my junior year. However, I won and was also told that because I did so, I could not compete for it again.
To make up for my change in major, I spent the summer of 1952 at Harvard Summer School to complete a year’s freshman chemistry course in eight weeks. I passed, but not well. I also was disappointed in Harvard because it was clearly unfriendly to undergraduates. Nor did I care for Boston. The attitude of the people there reminded me of the ‘going home” attitude I observed in Australia.
When I chose to major in geology during 1952, the Wesleyan Department of Geology was small, consisting of two professors, a technician and a secretary. The first scientist on the Wesleyan faculty was John Johnston, a Bowdoin chemistry graduate with an interest in mineralogy. He taught Natural history, including geology between 1837 and 1873. The department was founded in 1867 when its most prominent early geology graduate, William North Rice, was appointed. Rice was the first person to earn a PhD in geology from a US university (Yale) around 1870. When Rice retired in 1918, he was replaced by William Foye as professor of geology. Foye was replaced in 1935 by Joe Webb Peoples (BS, Vanderbilt, MS. Northwestern, PhD Princeton, economic geology; Mahoning Coal Company, Lehigh, Wesleyan) who stayed until he retired during the mid-1970s. He was department chairman during my student days.
Rice, Foye, and Peoples were assisted by non-tenure track junior faculty. They included Gilbert Cady from 1909 to 1910 who went to the USGS to become a distinguished coal geologist, and Ralph Digman (1944-47) who founded the geology department at Binghampton University. Norman Herz taught at Wesleyan from 1950 to 1951 and went to the University of Georgia where eventually he became department chairman. Rueben J. Ross (BA, Princeton, PhD Yale, paleontology; Wesleyan, USGS, Colorado School of Mines) was hired on the faculty in 1948 and taught me Historical Geology. Rube left in 1952. He was replaced by Elroy P. Lehmann (BS, MS, PhD, Wisconsin, stratigraphy; Wesleyan, Mobil Oil eventually VP of Exploration) who left in 1955. John Rosenfeld served on the Wesleyan faculty from 1955 to 1957 before moving on to UCLA. In 1958, Joe Weitz (BA, Wesleyan, PhD, Yale; structural geology) was added and left in 1960 to go to Colorado State University. In 1959, Gordon P. Eaton (BA Wesleyan, PhD, Cal Tech, metamorphic petrology; Wesleyan, USGS, Texas A&M Dean and Provost, Iowa State University President, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory Director; U.S. Geological Survey – Director), Joe People’s star undergraduate major, returned and left in 1962 for the USGS.
In 1972, the department’s name was changed to ‘Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences’ and began to expand. It now has a faculty of eight tenure-track professors and two research professors.
During the fall of my junior year, I enrolled in Mineralogy, Stratigraphy and Sedimentation, Physics, Calculus, and Philosophy of Religion. It was a tough grind and Physics proved to be a particularly difficult course. I liked the Stratigraphy and Sedimentation course, and decided that if the opportunity came, I should pursue a career in sedimentation, or as it is now called, sedimentology. I earned B’s in all my courses except Physics where I scraped by with a D minus.
I still sang in the Wesleyan Choir. During my junior year, our exchange arrangement was with Pembroke College in Providence RI (they later merged into Brown University). They came to Wesleyan first and on the Saturday afternoon when they arrived, we completed a rehearsal. Because by this time I was an officer of the choir, I had certain duties to complete after the rehearsal. I witnessed a conversation between the choir director, Dick Winslow, and the chapel organist, Bill Prentice. Winslow said with a panicked look on his face, "They can't sing!"
The concert took place that evening and a party was held after-wards. Some of the choir members really liked those Pembroke ladies. One of my colleagues put it well when he mentioned that those girls couldn't sing but they sure could make out.
The following Tuesday, the student newspaper appeared and one of my buddies at the John Wesley Club was its music critic. He reviewed the concert and severely criticized the Pembroke ladies for their inability to sing. Because the Pembroke choir had a high opinion of themselves, they arranged for the paper to mail them the issue with that review. On arrival at the Pembroke campus the following Saturday, we received a frosty welcome and a few choice words were exchanged. Suddenly the warmth and friendliness of the ladies disappeared.
Several of my choir colleagues were furious and wrote harsh letters to the student paper about the critical review and how it undermined their socializing. All were published, and so was a reply by the reviewer. He provided a primer on reviews and concluded by writing, "Always remember a review is the opinion of the reviewer only." I used that comment during later years when reviewing scientific manuscripts for journals or book publishers, proposals for funding agencies, or writing book reviews for scientific journals.
During the Spring Semester, 1953, I took petrology, structural geology, second semester physics, second semester calculus, and a seminar in Marine Ecology. Again, Physics was a struggle although I did well when we reviewed optics and acoustics. Still, I earned a D. I did better in the other courses, earning a mix of B’s and “A’s”.
The Marine Ecology seminar was basically a tutorial and I did well. The instructor, Dr. Haffner, gave me some interesting advice. He advised that when I started publishing papers, I should stop, reassess, and write a summary review paper and cite my own papers extensively. I discovered when doing so that more people read such review papers than the original detailed one.
During spring vacation, we took a one-week field trip to southern New York State and the coal mining regions of eastern Pennsylvania, including a trip down a mine-shaft to examine underground operations. Prior to the spring field trip, we went on afternoon field trips in the Connecticut Valley. During every class before the field trip, Joe Peoples reminded us to bring hand lenses on the spring trip, which we did.
The first stop on the spring trip was in the Peekskill Norite. After using our rock hammers to get samples, we peered at them with our hand lenses. However, “Doc’ Peoples was wandering around with a sheepish look on his face. He called us together and said, “Gentlemen, I have a confession to make. After haranguing you all week about bringing hand lenses, I left mine at home. Can I borrow one of yours please?”
We traveled in two cars. I rode with Doc Peoples. On the way back from Pennsylvania, we drove past New York City to drop people off so they could take trains home to visit their parents. I rode to Middletown because my parents were in Europe. I used the time to inquire about how to develop a career in geology, what my options were, what would be required to get there, and above all, what it would take to be successful. He answered all my questions and gave me lots of good advice. It was a good mentoring session. Joe Peoples taught me not only valuable things I would not have learned any other way, but also how to develop mentoring skills in the future.
After my parents returned from Europe they called. My sister, Marianne, was getting married in July to someone I had yet to meet. He was H. George Mandel, a Yale PhD in chemistry, who was an assistant professor of pharmacology at George Washington University Medical School. George was born in Germany. His father had been a director of the Deutsche Bank, but left in the late 1930’s. His parents lived in Scarsdale, NY, and were both pretty haughty and not the most pleasant people to know. Fortunately, Yale had rounded and humanized George Mandel and he was, in fact, a reasonable gent.
I attended their wedding where Georges Mandel’s mother was trying to match me to some of the daughters of her friends. They were very high maintenance and didn’t interest me. George’s mother berated me on a regular basis but her continued efforts to pair me up always ended in failure, for her.
That summer, I took a required geology field camp to learn geological mapping and field methods. I enrolled at Northwestern’s field camp because their course started in latest July and ended just before Labor Day. That enabled me to first accept a summer job as an engineering helper with the Connecticut Highway Department. The state was building a highway bridge in Middletown. My job was to stand next to a steam-driven
