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.
