Memorial to John Warfield Huddle 1907-1975 FRANK C
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Memorial to John Warfield Huddle 1907-1975 FRANK C. WHITMORE, JR. JOHN E. REPETSKI U.S. Geological Survey, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC 20560 John Warfield Huddle died in Washington, D.C., on November 21, 1975, after a long and uncomplaining struggle with Hodgkin’s disease. Through months of chemotherapy and intermittent hospitalization, he continued to lead as normal a life as he could with his family and with his friends at the National Mu seum of Natural History. As he had been throughout his life, he was at the end an example of unselfishness and consideration for others. John was born on August 14, 1907, in Eugene, Oregon, the son of Harriet Warfield and Wiley Jerome Huddle. At the time of his birth, his father was pro fessor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. When John was a year old, the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where his father joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. When John was eight, his father gave up teaching and became a consulting engineer in Chicago. The Huddles settled in Winnetka, Illinois, and this is where John, the oldest of four children, grew up. He attended New Trier Township High School, one of the most noted secondary schools in the Middle West. We know little about his academic record there; however, from his accounts, he had a lively and happy social life. In later years, it seemed that John was always running into girls he had known in high school and college, who were always happy to see him again. After high school, John entered Indiana University, which had been his father’s and uncle’s school, where he joined Phi Gamma Delta. The summer after his freshman year, John worked in a coal mine in Colorado. Shortly after returning to college that fall he became ill and had to return home. His illness was neither long nor serious, but when he recovered, John decided to remain at home and finish his education at North western University, where he received a scholarship. There he majored in geology, graduating in 1929. He then spent a year on an oil rig in Michigan before entering graduate school at Indiana University with the aim of teaching paleontology. At Indiana, John worked under E. R. Cumings and J. J. Galloway. He had an especially close relationship with Cumings, working under his supervision in the sum mers of 1931 through 1934 as a field geologist for the Indiana Geological Survey. This experience heightened John’s interest in Paleozoic stratigraphy and paleoecology. His first paper (1931) described newly discovered Silurian outcrops in an area in southeastern Indiana that he had visited with Cumings. They kept in touch through the rest of Cumings’s life, and in the 1960s, when Cumings was retired and living in Washington, John visited him weekly. As a graduate assistant at Indiana, John was the curator of the paleontology col lections, which included conodonts from the New Albany Shale. This fauna was the subject of his dissertation. John received his Ph.D. in 1934, and that same year he pub 2 Till- GIOLOGICAL, SOCIETY 01' AMERICA lished his paper, which became a classic in the study of conodonts. In it, John estab lished the major research interest of his life. John spent the summer of 1934 doing fieldwork in Virginia, in the course of which he met W. F. Prouty, head of the geology department at the University of North Carolina. Prouty offered John a job, and wasting no time, John hightailed it back to Winnetka to ask Ella Free to marry him. Parenthetically, this speed was typical of John. To the casual observer he was a slow-moving, deliberate person. This, plus his modesty, led him to be underrated by some who did not know him well. In his own quiet way, John accomplished an amazing amount of work. Ella Lillian Free, a Montana girl and daughter of a college president, had come to Winnetka to teach in New Trier Township High School. She roomed with John’s parents. With his new job, John whisked her from Illinois to Chapel Hill, where they entered joyfully into the life of a junior faculty couple. Both of them loved it. John was a superb teacher, and Ella mothered the students who came to their apartment. One of her early entertainments was based on eggs: John had forgotten to tell her that he had invited a group of students for Sunday supper. Eggs were all she had, so she looked in her cook book and decided to make a soufflé, which she had never done. It worked, to the amazement of a neighbor, who the next day told her of all the disasters that can befall a soufflé cook. John’s students remember him with fond admiration, and he had a crucial influ ence on many careers. The students called him “Skipper.” According to Wallace deWitt, a student and later a colleague of John’s, the nickname came from John’s ability to get lost leading field trips in the featureless North Carolina Coastal Plain. Another student, C. E. Prouty, writes: 1 was in Huddle’s first class (Stratigraphy) when he came to University of North Carolina to teach (circa 1935-36). The first day of class he proceeded to break all the rules known for presenting a good lecture. These included leaning on the rostrum with his elbows and his chin in his hands, making it difficult to talk; opening a window and spitting out; chewing gum; placing one foot on the radiator while talking; and scribbling on the board such that his writing could not be deciphered. It was a mess. After about 20 minutes of this he told us this is how we should not deliver out stratigraphy reports we were to present before the class. He told us that he was emulating J. J. Galloway, his old mentor at Indiana Univer sity, who was well known for this trick. It must have taken a lot of nerve to pull this off. I am sure no one in the class ever forgot this. I have recalled this to John at times we have met over the years. Incidentally, he was a marvellous teacher. John’s influence on his students and their regard for him are expressed by Grover E. Murray in the dedication of his book Geology of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Province of North America: “To John W. Huddle and H. W. Straley III who, in particular, molded and guided my early efforts as a student at the University of North Carolina, who aroused in me a lasting love of geology, and who showed me that it could be both a vocation and an avocation.” Financed by tiny research grants, John took his students to the field in a 1924 Pierce Arrow touring car with wooden-spoked wheels. They lived cheaply—as many as possible in a room—and collected tons of black shales from the Chattanooga and New Albany Shales in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. From 1934 to 1943, first as assistant professor and later as associate professor at North Carolina, John taught introductory geology, general and historical geology, graduate and undergraduate courses in stratigraphy and paleontology, and field geology. MEMORIAL TO JOHN WARFIELD HUDDLE 3 He also helped to set up a general science course consisting of one quarter each of botany, chemistry, and geology. In 1943, John took leave from the university and joined the Fuels Branch of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to work in the western United States. His first assign ment was in northwestern Colorado, structure mapping in the Cretaceous of the Range- ley anticline. His party worked through the winter, and he did not get home for Christ mas that year. Then, in February 1944, he moved to Arizona, where, with Ernest Dobrovolny, he worked on upper Paleozoic stratigraphy. The aim of this project was to establish a stratigraphic section, based upon exposed rocks in central Arizona, that could be correlated with rocks in cores from the northeastern part of the state. Huddle identified the Mississippian fossils collected during this work. Besides the stratigraphic reports, this project resulted in a paper (Huddle and Dobrovolny, 1946) on Upper Devonian bioherms in central Arizona—another instance of the effect of E. R. Cumings on John’s geologic interests. In the fall of 1945, John returned to Chapel Hill as a full professor, to resume his research on conodonts as well as his teaching. He retained ties with the USGS, holding a WAE (when actually employed—i.e., part-time) appointment. During the next 4 years, in the summers, he mapped Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks on the south flank of the Uinta Mountains in Utah. This work, which was undertaken because of increasing interest in the oil and gas possibilities of the Uinta Basin to the south, involved study of a Paleozoic section of nearly 40,000 feet from Cambrian through Permian, includ ing probably the most complete sequence of Carboniferous and Permian rocks in the Rocky Mountain region. As his part of the project, John mapped the geology of a large area on the south flank of the Uinta Mountains, v/est of the Uinta River. A major re sult of this work was a paper published with A. A. Baker and D. M. Kinney (1949). John’s work in the Uintas was recognized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1947, when he was appointed an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer, speaking to AAPG groups throughout the country. During this period also, John began his important association with the coal re search of the USGS.