Rocknocker: A Geologist’s Memoir. George Devries Klein

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 Pennsylvania Association of Geologists Fall field trip.

      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