It's Been 50 Years!

It's been 50 years (approximately) since I began my formal Geology education, when I began my Senior year in High School.  Late in my Junior Year, I learned I had the choice between Physics and Geology for my Senior Year (1971-1972).  

I knew Physics had to be harder (partially because of the Math) and the Physics teacher was weird (according to fellow students).  In contrast, the Geology teacher was described as merely "eccentric" (as have been most thereafter).  

A few years earlier, in Elementary School (7th Grade?), my Science/Homeroom teacher - while furthering my interests in science - was somewhat further along the "eccentric scale" than was my future Senior year Geology teacher.  (I wasn't yet old enough and wise enough to yet be sensing a pattern of eccentricity in scientists, especially teachers.)

From my preschool and Elementary years (starting with this early "field trip" photo (perhaps 1956)), I had been interested in "outdoors stuff", e.g., picking up seashells, miscellaneous rocks and minerals, arrowheads, pottery shards, panning gold, etc.  

Figure 1 was either at Saint Simons Island, Georgia or Daytona Beach, Florida, both common vacation spots for my family.  In this particular photo, I was studying Intertidal Zone sedimentation, while directing someone (my Dad?) on proper hole-digging methods.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Another "milestone" was being given this unassuming piece of Basalt (Figure 2), from the 1944 Mt. Vesuvius eruption in Italy.  I reckon I was about 9 years old (in 1963), when one of my Dad's childhood friends gave it to me.  He was "passing through" Naples with the U.S. Army during WWII and grabbed this piece when some of the Mt. Vesuvius flows entered the city's outskirts.  

Unlike other long held samples I managed to lose (a tiny Native Platinum nugget, found about 1969 in Auraria, GA and a small Arkansas Diamond found in 1973) during a 2011 home renovation, I have hung on to this lava sample.

A few years later after receiving the lava sample, while on vacation in Eastern Tennessee, I understood (somehow) that there was limestone in the area and limestone = fossils.  Getting my shoes wet in some nameless Tennessee creek yielded no fossil shells, though there were tiny, nondescript, living gastropods in the creek, but as they were small, they were of no interest.  

In that particular creek, I did find a smoothed, footlong, elongate piece of light gray limestone with slightly fluted ends.  Though I don't think I told anyone, I brought it home "just in case" it was a dinosaur bone.  

By the time I was in High School, I had seen a few pieces of dinosaur bones in museums, I decided that my "dino bone" was just a smooth piece of limestone and it ignominiously joined my other outdoor "yard rocks" (many of which were not what I originally thought they were).  [But maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity is important.]

Figure 3.

A few years later, ... After somehow making passable grades, I was accepted to grad school (my GPA was damaged by my grades in Trigonometry, Calculus I and II, Chemistry I, II, III and Physics I, II, III, and that stupid Freshman Sociology course I flunked, as well as my Introduction to Partying 101 and 102 classes).  Perhaps on the basis of a good GRE score, I managed to get accepted into Grad School at the University of Texas El Paso.

It was my Dad that decided that I needed a more Geology-appropriate vehicle than my 1970 Pontiac Lemans, so he found a good deal on this 1976 Jeep J-10 pickup (Figure 3), with a 256 cu. in. inline six-cylinder engine.  Having gotten zero traffic tickets in the six years I had the Lemans, perhaps this was his "good driver reward".  Other than my mediocre grades, I didn't give him too many headaches during high school and college.  

BTW, in the background is his 1974 long bed J-10, with the 401 cu. in. V-8 and a 4 bbl carb.  The gas mileage was horrid, as was mine too.  But when I sometimes borrowed his truck (before I had mine), it was easy to reach 80 mph, despite the terrible aerodynamics.

Sadly, he has been gone for 41 years, since late 1980 and Mom has been gone for 21 years.  He didn't get to meet his four grandkids and four great-grandkids, but Mom did get to meet the four grandkids (though the youngest probably doesn't remember her well).  (I posted this on what would have been his 100th birthday.  I should have done the same for Mom, but I was in the first year of my 2nd marriage, after being widowed in 2015, and I missed that opportunity.)

Dad taught me a number of practical skills, e.g., carpentry, some photography, map-reading skills, how to drive a 4x4, basic masonry, and his and Mom's large garden and their interest in being outdoors had a great influence on my sister and me.  Dad had taken a Geology course while he was at Georgia Tech in the middle-1930s.  Mom taught me about plants and animals and other "nature-related things".

For what it's worth, I kept that Jeep truck for 10 and 1/2 years and then followed it up with two more 4x4s, a 1987 Cherokee and a 1992 Cherokee.  (My daughter has been a "Jeeper" herself for close to five years, making her the third generation with that designation.  I am hoping one of her sons will follow in those family footsteps (or tire tracks)).

A little more background, while I am in a nostalgic mood.