My 1968 Chevelle suffered a setback in 1972.  It needed a valve job and I didn’t want to pay for the work.  I had driven it more than 100,000 miles in three years but wasn’t exactly sure because the odometer cable broke after the first year (36,000 miles).  I was too cheap or too broke to replace the cable.  The Chevy dealer in Dekalb offered me $1,500 on a trade for a new 1972 Chevette, a new model that year, a blue 3-speed manual transmission, a subcompact powered by a 4-cylinder aluminum engine.  I’ve always wondered if the Chevy dealer informed prospective buyers of the odometer and valve problems with the Chevelle.  I was drawn by the price of the Chevette ($500 cash difference on the trade), but ultimately I made a poor choice—the vehicle lacked air conditioning (we were moving to Texas), it was terribly underpowered, and it later proved to be mechanically unreliable.

Houston, Texas

That September, Irene and I drove to our new home in Houston, a KOA campground. Our intention was to camp for a week or two until I snagged a lucrative job with Big Oil.  Our residence, a green 10 X 10 ft canvas tent, was supplemented with cots and sleeping bags, and a two-burner Coleman stove.  Our fellow campers, seniors with huge RVs, were very friendly and gave us a lot of support.  We even received mail at the front office.  I donned my sport coat and tie most workday mornings and headed downtown.  The job situation for geologists was grim in the fall and winter of 1972-1973, but Texas was new to us, and we were two optimistic young Midwesterners willing to tolerate a tent until the right job appeared.  It was all very exciting: palm trees, people who spoke strangely, and lots of cockroaches.  We didn’t worry about finding work—it would just appear one day—and knew we would ultimately get jobs, especially Irene who was far more intelligent and employable than me.  She had a suite of skills suited to the office environment: typing, administration, shorthand, management, leadership.

We had friends in Houston too, fellow geology grads and spouses who had already moved there to find jobs:  Harvey and Darr Pokorny, Dave and Bev Carlson, and others.  Harvey and Dave found work with Geophysical Service Inc., a subsidiary of Texas Instruments, a company that processed seismic data for petroleum exploration.  Dave and Harvey were geophysically inclined and very helpful in providing job leads for me.

For the most part, our early Houston experience was enjoyable.  The weather was warm and humid, much different from what we were accustomed to.  It was a novelty to see tiny climbing frogs with suction feet on the walls of the KOA shower room, drive-through liquor stores selling drinks in plastic cups to go, and Tex-Mex.  From the beginning though, it was clear to both of us that Texas was a temporary way station on the road to professional success, a place to start my career, and hopefully Irene’s too.  We never intended to live out our lives there.  The incessant racism, nouveau riche mentality, religiosity, and general lack of sophistication grated on us.  I recall an incident at a local supermarket one Sunday when I tried buying a broom but couldn’t because law prohibited purchasing work-related items on the Sabbath.  We both ultimately wanted to continue our studies, get doctorates, and live in the West.  I was now an academic snob with a desire to live in the mountains.  After a few weeks of tent life, it became clear that getting an oil company job wouldn’t be easy.  I started interviewing “service companies”, outfits that did business with Big Oil—well logging, digital seismic processing, remote sensing, and descriptive stratigraphic analysis.  Not even a nibble after a month.

It was the thunderstorm that did it, a deluge, 2-3 inches in one night with attendant wind and lightning, battering our little tent and scaring us.  Our tent survived but our patience didn’t—especially Irene’s—and we decided to get an apartment and temporary jobs.  When I finally dismantled the tent and folded the canvas floor thousands of little creatures revealed themselves under its moldy exterior, an insect village.  We weren’t in immediate financial stress and could afford a one bedroom/one bath apartment in a nearby apartment complex off Fondren Road and Bellaire Boulevard just outside the 810 Beltway.  We would be close to our friends in the progressive southwest side, as we affectionately called the neighborhood.  A delivery truck deposited a new mattress and box spring, and several scavenging missions to garage sales provided the rest.  My favorite acquisition was a 1930’s sofa, a blue paisley 3-seater, advertised in the local “penny pincher” press.  Harvey, Dave, and I drove in my Chevette to some distant neighborhood in east Houston one evening, and I gave a friendly older lady a $15 check.  It took the three of us to load the couch onto the roof of the Chevette (no luggage rack). We secured it with rope and drove across town to our apartment.  I wish I had a photo of that adventure, three guys in an underpowered subcompact with a couch on the roof!

About that time, I found my first job as a Texan.  Foley’s Department Store in the Southwest Plaza shopping mall was looking for a sales clerk in the book and music department.  When I saw the ad in the Houston chronicle, I edited my resume by removing the MS degree and changing my life’s goal to retail sales.  I headed to Foley’s, secured an interview with the manager, and got a job the same day.  I worked about 30 hours a week.  This schedule allowed time to continue my search for a position in the “oil patch”.  The job was easy.  I learned the cash register system, stocked shelves with new books and records (no tapes in 1973), and sold merchandise.  Most sales involved contemporary music and basic audio paraphernalia.  The only memorable incident from my retail sales career occurred about 4 months into the job while I was arranging shelves of books in the stockroom.  The shelves occupied an entire wall, maybe 20 feet long and up to the ceiling with books, hundreds of them waiting to fill the shelves in the sales area.  I was on a ladder several rungs up near the top shelf when the entire structure collapsed in front of me and crashed to the floor.  My ladder was pushed forward but stayed upright as books piled up along the bottom two rungs.  I was lucky.  I wasn’t blamed for the incident, especially since previous complaints about the stability of the shelving were ignored by the maintenance staff.  I think the manager was relieved I wasn’t injured.

Irene soon found a great job at MD Anderson Cancer Hospital in south Houston.  She was hired as a personal assistant to a famous cancer researcher there, to help him with various tasks.  Irene always found work easily.

The stockroom episode soon ended my career as a sales associate at Foley’s.  I was on the verge of snagging my first position in the geosciences with Seismic and Digital Concepts, a small geophysical processing firm owned and managed by brothers, Tom and Tim Hollingsworth.  I had answered an ad in the Houston Chronicle for an entry level position as a processing geophysicist.  The job entailed analyzing raw digital data tapes of acoustic soundings of subsurface rock layers to identify structures that might hold petroleum.  Seismic sections were the end products, filtered and convoluted cross sections of prospective areas used by oil and gas companies on the prowl for petroleum.  This was entry-level geophysics.

I called SDC and arranged for an interview with brother Tom, the president.  The firm was located just inside Loop 810 a few miles east of our apartment in an industrial area.  Tom was cordial, a tall guy with an educated Texas drawl, gold cufflinks and friendly manner.  He explained the work, my responsibilities, and the salary (marginal at the time at $575/month).  Tom further explained that I needed to pass a standardized test and arranged for me to take it at a private facility the next day.  He seemed motivated to hire someone soon.  I was motivated to be that someone!  I appeared at the testing facility the next morning and met the only other applicant for a position at SDC, a young woman, ________ with a degree in geophysics from a northern university.  The test was a farce, a basic intelligence identifier without a single geophysical or geological question.  We joked about it afterward and apparently passed because we received calls from Tom later that day.  We both started work the following Monday morning, first filling out the required paperwork, meeting the rest of the crew, and then getting some surprises.  It was early May 1973.  The work day was 9 hours long, from 8 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through Friday, and 8 am to 1 pm on Saturday.  I was shocked!  It was slave labor—a mandatory 50-hour work week.  Nothing was said about that during the interview, and I never thought to ask.  I got another surprise, a few days later when I discovered that we had to work on Memorial Day.  As you can imagine, the staff was a disgruntled lot, a team of highly educated people treated like inmates in a Texas prison.  Two colleagues quit after the first week I was there.  I discovered that my female colleague, hired the same day, was only paid $500/month for the same work and job title.

Tim Holllingsworth was the other half of SDC, the antithesis of his brother, a chain-smoking, jeans wearing, beer drinking workaholic (Lone Star was his beverage of choice) who kept the computer running.  He seemed to work endlessly.  He was in the computer room when I arrived in the morning and remained there after I left in the late afternoon always with a beer nearby.  He would spend the lunch hour at a bar next door or drive his gold-colored Cadillac convertible to other beer halls nearby.  Tom and Tim had matching Cadillacs, a sure sign of material success in 1970’s Houston.

The work at SDC was easy.  I input data and parameters into standard computer processing programs to convert raw acoustic data into subsurface cross sections of petroleum-producing regions.  I labored on data from the Gulf of Mexico, the barrens of central Australia, and Louisiana coastal plain.  The raw seismic data were recorded on “geophones” that received signals from an energy source such as down-hole dynamite or a vibroseis truck.  Vibroseis trucks produced a low frequency acoustic signal by thumping a large pad on the ground to produce intense vibrations.  They were like road graders with enormous pads instead of blades.  They were far less destructive than detonating underground explosions.  In the dynamite days, farmers legitimately complained that underground explosions would scare livestock, damage groundwater sources, and break windows.  Hundreds of geophones connected by wire were arranged in a long line, sometimes a thousand or more feet in length, and electronically tied to a computer in an instrument truck.  Signals were compiled into a single computer file and sent to us for processing.  Quite a technologic fete actually.

Despite my negative comments about Texas and Houston, I have many fond memories of our experience there.  Saturday evenings were usually spent with our friends either watching our favorite sitcoms or playing board games.  Harvey really enjoyed scrabble.  Baggins, their Basset hound, was a loveable, low-legged sausage, who loved to eat anything not tied down.  On one occasion, he swallowed a Nerf ball and had to be taken to the doggie emergency room where the object was surgically removed.  Harvey and Darr Pokorny were J. R. R. Tolkien fans and named their children after characters in his trilogy, especially Hobbits.  Dave Carlson was forever tinkering with his TR-3.  I enjoyed riding in it on the rare occasions it was roadworthy.  We attended a Bob Dylan concert in Dallas one weekend and flew there via an infant Southwest Airlines—I think they had 3 planes—on Friday evening in a thunderstorm.  That was the scariest flight I ever experienced.  The attendants generously served free alcohol before we left Houston, but were strapped in for the short flight.  Everyone was looped and seemed to enjoy the rollercoaster ride.  Dylan had just gone electric and performed with The Band, mostly to cheers.  A few traditionalists were unhappy and booed the performance.

Once, a series of thunderstorms rolled through Houston, one after another, for a full day and night, dumping nearly two feet of rain on the city.  A stationary low pressure system was positioned in the Gulf, and moist air produced storm after storm immobilizing the city.  I had never seen rain like that before.  The “bayous”—concrete urban drainage systems—were filled to their limit, up to 50 or more feet deep with tons of floating debris carried with the flow, piling up against bridges and spilling over onto the roadways.  Snow fell around Christmas time, and as you might imagine, the city came to a standstill.  The 4 inches of wet white stuff melted by 10 am, but I was the only geophysical processor to show up at the office that day.  The locals thought we had a blizzard.

I enjoyed the fresh seafood and weekend crab boils on the beach.  We threw baited lines into the surf and waited for the greedy critters to attach themselves to the tasty tidbit.  We’d pull in the line, dislodge the little guys, dump them in the boiling water, and enjoy a seafood feast with cold beer. 

Dallas, Texas

I tolerated SDC and the long work weeks for six months but finally got a break.  Harvey Pokorny informed me that GSI was hiring geologists for their Plano (a Dallas suburb) office to do seismic processing and interpretation.  I applied for a position immediately, was flown to Dallas for an interview, and soon received a offer.  The work would be similar to SDC but the salary was much better ($875/month), and I would work for a large international company.  I’d get proper training, improve my resume, and place myself in a front row seat for later advancement.  GSI promised new hires that they would do geologic interpretation of seismic data.  I would also get discounts on Texas Instruments electronic products!  GSI was hiring about 20 geologists because they had just contracted to do a huge offshore seismic processing job along the African coast.  I never understood why GSI wanted to hire geologists to do geophysical work.  Maybe they thought geophysicists were too expensive, or that geologists would be more creative.  Texas Instruments had recently built a fast super computer, a large mainframe system, and developed new software to process seismic records quickly and efficiently.  GSI was in the forefront of the industry.

I was in the big time.  GSI paid for our move to Dallas.  Neptune movers showed up at our apartment in Houston and boxed and loaded everything including our 40-year-old couch, my rock collection, a three-foot southern pine in a large wooden nail barrel, and our coffee table, a wooden spindle for commercial cable transport.  Irene and I realized we would miss Houston.  We both knew that Dallas was a very conservative city, rather formal and dressy, and dripping with religiosity.  Women wore tons of makeup and dressed up to go to the supermarket.  Churches were plentiful.  Shops were closed on Sunday and the Gulf was 250 miles away.  Houston was a party town with more to do.  We found an apartment in Richardson, Texas just north of Loop 635, west of the North Central Expressway, and six miles from the nearest liquor store in north Dallas.  We were in a “dry” (Collin) County.   Worst of all, Dallas was hot with an average summer temperature approaching 100 degrees, and our Chevette lacked air conditioning.  But we moved there in the Fall of 1974 and had months to prepare for the oven.

I was still processing seismic data but doing it in a more professional environment with managers and supervisors who maintained better relationships with their employees.  I met lasting friends at GSI, fellow geologists who were hired at the same time.  Jim Sickles was from Petaluma, California, a Sonoma State graduate who did a thesis on volcanic rocks in the Coast Ranges of northern California.  He had a penchant for antique collecting.  Ken Kittleson was nicknamed Hawkeye.  He was from small town Iowa, a straight shooter, open and honest, with a friendly Midwestern accent and a love of weekend nightclubbing.  Ken was an uncomplicated guy and extremely intelligent, a geophysicist from Iowa State University with a strong background in math.  Others were equally friendly and we got along well in the open office.  Seismic processing was boring but we were good at it even though we wanted to interpret the data ourselves rather than prepare it for others to interpret.  We exceeded deadlines and completed jobs error free.  Because GSI was such a large company, hundreds of computer “batch” jobs were submitted daily and run during the night shift.  The graveyard shift operator would call me at 2 or 3 am telling me that my job failed.  We would hash over the error message on the phone and resubmit the job.  Most of the time that solved the problem, but occasionally I would hastily dress and head to the office and deal with a computer processing problem.

Our shop was a large open area, without privacy, and we talked steadily while punching paper tapes with processing commands.  Rubber band fights and practical jokes were common.  The rare visitor might grimace, shocked to witness an advancing army of 10 geologists, rubber bands cocked, invading an adjacent workroom while firing indiscriminately.  Our undisciplined behavior broke the office boredom and was tolerated by management because we were always ahead of schedule.

I was suddenly gripped by breathing problems one day, gasping for air and feeling very uncomfortable.  I had smoked a pack of Winstons or Marlboros steadily for 8 years, but had recently reduced my habit to a half-pack of True cigarettes daily.  Trues were a flavorless, low tar and nicotine brand, directed to the health conscious smoker.  I would quit entirely within a month and blamed cigarettes, my job, and Texas weather for my discomfort.  I visited two doctors but neither correctly diagnosed my problem.  One doc thought my problem was psychological, an artifact of a bad attitude.  He was an ex-army MD.  The other doc was just stymied.

During spring, 1974, Dallas heated up and opportunities for off-duty entertainment were limited.  Shopping, garage sales, museums, TV, and the occasional day trip to funky Texas towns were the mainstays of weekends.  The Texas mindset started to weigh on us.  I had started applying to doctoral programs in geology and was accepted at Syracuse University.  Dr. Jim Brower, a paleontologist and quantitative stratigrapher in the geology department started communicating with me.  I also applied to several western state geological surveys for a summer job.  The sooner we left Dallas the better.  I wrote to Merlin Tipton, the South Dakota State Geologist in Vermillion, and was offered a summer job as a groundwater geologist to complete municipal water projects.

By Spring 1974, some of my colleagues, part of the GSI hiring frenzy, started leaving for better pastures.  The Arab oil embargo was having an effect on the patriotism of oil company executives, and domestic exploration opportunities were improving.  The litany of farewell lunches had started at GSI.  Our department had about one a week for several weeks, and the festivities occasionally got out of hand.  At one such event—I can’t recall who left—we met at a chain pizza parlor near the office for beer and lunch to bid adieu to our departing friend.  Beer was probably the only alcoholic beverage available in retail establishments in the area.  Our immediate supervisor, Bill McBride, was there.  He was very tolerant and appreciated our work. He was a party animal himself from the old school.  He could chug brews with the most proficient recent college grads.  There were about 25 of us, occupying two long parallel tables.  The restaurant manger was happy to have the extra business, even though we were a bit rowdy.  By 2:00 pm the other tables had emptied out of disgust or because of work commitments, except for an enthusiastic couple who seemed to enjoy our companionship.  One of my most inebriated colleagues offered to fill a hat with dollars if the woman would disrobe and do a short dance on one of the tables.  Everyone enthusiastically participated in the event and the hat filled quickly.  By this time, the manager had locked all the doors and installed a “closed” sign on the front door.  A short disagreement arose when the definition of “naked” was discussed.  The problem was quickly resolved, and the woman briefly exposed herself to the delight of the audience.  The couple left shortly after that at least $100 richer.  I left the restaurant about 10 pm to the din of the ongoing party.  Shortly after returning home, I received my nightly call from the computer operator informing me that my batch job had failed.  I had to head to the office.

Burbank and Wolsey, South Dakota

By the end of May, Irene and I ended our Texas identities.  We packed our belongings and readied ourselves for the trip north.  I can’t even recall my farewell party.  By that time, so many geologists were leaving that goodbye parties had doubled up and toasts had to be shared.  GSI had erred in hiring geologists to do geophysical work.  Even some of the geophysicists were leaving for greener pastures and higher pay.  There was a trend in the early 1970’s to jump ship for higher pay when jobs were available—just like today.  Unfortunately, this behavior is a sign that money is more important than intellectual stimulation or happiness.  Much later, I had friends who would change jobs once or twice a year.  They made more money that I did, but were periodically laid off and played catch up, selling shoes in Midland or Oklahoma City to make ends meet between high paying gigs.  In the long run I feel that I was better off.  I loved my work and had a career position with a dependable retirement income.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Irene and I drove to Colorado to purchase several cases of Coors beer and then to Rapid City to visit friends.  Coors at that time was brewed in Golden and sold only in Colorado and Montana.  The beer seemed to have some kind of mystic feeling for me and my friends.  We didn’t realize until later that the Coors family was an extremely right-wing clan.  We then headed to the southeast corner of South Dakota, to Vermillion, home of the University of South Dakota and the State Geological Survey, our temporary home for the summer of 1974.  We found a small cottage to rent for next to nothing in nearby Burbank, a tiny burg, five miles southeast of Vermillion, on Missouri River bottom land, a railroad siding with about 50 people, a dozen buildings, and Wimp’s Bar. We were two doors from Wimp’s, the only functioning business in town, and made the obligatory walk there for a Friday catfish fry or just a beer.

Our place was a small, one bedroom, white clapboard, single story dwelling that hadn’t been rented for some time. It was in a state of disrepair.  Irene and I got to work and cleaned the place, grumbling at the owners while we worked.  I guess they were embarrassed at the condition of the place but impressed by us.  They started bringing over fresh-plucked chickens and homemade canned fruits and veggies. We soon stopped grumbling.  There is nothing better tasting than a free range farm chicken that spent its life eating bugs and worms in the back 40.  Our place had a large yard, so we borrowed our landlord’s rototiller and started planting a garden.  Irene had her sewing machine and crafted a cover for our paisley couch and new outfits for our next venue in New York.

My job involved spending most work weeks in a motel on the road, primarily in Huron, about 150 miles north of Vermilion, a three hour drive through East River country—meaning east of the Missouri River, a post glacial landscape.  My task was to identify an alternative water supply for the town of Wolsey, South Dakota.  Wolsey is about 15 miles west of Huron on US highway 14 just after the highway turns north.  Wolsey is nestled in an agricultural setting bestowed with rich soils that formed from events that occurred 10,000 years ago as the Wisconsin ice sheets receded northward into Canada.  Glacial deposits erased an earlier landscape of Cretaceous black shale, the Pierre Shale, named for the capital city of South Dakota, Pierre (for some historic reason, pronounced Peer).  Wolsey municipal water was derived from wells drilled into the Dakota Sandstone, an artesian aquifer about 1,000 feet below the surface immediately under the Pierre Shale.  Groundwater geologists call this stuff “fossil water” because Dakota water has lain hidden in its reservoir for several million years.  It was sourced in the Black Hills and other mountain ranges to the west where the Dakota was uplifted to the surface and exposed to recharge from rain and snow.  The Dakota is an artesian aquifer because it’s under pressure, built up over the eons as water was pushed farther and farther away from the recharge area.  When the first well encountered the Dakota in 1904 near Woonsocket, water literally exploded out of the well to the surface and rose to a height of 150 feet like an oil gusher.  In other words, the “hydraulic head” was well over a thousand feet above the formation (in the well bottom).  So many wells have been drilled into the Dakota in 120 years of extraction, that today the hydraulic head is hundreds of feet below ground within the well bore.

The only tinge of unhappiness in Wolsey was related to that water.  I quote the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website (2015):  “Health concerns regarding sulfate in drinking water have been raised because of reports that diarrhea may be associated with the ingestion of water containing high levels of sulfate.  Of particular concern are groups within the general population that may be at greater risk from the laxative effects of sulfate when they experience an abrupt change from drinking water with low sulfate concentrations to drinking water with high sulfate concentrations.”  Need I say more?

The community of Wolsey and the State of South Dakota paid for the drilling program.  Our responsibility was to find a new source of water from the only likely candidate, the overlying glacial drift.  The Pierre Shale is too impermeable to provide adequate water resources.  The surface deposits around Wolsey consisted of hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, poorly to well-sorted glacial debris, deposited from the receding continental ice sheets.  The scientific question was twofold: (1) is there enough water volume to quench the thirst of 200 residents, and (2) is the water quality acceptable for consumption?  The town could not afford to drill deep wells into the ancient Paleozoic strata several thousand feet below the Dakota or to build a water purification plant.  My task was to drill test wells into the glacial drift to identify sand aquifers and to determine water quality.  I worked with a competent crew, older undergraduates, summer hands like me to run a truck-mounted drill rig with the capacity to penetrate 500 feet of soft sediment.  We sampled well water with a hand pump and described and bagged “well cuttings” at the wellhead for future analysis.  Samples were usually taken every 10 feet of drilling depth.  I also visited local farmers with shallow water wells in the glacial sands and collected samples of their water to compile a local well inventory of name, location, depth, and chemical analyses.

My fellow workers were hardworking and fun, especially considering the heat.  At least 20 days were over 100 degrees that summer.  We doused two grass fires from the truck catalytic converter and drilled 53 wells.  Our goal for each well—it took about a day to drill one—was to penetrate the Pierre Shale underlying the glacial sediments.  We immediately knew when the shale bed was reached because drilling slowed and the cuttings contained shale chips.  My supervisor, Assad Barrari, visited about once a week and provided suggestions and support. He was a patient, soft spoken Iranian American who had supervised more than 20 municipal studies.

The underlying pre-glacial topography fascinated me.  I spent my early years consumed with reading about the glaciers of northern Illinois, the moraines, eskers, and sand sheets, and here I was leading a crew and analyzing the same ice sculptured sediments 600 miles to the northwest. The Pleistocene glacial sediment varied in thickness from less than 50 to more than 300 feet.  The pre-glacial topography of the Wolsey area consisted of hills and incised river valleys, in contrast to the relatively flat terrain elsewhere.  When I visited farmers in the area to identify and sample their domestic wells, I was often surprised to find shallow (30 to 50 ft depths) wells near hog or cattle pens.  Some of these wells may have been contaminated with nitrates or bacteria.  Later, when analyses were completed, the SDGS contacted farmers with contaminated wells.

Irene and I  went to drive-in movies, farm sales, and local cafes on the weekends.  We visited our landlords for dinner and beer.  They were pretty dedicated beer drinkers.  It was common to have a case of empty beer cans on the dining room table by the end of the evening.  Pabst Blue Ribbon was the standard at $4.00/case.

The Great Plains is noted for severe thunderstorms, and we had several that summer.  Late one evening, Irene and I and our neighbors were in their basement during a power outage.  The wind was gusting and the lightning was loud and frequent.  The local Vermillion radio station had broadcasted a tornado watch for the area.  Next morning I discovered a large tree branch resting on the roof of my SDGS vehicle during the storm, directly hitting the roof, denting it and cracking the windshield in two places.

Later that summer Jim Sickles visited us on his way to California.  He had finally left GSI and was headed west to visit family and find a new job.  He was done with geophysical computer processing and was applying for energy jobs in Denver.  He showed up in a crammed VW bug and was impressed with Burbank and Wimps.

By the end of the summer I completed the Wolsey work and another short rural water supply project near Brookings, South Dakota.  Wolsey was later published as SDGS Special Report 63, Ground-Water Investigation of the City of Wolsey, 1976, by T.S. Dyman and A. Barrari, my first published report.  It was time to head to Syracuse to begin my PhD program in geology.

Syracuse, New York

Irene and I stopped in Illinois to visit family.  The move to New York was mostly uneventful.  I don’t remember much about the drive, the mental images are mostly long gone.  One tidbit of the trip does stand out though, probably because of the hilarity and absurdity of the actual experience.  We were in the Chevette driving east on the Ohio Turnpike south of Cleveland.  As we passed a suburban exit ramp, I spotted several police cars with lights flashing on the shoulder of the freeway on our left.  Police had stopped a vehicle and were searching it in a way that looked familiar to me.  It was definitely a drug bust, and some poor devil was standing next to his vehicle, both hands on the roof of his car as the search was underway.  After we passed the scene, I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed that one of the police cars, an unmarked one typically used by detectives, had left the scene and entered the flow of traffic behind us.  The vehicle followed us closely for a quarter mile when a portable magnetic flasher was placed on the roof and illuminated.  At that moment I realized we had a problem and pulled over onto the shoulder.  Two detectives, sporting coats and ties exited the vehicle from both sides and approached us.  As I rolled down the window, I could feel myself getting angry.  We were carrying our rather large potted plants on the back seat, one of which, a false aralia (Dizygotheca elegantissima), a slender stemmed tropical perennial with leaves that grow in a circle at the tops of stems so that they look like fingers.

Aralia looks very similar to hemp from a distance.  It could be seen clearly through our rear window.  By the time the officer on my left reached my door, his partner had alerted him to the mistake.  They both apologized profusely and admitted that the recent “bust” had played a part in their decision to stop us.  They were on an arrest high.  “So it goes”, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. As I think back on that incident, I get even angrier at the outlandish drug laws of the 1970’s that affected everyone, especially the poor fellas serving five to ten for possession of more than an ounce of weed.

Autumn in New England is a spectacular multicolored panorama, and 1974 seemed like an especially good year.  The first six weeks in Syracuse were beautiful, with clear blue skies and red, brown, and yellow hills basking in the sunshine.  We were warned that from November to May, the weather in Syracuse would be depressing, mainly cold, cloudy days with rain or snow.  We moved into our one bedroom apartment in married student housing in the Drumlins section of campus.  Drumlins are gravel ridges formed by advancing glaciers, unsorted glacial debris aligned by the motion of ice.  The ridges were covered in trees forming a picturesque backdrop to the campus and a local country club golf course.  Syracuse was established in 1870 and has a stately campus with a large grassy commons adjacent to the geology building, Heroy Geological Observatory.

In early October, during the wave of brilliant sunny weather, my parents came for a visit.  I dreaded it of course, because my father, as an older adult, was a difficult person, a demanding, irritable, finicky individual who needed a lot of attention.  Not a good situation since I was trying to establish myself in the geology department.  I didn’t have the time or patience to deal with Ted Senior, but I was stuck.  We visited local tourist sites and natural features in our spare time and, by the third day, it became pretty stressful for us.  We were eating dinner that evening in our apartment, custom made for his satisfaction, when he said something like “gimme the potatoes”. That was it.  Irene simply said “you should say please”.  I didn’t blame her.  He was insulted that someone would question his behavior and ceased to communicate with us.  They left the next morning.  I felt sorry for my Mom who was stuck with him and would suffer the brunt of his long-lasting anger.

The geology department offered a regional field trip before classes started, a two-day journey to the Adirondacks to visit some classic geologic localities, accretionary terranes, ultramafic bodies, a garnet mine, and some metamorphic rocks that had been treated violently by high temperatures and pressures deep underground.  The geology of New England was new to me and much different from Illinois and Texas.  I signed up for glacial geomorphology, Fortran computer programming, geostatistics, and principals of paleontology.  Syracuse required two “tools” for a PhD degree, usually fulfilled with foreign languages such as German or French, but in the geology department, computer programming and statistics or probability could be substituted for the language requirement.  That rule was later modified or eliminated when auto translation devices and international journals in English appeared.  I chose Fortran and statistics.  My four years of high school Latin wouldn’t help much since journals weren’t written in Latin.  Geostatistics would help me with the statistics qualifying exam scheduled for the early Spring.  As  the dreary weather settled in, I buckled down.

Fellow graduate students come to mind when I think of Syracuse.  Jack, a Jewish guy from New York City, was just completing his PhD in structural geology that year.  His mother told him that since he was now done with his doctorate, he could start medical school!  Hans was an outspoken, ready-to-ridicule, straight-in-your-face German guy who was also just starting the program.  He was fun to drink with.  It took a lot to get him drunk, but he usually succeeded in reaching that goal.  I recall searching for him one night after a party on campus, ultimately finding him passed out in some shrubbery outside the house of the friends we were visiting.

Charlie Bartberger is the only fellow Syracuse grad student I remain in touch with.  He completed a dissertation in sedimentology under Dr Bryce Hand.  Bart and I have stayed in touch over the years, and share common moments of nostalgia over events those many years ago.  Stuart M seemed to have made a career out of grad school.  He was ABD (all but dissertation) and spent most of his time working as a mechanic specializing in Chevy Suburbans rather than writing about metamorphic rocks in the Adirondacks.  We never really stayed in touch but met some years later in Driggs, Idaho, where he had a log cabin.  He ultimately finished his dissertation.

Mike B and Mike G were my two favorite “Mikes” at Syracuse.  Both were MS students from the east, friendly guys, both very smart and perceptive.  They became successful petroleum geologists.  I recall the departmental seminar that Mike Belotti gave one afternoon, one of the most ingenious presentations I had ever heard, a sedimentologic talk on water-formed structures, sand bars, levees, chutes, meandering channel patterns, and dune forms, all on a scale of centimeters rather than meters and kilometers.  He photographed mud and silt layers along the sidewalk in front of his apartment after a rainstorm.  Mike Greico and I shared an office together.  Mike G wrote a thesis on glacial till fabrics in drumlins and moraines near campus.  His field expenses were minimal.  We often joked about our third office mate, Pat, a young woman in her late 20s who was working on an MA in geology (not an MS).  She would show up occasionally to check her mail and ace tests without a lick of office presence.

The department faculty was pretty conservative, an old school bunch of highly-esteemed guys—yes, they were all guys back then.  The only young faculty member was Wally Downs.  I recall Wally’s wife complaining once at a grad student party that the Chairman’s wife had told faculty wives they should spend their time helping their husbands advance their careers rather than their own.  The women’s liberation movement was starting then.  I need to give Wally credit.  He would show up at grad student events when no other faculty member appeared.  He had students over for beers too.  I would later meet (and work with) Wally at the USGS.

Dr Dirk D, an old Dutchman, a metamorphic petrologist had worked in the Adirondacks for much of his career.  We never saw much of him.  Dr Dan Merriam was the department chair, a friendly guy in a God-awful job dealing with tenured fellow faculty.  Dan was a mathematical geologist, a separate discipline back then and a new field of study dealing with computers, statistics, and quantitative techniques to solve geologic problems.  He published several books on the subject and rode the initial wave of computer applications in the earth sciences.  He was a good guy to know as it later turned out.  Dr Jim Brower was my favorite.  He was an easy going, likeable guy with a rye sense of humor.  He was the departmental paleontologist and a mathematical geologist in his by own right.  He knew his matrix algebra well and had us dissect the most complicated multivariate statistical techniques by performing them by hand with calculators so we would understand them clearly before using them in computer programs.  One of his grants at the time was from the Department of Defense to study the flight dynamics of pterodactyls, a family of soaring dinosaurs.  The air force was interested in studying these creatures in the hopes of identifying new flight techniques.  I assisted him on a project to quantify fossil assemblage zones using presence-absence data and a concept he referred to as relative biostratigraphic values (RBVs).  I helped him gather and analyze data.   He later added my name to a couple of papers he wrote on the subject.

Dr Ernie Muller was another old schooler, a very likeable one, an exceptionally organized fellow and devoted professor, a bit formal but sincere.  He was the most careful grader I ever encountered in graduate school.  He needed weeks to grade papers and tests but carefully evaluated every sentence, obviously taking countless hours to complete the tasks.  Our first assignment in his geomorphology class was to write a paragraph about our favorite geomorphic feature.  Of course, he was trying to identify our writing skills in order to improve them.  I chose the Nebraska Sand Hills, a region of sand dunes in western and central Nebraska that always fascinated me, a rather obscure choice considering we were in New York.  He was impressed with my selection, my writing skills, and my rationale for choosing the area.  A thank you goes to Geneva High School English teachers!

I did well at Syracuse because I was a hard worker.  I enjoyed the environment, the lifestyle, and my friends.  Unfortunately, my intractable health issue was coming to a head.  As the autumn weather deteriorated into the winter doldrums, my breathing problem intensified.  I’m sure the stress of grad school contributed to the situation, and my choice of doctors was unfortunate, but I believe that the upstate New York climate contributed significantly to my problem.  I was constantly gasping for breath, a no brainer for no fun!  I visited two different physicians in Syracuse, both affiliated with the university, but neither could adequately diagnose my symptoms.  Bronchial dilators were available in the 1970’s, but neither recommended these as a potential remedy.  Nothing seemed to help.

My respiratory condition was stressful for Irene too.  She had found another great job, at a local hospital, and we would have preferred to stay in Syracuse to finish my grad school requirements (and maybe hers), but that was not to be.  I was sure that the Syracuse climate contributed to my deteriorating health, but I couldn’t decide on a course of action without good medical help.  Out of frustration I went to the job placement office and noted that a Texaco representative was soon to be interviewing for geophysical positions in Denver.  I jumped at the idea of moving west sooner than later in the hopes that a dry climate would improve my health.  I would simply postpone my graduate school plans, but apply to Colorado School of Mines to complete my degree.  I also applied to the USGS in Denver for a position as a geologist with the Branch of Oil and Gas Resources.  The Denver office was hiring mathematical geologists for the Resource Appraisal Group, and I guess I was now a math guy after completing a statistical-oriented MS thesis and a year at Syracuse.

I had mixed feelings about my plan: first to get a temporary job in Denver with Texaco, then reapply for a PhD program in the west and, ultimately, get a job with the USGS or academia.  Terminating a PhD in mid stream is not a trivial decision.  I would have to endure the reapplication process, but I had developed skills in mathematical applications to geology and met important people who liked me.  Regardless of one’s opinion on the subject, the “who you know” phenomenon does contribute to future success.

I met with a Texaco representative on campus and was offered an interview trip to the Denver office.  The chief geophysicist, Dick Knittle, introduced me to the corporate hierarchy, described the position, and explained company goals.  I must have convinced management I was a company man because they offered me a job at $1,300/month.  I would start work in June at the end of the spring semester.  I was well aware that Texaco had a terrible reputation in those days.  They were an extremely conservative organization and hadn’t discovered a major new oil or gas field in years.  That was OK with me because the position was meant to be yet another bridge to the future.  I was sure I could give Texaco a year or two of my time and gain exploration experience before completing grad school.  Another move in style, this time with Allied Van Lines.  The wooden spindle was on its way west.