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
