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
