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Chapter 10

University of Pittsburgh (1961-1963)

The University of Pittsburgh was chartered in 1819 to serve the higher education needs of western Pennsylvania. It struggled because of lack of funds. During the 1920’s, the campus moved to its present site near the old Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. It was mostly a commuter school.

As a candidate the only thing I knew about Pitt was the discovery of the polio vaccine by Dr. Jonas Salk at Pitt’s medical school. Salk was an immediate university icon because of the fame he brought them, including the royalty income from the patent.

In 1955 the Pitt Board of Trustees appointed Edward Litchfield to be president with a mandate to upgrade the university. He was Dean of the Business School at Cornell and negotiated with a member of the Scaife Family who was president of Pitts’s board. The Scaife family owned Mellon Bank and Gulf Oil. Litchfield negotiated a side deal with Scaife which was never approved by the Board, and before he arrived, that Scaife family member died. Litchfield always believed he had resources to transform Pitt into the ‘Harvard of the Alleghenies.” Later events proved he didn’t.

I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in latest July, 1961. A. F. Frederickson let me stay at his home until I found an apartment. He lived in a large house with a very nice wife who was half Caucasian and half Native American. They had five daughters ranging in age from 6 to 17.

After unloading my rocks and books into my office, I found a furnished one-bedroom apartment in two days and moved in. I then drove east to visit my parents and made a brief visit to Yale. Sanders told me that Clark Burchfiel, who accepted a faculty appointment at Rice University, and I, were appointed to the two best geology academic positions in the USA that year.

John Sanders also told me he was chairing the 1963 SEPM (Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists; renamed Society of Sedimentary Research in 1993) Research Symposium on cyclic sedimentation and asked if I had any recommendations. I nominated Glenn Visher to talk about vertical sequences and explained what Glenn had developed. I also said that Glenn learned some of this at Shell so John needed to be careful how this was handled. Eventually, John invited Glenn to that symposium.

I also visited the headquarters of the Geological Society of America in New York City. I submitted my thesis to them as a possible Memoir, but it was returned in February with reviewer’s suggestions to break it up into several papers. I resubmitted one paper and wanted to know what happened. I met with the editor, Agnes Creagh who reviewed everything with me because two reviewers recommended further breakup and publication. A general paper on environments and sandstone petrology appeared in the GSA Bulletin in September, 1962, and one on sandstone classification in May, 1963. My paper on the Keuper Marl, submitted from Tulsa, was also accepted and appeared in March 1962 in Geology Magazine, a journal published by Cambridge University.

I owe Agnes Creagh an eternal debt of gratitude for spending three hours showing me how to put a manuscript in good order. When I thanked her as I left, she said “George, you will be training many PhD’s. I spent the time with you so you can show them what they must do to save me and my successor’s lots of time.” She was exactly right and if I did nothing else for my PhD students, it was to help them turn their standard theses into publishable prose which appeared in major geological journals.

The department of geology at Pitt, like the university, was undergoing massive change. The geology department had been at best, average. It was headed during the 1950’s by Chip Prouty who left in 1958 to head the department of geology at Michigan State. Norm Flint (BS, Univ. of New Hampshire, PhD, Ohio State) a Carboniferous coal stratigrapher, served as acting head until Frederickson arrived in 1960. Frederickson was an international authority on clay mineralogy, and I recalled reading his widely-cited paper on weathering at Yale.

Frederickson’s goal was to get rid of so-called ‘deadwood’ and rebuild the department with new people. He brought in Takesi Nagata (PhD Tokyo, paleomagnetics; Univ. of Tokyo) as a permanent visitor to spear-head a program in geomagnetism, hired Kazuo Kobayashi (PhD, 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). I heard Wayne present a paper at the 1960 AAPG meeting which was just published. It integrated the paleocurrents work by Paul Potter, Ray Siever and, later, Wayne. Wayne and I immediately established common ground and good rapport and developed a lifelong friendship.

I asked why he left Illinois to go to Rutgers and he explained the quirks of that department. The department head, George White, ran a tight ship, and White’s wife, Mildred, who had no children, developed a social group of all the wives of married students to teach them to become traditional ladies. How the wives got on with Mildred influenced the outcome of their husband’s fortunes in the department. Pryor’s wife was a nurse from Germany. He met her while on active duty immediately after the Allied occupation. She had many good qualities but also was a ‘hard case,” and Mildred was not pleased.

Wayne spoke fluent German and to help his wife adjust to America, they spoke both German and English at home. Moreover, Wayne had an independent streak that did not impress White. When Wayne took his German exam administered by the German department, he failed, and in fact, he failed three times. Normally, White went to bat for students but chose not to do so in Wayne’s case. Wayne finished his PhD at Rutgers in 18 months, passed their German exam, and returned to the Illinois Geological Survey (IGS).

He left in 1960 because of changes in research management at IGS. When he left, he presented a colloquium about how “clods rose to the top.” (It’s based on the deflation principle forming desert pavement). He later accepted a teaching Fulbright professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1968-69 where he presented his lectures “auf Deutsch.”

I had heard similar stories about George White and Illinois from Stuart Grossman, Terry Offield, and Dick Benson, an Illinois PhD who taught Ostracoda micropaleontology at Kansas while I was there.

The second semester started and I was teaching only one course. By now, Brock Powers finished his PhD at Yale and returned to Saudi Arabia. He sent me a bound copy of his thesis which I read. I found it routine and underwhelming. I decided to ask my graduate class to evaluate it and we discussed it. They were as critical of it as I was without my prompting.

One evening two weeks later, Frederickson met the graduate students and gave them a talk outlining his goals for the department’s future. Afterwards, he invited them for beer at a nearby pub and asked about the courses they were taking. The students in my class told him about their experience with the Brock Powers thesis, and told him good things about my teaching. Frederickson visited me the next day and revealed his discussion with those students. He said he was extremely pleased I gave them a chance to evaluate Brock’s thesis because as Fred put it, “They didn’t think much of it.” He then said that he appreciated my approach because it taught the students they were as capable as anyone and their being at Pitt should not be taken as a reason to assume they were second class geologists. Fred said my teaching approach built up their professional confidence and encouraged me to keep it up.

I required a field project in the Ames Limestone as part of that course. Students were assigned areas to sample and examine and I joined them at least once with the rest of the class visiting each area and helping the students draw comparisons to where they were working. All data was pooled and when the semester ended, they were to complete an integrated report. We later published a small version of it for the Pennsylvania Association of Geologists Fall field trip.

During mid-February, I met Vint Gwinn again and mentioned that McMaster University was looking for a sedimentologist. I recommended he apply. Because he earned his PhD at Princeton, he contacted his advisers and they told him they had already nominated one of their final-year PhD’s. Princeton traditionally nominated only one candidate for faculty appointments and told the university doing the hiring that the person they nominated was their best graduate. Other Princeton graduates were told to stand aside.

Prior to the early 1970’s with passage of the affirmative action laws, academic jobs were not advertised and hiring was done by word of mouth, personal contact, or mailing announcements. That was the traditional way.

I saw Vint again three weeks later and asked if he applied. Vint told me why he couldn’t. I told him that I thought the Princeton approach was unfair to the universities doing the hiring because they, not Princeton, could determine their real needs, and the practice was worse than medieval.

I then said, “Vint, I have an idea. Why don’t I write to McMaster nominating you and you will be the ‘Pittsburgh’ candidate. Do you want the job?” Vint assured me he was confident enough in his abilities to win the job if he earned an interview. I wrote a letter to Gerard V. (Gerry) Middletown (PhD, Imperial College, University of London; sedimentology; Imperial Oil, McMaster University) who was chairman of the department. Six weeks later Vint was interviewed, and was offered the job which he accepted.

Vint also told me that Gerry Middleton was chairing the annual SEPM Research Symposium on sedimentary structures in 1964. I filed that information away depending on how well the summer research went.

Because I was teaching only one course, I wrote papers remaining from my thesis, one on Bay of Fundy tidal flats, one on the Quaco Conglomerate of New Brunswick, and one critiquing Sandstone Classification. John Sanders and I agreed to write a joint paper comparing the Bay of Fundy Intertidal zone with the Dutch Wadden Zee described by Van Straaten and which Sanders visited. I completed them and sent them off by the semester’s end. All appeared during 1963 and 1964.

When I left Sinclair, I received permission to continue my work on the sandstone petrology of the Stanley-Jackfork Boundary and they let me take their samples and thin sections with me. After classes ended, I returned to Arkansas and Oklahoma to collect more material to complete my regional study. I visited Tulsa and reconnected with friends and returned to Pittsburgh in early June.

While collecting samples in Arkansas and Oklahoma, I drove off the main roads into the interior of the Ouachita Mountains. One day, while working an outcrop, a steady stream of locals drove by in pick-up trucks and stared at me. I noticed a big pot of water boiling while driving to the outcrop and suspected it was a backwoods still. As I finished and turned the car around, I noticed five pick-up trucks behind me riding shot gun. They let me leave. I discovered later that the favorite disguise for a “revenuer” was a geologist and I was in the heart of Ouachita moonshine country.

I then flew to London, connecting to Oxford. Stuart McKerrow arranged for me to ‘house sit” for one of their younger faculty who was doing field work in Northern Ireland.

First, I had to arrange transportation. Stuart told me his family needed a second car and suggested we go 50-50 and buy a used car. I would use it during the summer and he used it until I came back. I would use it again the second summer and he would buy me out. I agreed and together we bought a medium-sized Austin four-door sedan.

After visiting outcrops together and Stuart explaining the current stratigraphic framework, I went to the library, reviewed literature to make a selection of outcrops to visit and commenced work. I experienced great difficulty in resolving their stratigraphic terminology. The Great Oolite was subdivided according to a series of three “fossil beds”, the first, second, third, and so forth. Recognizing these in the field was not easy. The fossils were a mixtures of shallow-marine and coastal pelecypods, brachiopods, and gastropods. I began field work at a large quarry where all three were observed and noticed that contrary to past paradigms, the fossil beds pinched out. Moreover, the shells were concentrated and concave up, reminiscent of intertidal tidal channel fills reported by Van Straaten from the Wadden Zee and which I observed in the Bay of Fundy.

As field work continued, I also observed that in other outcrops, the shell lags were overlain by a cross-bedded oolite with bipolar orientation, and graded up into a ripple-bedded oolite. They were capped with a limey mudstone. In short, it replicated the fining-upward meandering channel model of Visher, but in a carbonate system, and in modern terms represented a parasequence. It clearly was a tidal channel fill. I checked the library again and reread parts of Arkell’s book on ‘The Jurassic System of Britain” to see if he and others reported anything like I observed and none had.

During the middle of the summer, I went to a small active quarry worked by one man. I first went to the farm house to get permission to cross their land and open and close gates.

Driving into the quarry, I immediately observed three such stacked vertical sequences in the quarry face. I introduced myself to the quarryman and began working, measuring a section and taking samples. After a half-hour, the quarryman came to me and said (spelled phonetically):

“Ya know, Englund was coovered by the sea three toimes.”

I asked him why he thought so and he pointed to the base and top of each of one of my vertical sequences!!

I then asked him why three events. Couldn’t it have happened during a single episode of marine drowning?

He said, “Well, ya know, the lite professor Arkell told me that England was coovered by the sea three toimes.”

He had a contract to quarry limestone for restoration of the college buildings at Oxford. He explained that to quarry the building stone, he scraped off the limy mudstone at the top, and cut down to just above the fossil bed to get good quality stone.

I made many trips back to the quarry, and brought geologists from all over the UK to show these sequences.

That experience was a good reminder that people lacking formal education can make accurate scientific observations and ask intelligent questions about them. It was a sobering reminder that although I made a sedimentological discovery, there were forebears who had seen these features too. The difference in understanding was timing and training.

The summer ended and on my return to Pitt, I immediately wrote a short paper about the three tidal channel sequences in the Great Oolite, submitted it to Nature, and they published it in mid-February, 1963. I also wrote Gerry Middleton inquiring if he wanted a carbonate talk in his 1964 SEPM Research symposium and enclosed a preprint of my Nature paper. He invited me to present a paper at the 1984 SEPM symposium.

The fall began with nothing unusual on the horizon. In Late September, the Pennsylvania Association of Geologists held its field trip in Somerset, PA, and I brought my class. John Rodgers wrote earlier that he was attending the trip, so I invited him to stay with me the Saturday the trip ended, and to join me and Bob Hodgen and Bob’s wife for dinner. He accepted. Bob Hodgen read my GSA paper on Triassic sedimentation, because it was published the week before, and congratulated me. Rodgers had not seen it yet and complimented me on getting it published so quickly.

I served as department colloquium chairman that year and discovered that Robert S. Dietz of the Naval Electronics Research lab was to be an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer at the October evening meeting of the Pittsburgh Geological Society (PGS) discussing plate tectonics. By this time, I was elected to PGS’s council. Because Frederickson just hired Alvin Cohen, an Illinois PhD glass chemist who was conducting tectite research, I called Dietz to see if he could also present a colloquium about meteorites to the department. He told me to contact AAPG to get approval and it was granted.

I met Dietz at 7:00 am at the Pittsburgh airport and checked him into the Pittsburgh Hilton. He hung his clothes, left his brief case in the room, and took his slides with him. He visited different faculty in the department, gave his talk, and we returned to the Pittsburgh Hilton. I dropped him off to park my car, walked back, and waited in the lobby. He didn’t come. I picked up the house phone and called. Bob asked me to come to his room. When I arrived he explained he returned to the room, took his clothes off to take a shower, and after drying off, opened the closet to pick a different suit. His clothes and luggage were missing. He was on the hotel’s case, but luckily, he kept his slides.

I called the restaurant where PGS had its meeting and asked to speak to the PGS President, Scotty Affleck, to let him know we were running late. Eventually, Dietz gave his talk, and met everyone. I connected with Dietz two weeks later at the GSA meeting in Houston and he told me everything was found. The hotel mistakenly switched keys giving him keys to the room next to the one where his luggage was.

GSA that fall was in Houston and I went on a field trip led by H. A. Bernard (BS, PhD, LSU, sedimentology; Shell Research), Rufus LeBlanc (BS, PhD, LSU, sedimentology; Shell Research) and Charles Major (BS, MS, Illinois, geology; Shell, Pennzoil) to the Holocene sediments of Galveston Island and the Brazos River Valley. It was the same trip used by Shell for its training program. It was the best part of the meeting. I took numerous slides of both sedimentary features, and all their color diagrams. These were used for many years in my courses.

On my return, I noticed the atmosphere changed. First, Mrs. Kinch was fired. Freddy hired a Mrs. Orso to replace her and she was barely up to the job. One day, Joe Lipson chewed me out about a trivial matter I can’t recall. There was tension between me and Buckwalter over the way I taught mineralogy because he had to revise his petrology course. Frederickson suddenly cooled towards me. A friend in Tulsa called to alert me to some news I did not know. Pan Am Research fired Harry Werner and he was looking for a job. I was warned that at Pan Am Research, Harry was Frederickson’s lap dog.

Originally, Fred tried to hire Werner to teach petroleum geology, but the administration declined because of the recent hiring of Alvin Cohen. Because I was untenured, my position became vulnerable.

In December, Martin Bender died. Frederickson asked me to teach his historical geology for one semester on an emergency basis and I agreed. When I heard Martin died, I anticipated such a request so was prepared to help out.

In early February, Frederickson called me in and told me my faculty appointment would not be renewed. The tenure committee of Frederickson, Buckwalter, Lipson and Flint chose to turn me down. This came as a surprise because I was never asked for an up-dated CV, reprints, or other supporting documents. I asked why and he told me people found me difficult, students complained about my teaching, high standards, and my demanding workload in courses.

I visited my colleagues to get feedback and got little help.

Some of the graduate students were shocked by this turn of events. They were satisfied with their course experiences with me. One with whom I became friends over time was Dick Gray (BS, Engineering, Carnegie Tech, MS, Geology, Pittsburgh, various engineering consulting firms, past member of GSA Council). With an engineering background, he keyed in on sedimentary processes quickly and led both my graduate classes. He had an exemplary career with various engineering firms including his own, served on the GSA Council, and was North American President of an international engineering geology association. From my perspective, he could have made it anywhere, something I found true of many students every place I taught as a permanent and visiting faculty member, or when teaching industry short courses.

I contacted people around the country to get job leads so I could apply for other positions. I contacted John Sanders, and Carl Dunbar who was spending a year at KU as a visiting professor. In his letter back, Dunbar wrote “once emeritus, stay emeritus.” I also contacted Moore, Foley and Hambleton. Soon, I had a list of leads, but they did not interest me. I applied anyway.

A week later, Frederickson wrote a memo ordering me to cancel my summer plans because I was to teach summer school. I went to David Halliday, Dean the College of Science to object. Halliday explained course staffing was the responsibility of the department head and he could not intervene. He asked me to keep him informed as developments occurred.

I was also advised by friends to move key papers, rock collections, and personal items from my office to my apartment, which I did nights and weekends.

During late-February, a box was delivered to the entrance door of Freddie’s office but left in the Hall. One night I read the visible packing slip and it was a tumbler for polishing jewelry. The packing slip showed that the tumbler was charged to Frederickson’s PRF (Petroleum Research Fund) research grant. Two Sundays later, while packing things in my office, I heard a noise in the hall from Freddie’s office. As I left the building and passed his office, I noticed the box was missing. Frederickson was loading it into the trunk of his car while I entered the parking garage. I said, “Good Morning Dr Frederickson.” He jerked up, hit his head on the trunk lid and turned around red in the face, but said nothing. Clearly, this item was bought for personal use and I let Dean Halliday know.

I made arrangements to attend AAPG in Houston. I interviewed for a position at San Diego State University, but it was a poor match.

On my return, Frederickson sent a memo about my trip to AAPG. I decided there was a simple solution. I wrote a letter to the Dean with a copy to Frederickson resigning my appointment a week after the semester ended, and attached a copy of Frederickson’s latest memorandum. I did so even though I did not yet have a job offer. The Dean wrote back accepting the resignation.

Frederickson, however, was opposed and the dean reminded him one doesn’t ask someone who was just denied tenure to give up their summer research plans, and because a termination notice was given to me, the resignation was accepted automatically. Halliday told me later he also informed Frederickson that he would have to investigate one of his equipment purchases because there was a complaint. Halliday disclosed to me earlier that Frederickson had become a problem because he became close to Litchfield and was going past Deans and Vice Chancellors to get things outside normal protocol.

When I returned from AAPG, I received a phone call from Howard A. Meyerhoff (BS, Illinois, PhD, Columbia, geomorphology; Smith College, U.S Manpower Commission, Pennsylvania) about my application for a faculty appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. Howard was appointed chairman in January, 1963, cleared the decks, and fired all but one person. He invited me to interview. I flew to Philadelphia early on a Thursday in mid-April.

I arrived and we talked for two hours. Meyerhoff taught for many years at Smith College, mapped Puerto Rico for the U.S.G.S. and during World War II, moved to Washington to head the US Manpower Commission where he remained until December, 1962. He was recruited by Penn’s president, Gaylord Harnwell, to return to academe that winter. He explained that because he had no faculty for me to meet, I would meet with a special search committee consisting of the Provost, David R. Goddard (PhD, UCB; botanist; Univ. of Rochester, Penn, Member of National Academy of Science), Ray Nichols (Dean of Graduate School, Pulitzer Prize Historian), and Otto Springer (Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, PhD. Gottingen; Germanic literature).

We walked to College Hall where the offices of the College of Arts and Sciences were housed and went to the Dean’s conference room. Springer was already there and we were soon joined by Nichols. Goddard arrived five minutes later.

The provost did the interviewing and after explaining he knew a number of paleobotanists and learned about geology from them, he asked me to explain sedimentology. I talked about four components of sedimentology: clastics and carbonates, and ancient and Recent sedimentology. He understood.

He then pulled out my publication list and read each title. Goddard asked me to identify where I did the research, what was thesis related, what work was done after leaving Yale, and when I had done the work. I gave him answers (the first publication was work completed after leaving Yale). Clearly, he wanted to know whether I was coasting, or whether after leaving Yale I continued new research every place I worked and was contributing new science to my field.

After discussing other things, the Provost said, "George, if we hire you, we may not be able to hire a second sedimentologist for many years. What kind of background should we look for when making our selection?"

I explained that they should consider a person who either completed research and published about BOTH ancient and modern clastics, as well as EITHER ancient or modern carbonates, or someone who had worked on BOTH ancient and modern carbonates, and EITHER ancient or modern clastics.

Goddard picked up my publication list again and asked me to identify which of the four topics the papers were about. The first five he named were either ancient or modern clastics. Then he read the title of my Nature paper and I said "Ancient Carbonates." He stopped, looked at his watch, mumbled about having to leave for another appointment, said good bye to me, and asked Meyerhoff to come with him. I stayed with the two deans.

Howard returned shortly afterwards, and after finishing the interview with the deans, Howard and I left. Once out the door Howard told me, "George the Provost wants me to hire you. His comment was ‘Klein is the first Yale PhD I met in my entire career (about 25 years) who has published several papers besides his thesis within the first three years of completing his degree. Make sure he leaves town accepting our offer’."

I knew accepting an offer at Penn had its risks. Space was at a premium and being renovated. I had not met Lehman, the mineralogist who was staying, and had no idea who else was coming. There were many loose ends. I accepted the offer strictly because of the strength of reputation of the university. I believed that with Penn’s overall reputation behind me, I should be able to advance my career in geology and either make the place into something better, geology-wise, or find another place in time that would provide a better opportunity. I was only 30 years old, had a long career ahead of me, and was confident that the future would turn out positively for me. The nationwide trend in Higher Education was one of expansion and consequently, there would be other opportunities. All I needed to do was work hard, keep doing research, keep publishing, and do the things I was good at.