keweenawan basalts along Lake Superior, went to the Hibbing open pit Iron Mine and reached Ely, MN after three days.

There, we boarded chartered canoes and paddled and portaged our way to our first camp site. We mapped geology from canoes and bushwhacked inland to complete our maps. Because I had been a canoeing counselor, I helped instruct the other students on canoeing.

The other participants came from a variety of universities: DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, University of Cincinnati, LSU, Franklin and Marshall, and Northwestern. The best prepared student was Bill Rush, who attended LSU. He spent the previous summer on an oil company field mapping crew. I learned a lot from him as well as the instructors, and was shocked to discover later Bill never submitted his final report.

After completing the course, I returned to Evanston and met the department chairman, Art Howland. Northwestern had, at that time, a nationally-recognized team of three professors, William C. Krumbein (PhD, Chicago, sedimentology, geostatistics), Laurence L. Sloss (PhD, Chicago, stratigraphy) and Edward C. Dapples (PhD, Wisconsin, sedimentary petrology). I met all three because I planned to apply there for graduate work. Frank Hoodmaker warned me that Northwestern’s program was tough and he left and completed a Master’s degree at the University of Wyoming.

Krumbein was busy so we talked briefly, Sloss talked with me but at the same time was busy drafting, and Dapples spent time rambling about his work. Perhaps I caught them at a bad time or perhaps they met many applicants so interviewing one more became a routine and boring exercise for them.

I returned to Wesleyan and had two months, in addition to regular course work, to write my field camp report, draft the diagrams and submit it. I did with a week to spare and earned an “A”. Years later, at the 1958 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Ed Sullivan who graduated from Northwestern and took the course also, told me that I was the only one to earn an “A.”

Wesleyan’s financial fortunes also suddenly improved. An alumnus, Davidson, bequeathed his fortune of $6 million. Davidson’s wife predeceased him and there were no children. The endowment suddenly doubled and Wesleyan’s expectations changed.

During my senior year, I took a year’s course in statistics, a semester of Paleontology, a year’s senior geology seminar, a philosophy course and a year’s worth of credit to complete a senior thesis. I graduated with three other geology majors. They were:

- Dana Schrader who became a Navy pilot and then flew for Eastern Airlines.

- Tom Rogers, who earned an MS from the University of California, Berkeley, took a job with Gulf, was laid off, and then worked for the California Department of Mines.

and

- Lou Wilcox, who took a job with the Army Map Service, and later earned a PhD in geodesy from St. Louis University. Lou died in 1972.

I lost contact with Dana and Tom.

A week before graduation, we received our yearbooks which included a profile of the editors’ recollections of each class mate. Mine stated “Well-Assimilated Immigrant.”

Graduation was held on a hot day. My family joined me. Joe People and his family hosted a reception for the four geology majors and their families. We then went to graduation where Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, delivered the commencement address.

At the close of Commencement, the college President, Vic Butterfield, delivered his “Charge to the Class of 1954.” Starting with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead that “great ages are also dangerous ages”, Vic discussed how

- the atmosphere in the USA changed with McCarthyism,

- the American role in the world became more dangerous with the Cold War, and

- so many of the world’s people increased their demand for freedom and well-being. He discussed also the raging battle of ideas of the time and closed his remarks saying,

“These are the times for these forces (of moderation, justice, freedom) to speak out, if quietly yet very firmly. You are about to join them. With judgment and courage you can become effective spokesmen for the cause of civilization and freedom. You may get hurt if you speak. But you won’t be worth your Alma Mater’s faith and investment in you if you falter from fear. This is no time for timid men. There is no place in the hearts of Wesleyan men for this kind of fear.

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.