Historical Geology Laboratory in 1930, with a Few Personal Twists

I admit it. I miss a lot. I've noticed that a lot of colleges and universities are very proud of their history and traditions, but in my experience at three community colleges, the memory of a department is rather short. When I started at Modesto Junior College, I was told stories of my predecessor, who was a legendary character, and not in a good way. Although he served for many years, his retirement was welcomed by many. It took a number of years before I found that some rather significant people taught in the position I occupy now, including Richard Hilton, who wrote Dinosaurs and Other Mesozoic Reptiles of California. Another was Charles Love, the son of Wyoming geologist David Love, whose career was central part of John McPhee's excellent book Rising From the Plains. But those individuals only reach back into the 1970s. I've got no idea who was here in the first fifty years of the existence of our institution.

Likewise, I know very little about the first college I attended, Chaffey College in southern California. It's true that I was just a gawky teenager who had no sense of institutional history when I was there between 1975 and 1977. I got to know my two professors, but they were relatively young at the time, and I had no sense at all of who taught there in earlier years.

So I had a series of interesting revelations tonight. I had known that my step-grandfather had taken a geology class way back in 1930, and it turned out that he held on to some of his notes (present-day students of mine: do YOU do that??). They were passed on to me, and I set them aside and they were "lost" for a time when we had to pack up the entire house for a re-carpeting job (yes, this is obviously a convoluted story). In any case I ran across the notebook again and finally decided to sit down and have a closer look.

The first surprise had nothing to do with the geology. I'm sure I was told this but it just didn't register: my grandfather went to the same community college I did! At the time it was called Chaffey Junior College (today it is simply Chaffey College). That "junior" conferred a sort of inferiority upon the students who needed to attend a cheaper local alternative to expensive universities and private institutions. But if there is anything that I've found to be true, it is that we community colleges produce a great many talented graduates who have competed very well when they've transferred to four-year institutions. Still, over the years, California's community colleges have dropped the "junior" from their name...all but two: Santa Rosa Junior College, and my very own Modesto Junior College. We decided a long time ago that we liked our name. Our students provide us all the reputation for excellence that we need.

As I opened the lab book (which hasn't changed form in nearly 90 years), a slip of paper fell out. It was his report card. What was great interest to me was that the geology instructor had signed his name, R.D. Dysart. I had found the name of a geology instructor from those early years of Chaffey's history. So I got curious and started searching on the internet for any information about the man (and how unfortunate it is that I immediately and correctly assumed that it was a man?). And with that came the second big surprise.

I got my bachelor degree in geology from Pomona College, an achievement for which I am very proud (I'm not saying I excelled; I made it through the program...barely). Pomona has one of the finest geology programs in the state, and I readily recommend it to my transferring students. The department has a rich history that extends back into the early 1920s, when it was (I believe) only the second such program to be established in the state. For the first thirty years, the department was headed by A.O. Woodford, a legendary geologist in California circles. He continued as an emeritus professor for decades, and I actually was privileged to attend a field trip that he conducted when he was in his early nineties. He lived to be over 100 years old.

The name Russell D. Dysart popped up in my search...he was one of the earliest graduates of the geology department at Pomona College, in 1925, only three years after the program began! He apparently taught at Chaffey Junior College for many years, where (it is noted on the Pomona website) that he was famous for the red tie that he wore on all his field trips.

So there you go. My grandfather was a student of one of the first graduates of my alma mater, who taught at the community college that I attended. You never know the connections that will happen in life.

It's a lot of fun to thumb through the history of geology as seen by the student. One can find old textbooks in used book stores (and I have some that date back to the late 1800s), but it is a little different to see how that knowledge filters down to a student who may or may not ever think about geology again (for the record, my grandfather retained a lot of his geologic knowledge and enjoyed picking my brain for years).

There isn't a lot of personal perspective in these notes, and I wouldn't expect all that much, but I was struck by my grandfather's penmanship. It's a good thing my students have computers these days to write with, just sayin'.

Some things are very different as one scrolls through hypotheses about the origin and history of the Earth, but other things remain the same. We may have an incredible theory, plate tectonics, through which we can understand much of the history of the planet, a theory that had not been accepted, nor even conceived in the 1930s (look up what happened to Alfred Wegener for instance). And yet the rocks and fossils are the same. We've discovered many more species, but the drawings my grandfather made look very much like those that my own students will be drawing in just a few weeks. Complex over-arching theories are great, but they have to explain the rocks and fossils or they will come crashing down. Students will always need to know the basic information in order to understand the theories that account for them.

I learned something else about professor Russell D. Dysart, something that isn't true of me...he was a man of few words when it came to assigning grades...

A Geology Professor Passes: Donald B. McIntyre

I've received word from Dr. Eric Grosfils at Pomona College that one of the professors from my days at Pomona has passed away. Dr. McIntyre was a truly unique teacher, challenging, sometimes frustrating, but an excellent professor. I look back and I realize I was not as ready for college as I thought I was when I arrived at Pomona in 1977. I had transferred from the local community college, and though I had done well enough, I was now entering one of the most highly regarded and challenging geology programs in the state. I felt like a fish out of water!

Dr. McIntyre taught a class on Global Tectonics. I thought was going to be told about divergent and convergent boundaries and evidence for continental drift and other basic "stuff". Instead, we were given the keys to the library, and a list of the original classic papers in plate tectonics to study so we could learn for ourselves not the basic facts, but what the original evidence was, what the detractors and opponents had to say, as a preparation to analyze the arguments in class. As a student in Dr. McIntyre's class, I had become, in essence, one of the researchers fighting the academic battles of the late sixties and early seventies. It was uncomfortable for me at the time, and yet a valuable life-changing lesson. Science isn't facts. Science is a process, a sometimes difficult process for gaining knowledge.

Dr. McIntyre could be almost imperious at times, and calling him "Donald" could earn a person a cold stare and silence. Yet most times, he was a warm and friendly person. He and his wife hosted a Christmas party for the students in the department every year I was there. It was a nice gesture for students who were sometimes several states or entire oceans away from their homes. I can remember him pulling a volume off the wall of his personal library to show me a passage on the history of mountain climbing in Scotland. The author had said that his climbing partner, one Donald McIntyre, if he ever fell off a cliff, would be licking the rocks on the way down to better identify them!

I worked in the department at Pomona for a couple of years while I decided the next step in my own educational journey. Serving as a laboratory and field assistant to Dr. McIntyre and the other professors at the school was as good an education as anything I ever learned in a classroom. I moved on in 1982. Dr. McIntyre retired and moved home to Scotland in 1989, and I occasionally heard of his activities through the school alumni announcements.

I finally was able to journey to Scotland in 2001, and my students and I were able to share a meal with Dr. McIntyre in Inverness. It was a wonderful evening. He was, as always, a gracious and polite conversationalist. It was good to see him again.

These are some of my personal remembrances of working with Dr. McIntyre. I invite you to see a bit more of his lifetime accomplishments at his website. He will be missed. The announcement from Pomona College follows:

Donald B. McIntyre, Professor Emeritus of Geology, died on October 21st in Scotland, where he had lived since retiring from the College in 1989. He was 86 years old.

A memorial service will be held on Friday, October 30, at 11:00 a.m. in St. John's Kirk, Perth, Scotland.

A native of Edinburgh, Professor McIntyre received B.Sc., Ph.D., and D.Sc. degrees from the University of Edinburgh and taught there before joining the Pomona faculty as an associate professor in 1954. The following year he succeeded A. O. Woodford as Department of Geology chair, a position he held for almost three decades. Professor McIntyre's research interests were diverse, and his achievements earned him numerous honors, among them Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. He was, his colleague Donald Zenger once wrote, "a scholar of the highest order."

Professor McIntyre was also a gifted teacher, winning two Wig awards here on campus and, in 1985, being named California Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. In nominating him for the latter award, R. Stanton Hales noted: "It is known that one good question asked of McIntyre will earn at least two hours of personal instruction."

In lieu of flowers, members of the family have requested that donations in Professor McIntyre's honor be directed to one of two funds:

-- the Ewen McIntyre Upper Springland Fund; checks should be made out to the fund and sent to it c/o Ann McIntyre (17 Beaumont House, 15 N. St John's Place, Perth PH1 5SZ, Scotland UK). My understanding is that this fund helps support the home for the disabled where Donald and Ann's son, Ewen, currently resides.

-- the McIntyre Geology Fund at Pomona College (also called the Donald B. McIntyre-H. Stanton Hill Geology Fund), established in Donald's honor by H. Stanton Hill ('33) and Mary C. Hill in 1987; gifts/contributions intended for this fund can be sent to Pomona College, c/o Don Pattison, Office of Donor Relations, 550 North College Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711. In his remarks Stanton Hill directs that "this fund will be for the benefit of the students taught by Donald's colleagues and successors."

In addition, if anyone would like to share personal recollections of Professor McIntyre with his family and does not wish to send them to Ann directly, we would be pleased to receive, collate, and forward them along (please send such comments via email by December 1st, subject "Donald McIntyre", to https://webmail.yosemite.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=4f27de7267174b68955d4b5890d81da5&URL=mailto%3aegrosfils%40pomona.edu). In a future communication, the department will also discuss developing plans for honoring Professor McIntyre at our annual alumni dinner, scheduled this year for the evening of February 17th, 2010.

The loss of such a highly regarded and cherished member of our community is never easy, and our thoughts are with Professor McIntyre's family in these difficult times.

Accretionary Wedge Carnival: A Late Arrival and Nearly Lost Connections

This month's Accretionary Wedge Carnival is (was) hosted by Callan Bentley at NOVAgeoblog, and is on the rather wide open topic of geologic connections. I'm a little late, having been distracted by the beginning of a new semester: those first hours of excitement, expectation and enthusiasm, followed by fifteen weeks of perceived pain and suffering (at least that is what MY students say).

The start of a new teaching year gave me the idea for my contribution to the Wedge this time around. I am a teacher, I was taught by a number of excellent teachers, and they in turn had teachers. I was vaguely aware that some of my professors studied under some illustrious individuals, and I even met a few of them, but I had never really considered looking into the academic lineage of those who taught me geology. I was in for a few surprises.

I found out right away that lots of mathematicians, chemists and physicists have an academic lineage on the web, but I couldn't locate many for geologists (not that I spent hours on the subject or anything). But there was enough to construct an academic lineage (sort of) for myself going back to the late 1700's. There may be a few mistakes here, and apparently a lineage is supposed to follow the thesis advisors, but I'm gonna cheat just a little (a lot) on the rules, so here we go...

I got my bachelor's degree in geology at Pomona College where I studied under three fine professors, Dr. Donald Zenger, Dr. D.B. McIntyre, and Dr. A.K. Baird. I did my senior thesis with Dr. Baird. He passed away a number of years ago, far too young, but he did a great deal of research on the Southern California Batholith, and worked with Mars Viking Project in the 1970's.

To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Baird studied at Pomona College under the guidance of Dr. A.O. "Woody" Woodford (1890-1990), who founded the department in 1922, and taught geology to the likes of Roger Revelle (mentioned in "Inconvenient Truth" for his global warming work; Revelle College at UCSD is named for him), Charles Anderson (former chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey), Mason Hill (San Andreas fault and oil on the north slope of Alaska), Rollin Eckis (geologist and former chairman of ARCO), and John Shelton, along with many, many others. Woody maintained an office at Pomona College after his retirement in 1955, and continued his research through the 1980's. He was a familiar sight in the halls when I was a student there.

Along with his other professors, Woody studied at U.C. Berkeley under Andrew C. Lawson (1861-1952), a giant in the history of geologic research in both the Canadian Shield and in California. Lawson designed much of the geology program at Berkeley, and made many pioneering studies in the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada, and was the chairman of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission that produced the pivotal report on the great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Andrew came to Berkeley at the invitation of Joseph LeConte (1823-1901), who was the first geologist there. He is known for many contributions to the field of paleontology, but he is perhaps best known today for his explorations of the Sierra Nevada, and his association with John Muir and the founding of the Sierra Club.

While at Harvard University, LeConte studied under Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who is well known for his work in paleontology, but is celebrated in geology because of his research in glaciology, and his proposal that northern Europe and North America had once been covered by thick blankets of ice.

Agassiz was introduced to geology by Alexander von Humboldt (1768-1859) and to zoology by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Humboldt traveled widely, especially in South America and Europe, and originally proposed the Jurassic as a name for Mesozoic period represented by limestones in the Jura Mountains. He was one of the first to suggest that Africa and South America might have been connected to each other in the past.

Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier was one of the earliest paleontologists and was one of the first to recognize that extinctions had taken place in the Earth's past. He was also a pioneer in the field of comparative anatomy. He is also famous for his belief in catastrophism, which stood in contrast to uniformitarianism, one of the guiding principles of science today.

So there it is...a series of connections that reaches back two centuries that led to a lanky slacker at Pomona College who later lucked into being a teacher at a modest community college in central California. It is not the lineage that leads to inspiration, of course. The teacher who gave me the desire to know more about the earth more than any other didn't have a lineage that I can track down on the internet, but I know he loved the science and inspired many of us to become geologists. He's in the picture above, but I haven't asked his permission to give his name, so I won't, but I want to thank him for his contribution to the field, and to let him know that I hope to carry on his tradition of excellence in my own career.