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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 student signing up for it to take a rock quiz first. When I went to his office, he handed me two dark olive gray rocks. I looked at them and identified one as basalt and the other as an altered greenstone. Turned out the “basalt” was greywacke, and the “greenstone” was a basalt. Moreover, they came from the Keweenawan Peninsula in Michigan on Lake Superior, near my field camp area. Waters told me to take Gates’ course before taking petrogenesis.

During the late winter, I applied for a summer job with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) indicating a preference for an assignment in the Canadian Rockies. I was hired as a Senior Geological Field Assistant, but sent back to Newfoundland.

I took a quick trip home to go to the White Plains NY Federal Court House in late April, 1955, to receive my citizenship papers and was sworn in as a U.S. Citizen.

Hopkins turned out to be a very unhappy experience. In May, about two weeks before the semester ended, Cloos announced that all first year students were required to take a written prelim exam, although earlier he told me I should take it my second year. I appealed and was turned down. I took it and did badly. Cloos asked me to find another graduate school.

The following week, I visited Lehigh and Penn State. Because it was late in the year, they turned me down. I then applied to the University of Kansas, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota. Only the University of Kansas accepted me and in time, I appreciated their acceptance more and more.

Coincidentally, Amsden, Byerly, and Vokes also left that year. Amsden went to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, Byerly went to the U.S.G.S, and Vokes became chairman of the department of geology at Tulane University.

The semester ended, I passed all course exams, and went to Newfoundland. I flew to Gander and took the train to Terra Nova on the eastern side of the Island. I was the last to arrive and was met by the party chief, Stuart Jenness (PhD, Yale, field geology; GSC), Reg Bates (a local Boatman), Colin Bull (local cook) and Frank Nolan (Junior Assistant). Frank, an undergraduate at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was Nova Scotia’s junior tennis champion.

GSC provided a jeep and I was taken to the base camp. There was also about 3 inches of snow on the ground and it was still snowing. We pitched our tents despite the conditions.

Frank and I were tent mates, sharing a two-man tent. Reg and Colin shared a tent. Stu had his own tent which also doubled up as a field office. We also had a rifle in Stu’s tent which could only be used on his approval, literally “in the name of the Crown” in case provisions ran low.

We mapped a mixed Precambrian and Lower Paleozoic metamorphic terrain. Most of our mapping was completed by running traverses through the Newfoundland bush, muskeg and rough terrain. Stu assigned Reg to work with me because he felt Frank Nolan needed a lot more supervision. We plotted our outcrop data on our base map and transferred them every night to Stu’s master map in camp. Camp meals were acceptable, but Colin had the habit of overcooking roast beef. Moreover, Stu arranged to have grapefruit shipped in for breakfast and Colin kept cutting them vertically instead of across the mid-section. We tried to explain it to him and it never registered.

On weekends, Reg went home, and Stu gave me the jeep to do roadside mapping. One week, Frank returned to Nova Scotia for family reasons, so Stu and I worked together. It was a good learning experience for me. He also told me a lot about the graduate program at Yale and how it was structured with a series of hurdles.

During August, Reg and Colin decided to brew homemade beer. Frank and I helped get it started and after the beer was bottled, we left it in a nearby creek to mellow and cool. Frank didn’t want to wait and got roaring drunk. In the middle of the night he got sick and threw up all over the tent. I helped him up clean up the mess. Frank was, of course, very embarrassed and profusely apologized to all of us for days.

We finished mapping by Labor Day and said our good-byes. I went home to visit my parents and made preparations to go to Lawrence, KS.

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. An academic environment is extremely unpredictable and guidelines or verbal understandings and instructions, particularly with students, can be reversed almost capriciously.

2. A graduate student must prepare for all contingencies.

3. When faculty advise taking preparatory courses (such as the hand-specimen petrology course), accept that advice.