Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Garniss Curtis
A CAREER IN GEOLOGY AND GEOCHRONOLOGY 1948-1989
Interviews Conducted by Eleanor Swent in 2002
Copyright © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.
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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Garniss Curtis, dated July 29, 2002. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Garniss Curtis, “A Career in Geology and Geochronology 1948-1989,” an oral history conducted by Eleanor Swent in 2002, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2008.
Garniss Curtis photo courtesy of Clem and Sharie Shute
TABLE OF CONTENTS—GARNISS CURTIS
INTERVIEW 1: July 29, 2002
Tape 1 1 Early memories, childhood in San Rafael, parents’ divorce—moving in with maternal grandparents— grandfather’s business connections in paint and marble—mother’s lineage: Van Nordens and O’Reillys—father’s lineage: Kemps—more on parents’s divorce, father’s remarriage and half brother Chester—reunion with father at age 35, orchestrated by wife Dorette—early interest in hunting inspired by uncles, father and grandfather—learning to hunt with bows and arrows—childhood friends—heart murmer diagnosis in high school and resultant military ineligibility—graduation and first job as a mining engineer in Arizona—changing attitude toward and eventual distaste for hunting—early schooling: starting kindergarten—elementary school teachers—math proficiency, interest in building and engineering—lifelong friendship with Brian McCarthy, Brian’s Catholic background—mother’s Catholic schooling and eventual atheism—mother’s experience during the 1906 earthquake.
Tape 2 12 Being raised atheist, later agnosticism—scientific wonder and and religious skepticism—differing diagnoses of heart murmer, move to Ventura to work with Shell Oil—premonitions and other scientifically-inexplicable events—UFO research—Journal of Scientific Exploration—commuting with sister to San Rafael High School—childhood scientific stimuli, grandmother’s influence— mother’s remarriage in 1929 to Allan Ralston Curtis, move to Ross—stepfather’s interest in golf— developing talent for basketball—name change in college to Curtis—first book of scientific facts in sixth or seventh grade, resulting interest in libraries and science—the family weathers the Depression.
INTERVIEW 2: August 14, 2002
Tape 3 25 Overview of highschool, being the only boy in typing class—starting college, feeling socially unprepared, joining a fraternity—keeping in touch with college and high school friends—school friends lost in WWII—changing majors to economic geology, graduation and marriage to Dorette Davis on May 14, 1942—move to Christmas, Arizona for a copper mine engineering job— researching Tornado Peak—return to California for job with Shell Oil after the war, decision to pursue a Ph.D.—lessons learned working at Shell: competent and incompetent geologists—using maps superior to USGS maps—work with Lloyd Lewis and Paul Pustmueller—leaving Shell, beginning Ph.D. program in 1946 at UC Berkeley—work with Howel Williams—transition to teaching after Carlton Hulin’s departure—research at Markleeville—“nués ardents” deposits, story of 1902 eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique.
Tape 4 38 More on nués ardents found at Markleeville—growing fascination with volcanology, the 1912 eruption of Katmai, and C.N. Fenner’s work—first visit to Katmai in 1953 with Werner Juhle—cold, harsh conditions at Katmai—studying Novarupta—first impressions of Juhle, ordering more powdered milk—betting the meagre bourbon stash: is it ash or Naknek formation?—Juhle’s plans to work at UCB with Curtis, then disappearance at Katmai—return to Katmai to search for Juhle’s body—further research at Katmai in 1954—increasingly harsh conditions: cold, rainy weather and radio communication difficulties—tramping and mapping, equipment—bear invasion of the camp and supplies—meeting with Bob Spring, LIFE magazine photographer and gravely ill companion— impressive flying by pilot, Woody, to rescue the sick man—following the trail of Juhle’s belongings in search of his body—mapping, investigating: where did all this pumice come from?
INTERVIEW 3: August 15, 2002
Tape 5 53 Professors: Lawson and Louderback—the academic senate and General Assembly—changing away from and back to the semester system—effects of the Free Speech Movement—early teaching career, starting out teaching everything—basalt research—inspired moments of discovery about Katmai basalt formations—Potassium-Argon dating—more clues in Juhle’s disappearance, his mother finds a scrap of wool from his sweater along the trail—working with Jack Evernden to get Miller Institute fellowships—fellowship in New Zealand, 1958, then to Japan, looking for potassium-containg rocks to date—Olduvai Gorge with the Leakeys in 1961—encounter with a rhino mother and baby.
Tape 6 67 More on Richard Leakey—the Berkeley-Leakey connection beginning with Jack Evernden in 1957— fuding for Olduvai research given by the Miller Institute and the National Science Foundation—fossil finds on Rusinga in Lake Victoria—the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Burg Wartenstein castle—feud with Louis Leakey—dubious “artifacts” from the Mojave Desert.
Tape 7 75 Kay Behrensmeyer’s work at Koobi Fora, the KBS Tuff, in the Lake Turkana area—controversy over dating accuracy—falling out with Jack Miller—the Institute of Human Origins—Argon-Argon dating with Don DePaulo—raising money for new equipment, 1980s—Al Deino computerizes the laser Argon-Argon dating process—research in Java beginning in 1968—dating Mojokerto samples at 1.8 million, and resistance from Richard Kline at Stanford—hominid skulls at Dmanisi, Georgia, dated at 1.8 million—the question of when hominids left Africa—Java Man—fall-out between BGC and IHO.
Tape 8 89 Friendship with Gordon Getty—long-time assistant Sharie Shute.
INTERVIEW 4: August 22, 2002
Tape 8 continued 93 Laetoli footprints—work with Mark Monahan—Monahan’s career—meeting two American women on the road from Kenya to Tanzania—car-camping along the way, wildlife sightings—colleague Richard Hay—some remarkable students: Kay Behensmeyer and Deb Chandra, more on Mark Mohahan—Frank Brown and Clark Howell—meetings at Burg Wartenstein—developing technology in argon and potassium dating—students Brent Dalrymple and Jack Evernden—Ian McDougall.
Tape 9 104 Help from paleontology student Gideon James—break with Jack Evernden—the struggle for a new building: Bacon Hall to McCone—naming of McCone—Shasta Reservoir iron mine lawsuit and Andrew Lawson’s dealings with John Haulsey—project to surround the USSR with seismographs to detect nuclear testing—more on Jack Evernden: career and marriages—marital “musical chairs” within the department—democratic departmental politics, polling before awarding a position— Evernden’s unpopular style—meeting Walter Alvarez.
Tape 10 116 More on Walter Alvarez—Bob Drake. INTERVIEW 5: August 23, 2002
Tape 11 119 Students Robert Drake, Dan Krumacher—Gordon Gastil—Mark (Chris) Christianson and work in the Andes—catching hepatitis in Mexico—work with Bob Drake in the Mauli River area, 1970— inadvertent border crossing into Argentina, car trouble—Chilean politics: Allende and the communists—risky foray into Argentina with forged license plate to buy Scotch—the San Fernando earthquake in 1971—Neil Gilbert and new computer technology—socializing with grad students— business with Drake’s in-laws—learning to use computer automation in Argon-Argon dating, the race to publish—getting the credit for dating Lucy.
Tape 12 131 Involvement with the AAAS, working with Sharie Shute—
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Interview with Garniss Curtis [Interview 1: July 29, 2002 ] [Tape 1, Side A]
Earliest Memories and Family Recollections, Marin County, California
Swent: We’re beginning an interview with Garniss Curtis in Berkeley, California at the Berkeley Geochronology Center on Monday, July 29, 2002. Do you want to start telling about your—
Curtis: I’ll talk about my earliest memories.
Swent: Your earliest memories, that’s good.
Curtis: This is sort of unusual, and I’m not sure that I believe it, but this is what happened. The first memory that I have, I was being handed across a fence to somebody else. Then this other person walked up a hill. I knew that my mother was coming and I was handed back to her and we looked up and there was a big fire on the hill. Smoke was coming up, and flames. This was in San Rafael, and these were called the Black Canyon Hills. We watched that and then a bunch of children came running up. And we were standing on the edge of a little declivity, a little sort of a slide out that had left a declivity in the hill and the kids ran down across that and up the other side. I wanted to be with them. I didn’t know how to communicate that to my mother except to kick. That is about the end of the memory, seeing those kids over there and wanting to be with them.
So it was many years later I said to my mother, “Now, when was that big fire up in the Black Canyon Hills?”
And she said, “Oh, that was in 1919. October, 1919.”
I was born May 27, 1919, so I would have been five months old. I said, “Are you sure it was 1919 and not 1920?”
“Oh,” she said, “I know that,” because—I think she said the 19th of October, she said, “This was an important day.” Then she told me whatever it was that caused her to remember that. She was getting divorced from my father at the time, so she had reasons to remember different things. So that would be quite unusual. Now the next memories that I have were: she had built a little colonial house there on Grand Avenue in San Rafael where my older sister, three years older than I, was born in 1916, and that is when we were in that house and I was born in San Rafael in 1919. We had walked up back of that colonial house. I used to play out in the yard and I would get dirty. She would hold me under the tap on the side of the house and wash my face and hands before bringing me in. I didn’t mind that at all. That was around two—one and a half, two years old when that happened.
Then we moved. After she got divorced, we moved from that house. She rented it for a while and then eventually sold it. We moved in with my grandmother who was on the— about a quarter of a mile away, living in—they called it “The Gables.” It was going to 2
be the servants’ quarters of a house that they never built. They had nine acres. My grandmother and grandfather were going to build a large house and this was going to be the servants’ quarters. They put that up first, but they didn’t build the house because the 1906 earthquake came along and destroyed his business.
He owned a third interest in the Columbia Marble Company up in Columbia. He owned a paint business that made Paris White, among other things. Well, that was destroyed. There wasn’t enough insurance to get really going again. He held onto his interest in the marble quarry until about 1930. We used to, when I was small, take trips up to Columbia and spend a week or two at the Columbia Marble and watch them cut marble, but after the earthquake, marble just died because concrete was the thing, much less expensive and stronger and so on. You can still see Columbia marble in the Ferry Building and what used to be the old White House [store]. The quarry has been opened again by the people so you can see it in some of the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] stations, that Columbia Marble.
Swent: What was your grandfather’s name?
Curtis: Hearfield. David Hearfield III. He came from England, from Hessle. He was one of several brothers and sisters and they sent him to California because it looked like this was going to be a growing place. He never took out papers and became a citizen, but he accepted California as his home. My mother used to tell about when they used to take trips to England to see the relatives when she was small. She was born in San Francisco. My father was born in San Francisco. And on my mother’s side, my grandmother was born in San Francisco and my great-grandmother came to San Francisco when she was just a few—two years old. My great-grandmother was Catholic, she—her surname was O’Reilly and she was Catholic. There were no Catholic schools, surprisingly, for young Catholics in San Francisco. She had to go all the way up to Benicia to a Catholic school where they—. So these are memories that, you know, I have.
Swent: Yes. It’s interesting that you were involved with stones, genetically, you might say. [chuckles]
Curtis: Yes. My grandmother was the daughter of an old pioneer named Van Norden from a family of Van Nordens on the East Coast from New York up to Vermont. There were Van Nordens that were all—His brother was—he came to prospect and his brother came to prospect. He realized that he didn’t have an idea of what he was—except gold—what he was looking for, how to look for it. He came first around the Horn on a ship with his brother. And Lake Van Norden is named for his brother, in the Sierra. So he decided that what he could do was put a ferry up near Oroville on the Feather River because there was a lot of travel back and forth across the river. So he went back and got financial backing for putting in a ferry. He would charge a pinch of gold from whatever they— this was common fare. They didn’t have money. The miners just dealt in their product that they were getting out of the ground. He had a big fat thumb and believe it or not, he made a fortune out of those pinches of gold. But when he married my great- grandmother O’Reilly, she went through that money very quickly. [chuckles] And then she married another person named Boyd, a lawyer in San Francisco who was one of the founders of the Pacific Union Club. He’d made a lot of money. She was able to divest him pretty much of his money, too. But Great-great-grandfather Van Norden lived to a ripe old age of 104. 3
Swent: That was even more unusual then, wasn’t it?
Curtis: Yes, it was quite unusual. And my grandmother loved him very much. She was very— and he was alive enough for my mother to have seen him as a little girl. So that’s sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history there. The O’Reillys came from Ireland, of course, I think from Tralee. I’ve never heard much about the relatives there. I heard much more about my English relatives on my mother’s side. We kept in touch with quite a few of them for many, many years. Of those that we kept in touch with, Aunt Tasie, one of my grandfather’s sisters, Tasie, which was short for something, but I don’t know what.
Swent: Anastasia, perhaps?
Curtis: Maybe, yes. [chuckles] We did keep in touch with quite a few of the Van Nordens. Some of them lived in Marin County. They’re all dead now. The—well, I won’t go on with that.
Swent: What about your father?
Curtis: My father was born in San Francisco. Kemp was his name. My real name should be Kemp and I’ll tell you about that in a minute. And he and I—because my mother divorced him when I was just an infant and got custody of my sister and myself, the two children at that time. She—
Swent: In those days, women often didn’t get custody of children without a battle.
Curtis: There was some—she had a very good lawyer and she got custody, total custody. She was so mad at my father that she wouldn’t let him have visitation rights even, so I didn’t see him until I was four years old. He came to get some guns. He was a hunter. He lived for hunting and fishing, about which I’ll tell you some more. And he came to get his guns and my mother let, first my sister, who he had much more contact with than I—she was three years old when the divorce occurred. She went in to talk to him first in the bedroom. And then I went in with her. I remember that very well.
Sitting there and he was asking me questions. Four was my big year. I have a lot of memories from four, quite a few memories from age three. So that was the last I saw of him until long after I got married.
Let’s see. We’re onto family history. Maybe we should go into this a little further, why my father and mother broke up. I didn’t ask her that until I was sixteen. Why did you and my father break up. She said, “Well, you know—” this is being recorded, but this is true. She said, “I never really liked sex, and I thought I had your father weaned.” Now, here I was, sixteen with all my—you know, everything going on. And I just burst out laughing. I couldn’t believe that she would be so naïve about something like that. So he got his sexual pleasure from another woman. In fact, at the time I was born, she was pregnant. My half-brother was almost my same age. I didn’t know anything about him until I got into college. I was in the ROTC and he was standing next to me in our drill every day. I didn’t introduce myself. He didn’t introduce himself. We had conversations. He was in petroleum engineering, which was in the old mining building here, and I was in mining engineering. We would bump into each other and say hello, but we had never really identified ourselves. He had the red hair of my father and I had 4
just—I was a blond to begin with and just with a very slight tinge of red in it. My beard was red, but I always shaved that off. So he got the features of my father, and I don’t know what features I got. A little bit of both, I guess. So that’s strange.
But my wife—jumping way ahead. My wife, Dorette, was interested in my father. She had met my grandmother, who was still alive and she—of course my mother was alive—and she wanted to see my father. I’ve told you that I spent some time in Katmai, coming back from—it was the end of the summer. I’d been up there for three months studying Katmai and the environs and she met me out at Fairfield. I’d taken MATS, Military Air Transport. The inside of this plane was empty and the size of a basketball court. We had a deal with them, the U.S. Geological Survey. I was a temporary member of the Survey on that project. Anyway, coming back she met me and she said, “Well, I’ve got a surprise for you.” Here she had the kids in the car. And she said, “We’re going to have dinner with your father.” [chuckles] She had contacted them, and his third or fourth wife. So—.
They lived in Oakland and we went. So here I was, let’s see: I was thirty-five years old. I had, when I was very young, loved hunting and fishing. At thirty-five, I had given up hunting long since, but I loved fishing. So we talked about things. He—Mary, his—I guess it was his third wife or fourth, but I’m not sure; we’ll say his third wife—was a devoted and understanding woman because she said, very frankly, she said, “Well, when Chet—” I was Chester Kemp, to be Chester Kemp II, but my mother changed my name, and that’s what I was registered as, changed my name to Garniss, Garniss Kemp. He named his son, who was my age, named him Chester. So, here we were. Chester graduated the same time I did. He was a petroleum engineer and largely spending his time in Saudi Arabia. So he was away months at a time. And my father was devoted to him and his family, as you could expect. [Added in editing: I found out years later in a Cal Engineering publication that my half brother died in the mid to late 1960s; and we heard from Mary that my father died around the same time. I’ve wondered if there is a connection. I’d like to look into that sometime.] But what I got from my father was that he had never gotten beyond living to hunt and fish. That was the most important thing in his life. Though he graduated from Berkeley in engineering, civil engineering, he found that he could sell cars, so he was a car salesman for the rest of his life. Now Mary said, “When he doesn’t come home from working (wherever he was selling cars), I know that he’s just taken off to go hunting and fishing. And he’ll come home when he wants to.” But he wouldn’t tell her. He just got the urge and would go. He remembered just about every fly he ever used for every big fish he ever caught, on the Trinity River, on the Klamath River, on streams in the Sierra. He just lived to hunt and fish.
Love of Hunting; in the Genes
Curtis: And I, by that time, had long since given up hunting. I had—my model for when I was young, because I didn’t have a father, was my grandfather and my uncles. One of my uncles was a hunter and a fisherman. My grandfather was a hunter and a fisherman. The other uncle was in the arts. He loved classical music and he played the piano beautifully. When he was around—he was the youngest of the family, and he was around playing the piano. And I just fell in love with the classics: Chopin, Beethoven, all of them. 5
Mozart and the things that he played. I never really became interested in popular music, but the principal thing was that I wanted to be a hunter because my mother told me what a wonderful shot he was.
I started with a BB gun at age eight and at nine I had a .22. At ten and eleven, I added rifles and shotguns. But my favorite was a .22, and I could hit almost anything with that. I had no conscience. My mother said, “Garniss, sometime you’ll realize that you just can’t keep killing these innocent little birds.” But I just had this—and I knew that this is genetic. We were hunter-gatherers and the males had to hunt. That was in my genes and I wanted to hunt like my father and grandfather. Even though I loved the music of my uncle, I identified with this other uncle, Harold. My Uncle David was the artistically inclined one. Harold was the hunter and fisherman. Grandfather was the hunter and fisherman. So I got so good you could throw a penny and I would hit it. I shot quail on the fly, I shot different birds on the fly, swallows because they were a challenge.
This was until about the age of thirteen when I began to lose interest in killing. I got a book—the Kentfield—there was a big family of Kents. One of the family had married an Arnold. Elizabeth Kent married Stanley Arnold and they built a place on the old Kent—what is now Kent Woodlands. And they had several children. The one who was my age was Kent Arnold. His first name was Kent. His older brother was Stanley, but they called him Jordan, Jordy because his father was Stanley, and to separate them. Then there was Elizabeth who was a brilliant person, just did brilliantly in college and went into astronomy. Evy, Evelyn, was a friend of my older sister. So we had a great deal to do with that family.
They had great festivals on that whole area once a year. Kent and I, we were devils. We got these little blowguns and shot—we went in and unloaded cartridges in the arms room. Oh, they had skeet and trap shooting on the place. I didn’t—I was a little young for that. I would love to have done it, but they thought I was too young. They would unload a cartridge and get the shot out of it and then, taking a straw, we would pop the balloons that were around. Then they also had a lot of airguns so they set up a thing with targets. If you hit the center of the target, you knocked down a can of beans, or whatever it was. Well, you know, I quickly—my mother said, “What are we going to do with twenty-seven cans of beans?” I said, “Well, we can eat them slowly.” [laughter] And we did.
And so I played with him and we hunted together. He had told me that his grandfather Kent, who, by the way, got his training in my great-grandfather Boyd’s law office in San Francisco; he became a lawyer, Kent. He bought that property all the way over to Mount Tam and down to Muir Woods, which he, of course, donated as a park. But he owned the whole mountain for a long time and sold that off. That big estate was—well, he died before Mrs. Kent died, but she was a wonderful woman. Once a week, we would have a—well, I was going to say we hunted with their guns on that estate. We were not permitted to shoot anything, just shoot at the tin cans. And of course that meant we hid the birds that we shot. It was awful, you know? Just terrible.
So in the library of Kent’s father was a book, Hunting with a Bow and Arrow by Saxton Pope. Now, Saxton Pope was a medical doctor here on campus in what, I guess, became Cowell Hospital, maybe it was at that time. He wrote this wonderful book on making bows and arrows. So that I got, at age thirteen, I got interested in making bows and 6
arrows. When I got to high school, I had pretty much given up shooting with guns and had gone to bows and arrows. I found two friends. George Brazil of Portuguese origin—was a large family in the county. They owned a lot of—his cousins owned a lot of property out by—let’s see, along Tomales Bay, on the east side of Tomales Bay, north of Pt. Reyes Station. I went out there many years later. But anyhow, George and I and Bert Kirschner became very good friends. We all got together and started making bows and arrows and going hunting with bows and arrows. We became pretty good. I was better—
Swent: What did you make them of?
Curtis: Well, we didn’t have yew. You could buy lemonwood and osage orange. I had a bow—I didn’t make my osage organge—I had that made for me. I made a lemonwood bow. Most of the others made lemonwood bows, too. We practiced on targets and then we would go hunting. George was—I could beat him on targets every time, but when it came to shooting birds with a bow and arrow, he did much better than Bert and I, even though I did kill quail with a bow and arrow and rabbits. George just never seemed to miss, no matter—. But on the targets, you know, at thirty feet—we would practice on a three-inch disc on a straw target. And I could hit that almost every time, and George couldn’t. But when it came to game, he did. So those were my friends all through high school and that’s what we did.
The war came on, you know. George went through junior college, or what was then called junior college, Kentfield Community College. Bert didn’t like—he was bright, but academic things just were not his—. And he got a job first with—
[Tape 1, Side B]
Curtis: —J.C. Penney in San Rafael. And he met his wife, Verna. Now, I had gone to school with Verna when we moved from San Rafael. Well, everything’s out of order here.
Swent: That’s okay. That’s the way we talk.
Curtis: So I had known her in what we now call middle school, but was grammar school. Her father owned the Penney’s store, or was manager of Penney’s store in San Rafael. Bert married her. He married her and then went off to war. He was in the Air Force. He was a tailgunner in a B-25, which was pretty risky business. He took up smoking and Verna took up smoking. They hadn’t smoked in high school. George went into the Navy and was in the Navy—he got into the Navy Air Force and was a flyer. He came down with pneumonia. Now, meantime, when we started high school—this was just about the time I met them—I had a strange illness and I was out of school for about six weeks. The doctor that we had had previously—I think he died. So my mother went back to the doctor who had brought me into the world, named Jones, O.W. Jones. And he went under the name O.W. I never found out why he was called O.W., but I think that he didn’t like his name. I was thinking about that once and I bet it was Oliver Wendell Jones. [chuckles]
Swent: No doubt. 7
Curtis: Because he never used it. But anyway, he determined that I had a heart murmur. I went to San Francisco and was examined for a couple of days by a specialist there and had done all the tests. They said, “Well, you’ve got perhaps a very slight murmur, but don’t worry about it.” Well, that kept me out of the service. I got a job after graduation as a mining engineer. I graduated from here and my first job was as a mining engineer in Arizona. I’ll get into that later. But I’ll say that while I was in this mine in Arizona, I got a letter from George saying he was in the hospital, but feeling fine and he would soon be out. Then I got a telegram from my mother saying that George had died. A clot had developed in his lung and had gone to his heart. They found him dead in bed. That was—
A very young man.Swent:
Curtis: Yes, a young man. The strange thing about George was, he said—this was back in the teens—he said, “I know that I’m not going to live beyond twenty-seven.” And I said, “Where do you get that?” He said, “I just know it. I don’t know where it comes from.” He was a Catholic. I don’t know that he was a very devout Catholic, but he seemed to sense that he was going to die at twenty-seven. And he did die, not at twenty-seven, but at twenty—let’s see, that was—yes, twenty-four. So he did die before twenty-seven. Very strange to have that premonition that he was not going to live beyond twenty- seven. I’ll get to Bert’s death and Verna’s death later.
Getting back to early memories and going on that route: my mother moved in with my grandmother and grandfather. And that, as I said, was my model. We lived right next to these hills so the hunting I’ve talked about came very naturally. Now, I had an older cousin, Henry John Small, who would come and visit. We called him H.J. and H.J. loved to hunt. His mother and his stepfather lived in Ukiah, and of course out on a ranch. They raised sheep, and he just lived to hunt too, so I had a lot of stimulus to hunt. It’s a wonder that I ever got over it. But I did realize that, in my teens, I wasn’t giving— because I was a very good shot with that .22— that it just wasn’t right. I had to give the animals more chance. That was the archery. Well, in college I met Dorette. And she took up a little archery. But I took her up on the hill one day and shot a ground squirrel. That was the last thing I ever killed. That was with a bow and arrow. Hunting just went out of me. Not fishing, but hunting. I’ve become a very, you know, an ecologist and preserver of wildlife, supporting all those things.
Swent: You got it all out of your system?
Curtis: I got it out of my system. And I look back with horror that I had such little conscience when I was little. The only excuse that I have for that was that everyone around me hunted and supported what I did with praise. But the urge to go hunting was so strong. So when different friends that have had—on the faculty—would say, “Well, I’m going out for my elk this year in Colorado.” And I would think—I wouldn’t say it to them out loud. I would think, “How can you go kill an elk?” And this is—I really feel it’s in our genes and it takes an intelligence to think about what you’re doing and get that out of you that way because I know the feeling that I went through that I just couldn’t wait to get that gun and shoot something. Just couldn’t wait. Just the urge was so strong. Well, I did get out of that. 8
Schools and Friendships in San Rafael and Ross
Curtis: I will go through a little bit of my—my older sister started the first grade of course, three years—
Swent: What was her name?
Curtis: Jane. She was Jane Van Norden Kemp; her middle name was Van Norden. My mother gave me Hearfield as my middle name. So I was home alone. There were no kids around in the neighborhood or close by at that time. My cousins—this is my uncle Harold’s children and wife—they lived in Fairfax and we would go see them, but that was a long way from San Rafael. Then they decided to build a house on the property near where I lived with my grandmother, but I was already then—my mother said, even though I was four years old, she said, “I think that you’re very capable of going to kindergarten.” She felt that being alone with her was just the wrong environment. So it did something, took some doing to get me into kindergarten at four, but she did get me into kindergarten and I loved it! I loved the kids in my—I can remember all the—most of the names of the kids that were with me then. And that first teacher I had was Miss Askins, gray hair, just the most lovable sort of a mother-like person who was so patient with all of us.
Swent: Where was the kindergarten?
Curtis: This was at Coleman School and that was on, at that time, on Grand Avenue. It subsequently was moved just off of Grand Avenue. Let’s see. I forget the name of the street. It’s on property that was once owned by the Hotel Rafael, which burned down in 1928. A big fire burned it down and there were about twenty-five or thirty acres which later became subdivided and the school was moved there. The highway came in and cut out some of the schoolyard, so they decided it was time to move. But there it was, just across the street from me. Miss Askins was just so enthusiastic. Some of the people that were there: there was Louie Arbini, a little Italian boy. His older brother, Rudolph was, I think by that time, was in the second grade. And Bill Murray. The bank of San Rafael was owned by the Murrays and Bill, Jr., was a year older than I. So he was five and I was four in kindergarten, but we became friends. Those two particularly.
George Whitcomb—another sad story, by the way. Well, I’ll tell you a little about George. He was such a wonderful guy, just so friendly. During the war, he—well, one of my friends, whom I didn’t know then, was a Catholic named Brian McCarthy, became a very close friend later, but was not in school at that time with me. Lived across the street from where George Whitcomb lived and we went shooting BB guns together. I guess we were in high school at the time. We went shooting BB guns with George. We sneaked onto the convent grounds which was essentially right near where Brian and George lived, and we were shooting there at a sign. George looked at the sign and he said, “What are you going to shoot at?”
And I said, “We’ll shoot at the ‘O,’” in whatever the word was.
He said, “There’s no ‘O’ there. I can’t see an ‘O.’” 9
And Brian immediately picked up—Brian was a very, very responsible person. He immediately picked up that George was suffering from—that he needed glasses. Now, here he was in high school, and so he went—Brian went to George’s parents, who lived right across the street form him and said, “Did you know that George really needs glasses? He can’t see details.” And that mother had never figured that out. This is why he did very poorly in school and the teachers didn’t catch it, and of course, it was very obvious when he said he couldn’t see it, see this ‘O’ that we were shooting at. So he got some help then, but he couldn’t go into the army and he got a job as a mechanic. He was very, very upset that he couldn’t get into the army because of his bad sight. And friends would come home sometimes for—naval people would. This preyed on him and he finally got in his car and he drove about ninety miles an hour right into a tree and killed himself. He was—life just was—he felt left out of it.
Swent: Oh, how sad.
Curtis: Oh, a terrible thing. And he—well anyhow, he was one of my early friends in kindergarten and through the first grade and on up to high school. Bill Murray, when I was four, was in that kindergarten with me, but they wouldn’t let me, at the end of that year when I became five, go into the first grade. They said that you can’t do that in this school. It was the principal that was against that, so I had to spend another year in kindergarten, but I kept friends with Bill Murray and his younger brother, Leonard, who was younger than I. So through—I was in that school until the sixth grade and my first teacher after I got—. Oh, my second—Miss Askins left and I had Miss Atkins for my second one. She was much younger. She wasn’t nearly as motherly. I liked her; she was all business though.
Then I went into the first grade and Miss Cansella was another one of these young, lovable people. She was just out of college. She taught me reading and I did very well with reading right away. Then the next teacher was Mrs. Spencer. She had married an engineer named Spencer. Just before I moved into her class, her name had been Miss Pacheco. Miss Spencer was my third grade teacher, high second and third grade. They split up. Then my fourth grade teacher had been Miss Thrap, but she married and became Mrs. Watson. Everybody feared Mrs. Watson. Oh, I loved Mrs. Spencer. I kept in touch with her all through college. Mrs. Watson—of course, it was Miss Watson to us—she taught me really, I guess, arithmetic. Now we had had addition and subtraction, of course, in—well, Mrs. Spencer was very good, too, now that I think about it. Mrs. Watson taught me doing square roots and that sort of stuff which was a little bit more advanced.
Swent: In fourth grade!
Curtis: By that time, in the fourth and fifth, low fifth, grades—yes, we got into square roots and I remember when Miss Watson was ill and a substitute came in, she had us add columns of things on the board in front of everybody. I thought that everybody was doing this the way I was doing it, which was when you have double or triple numbers, you go up and you add them. You just go, for instance in a column, you go four and the next one is six, so you go four, ten, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-seven, and then two to carry. You just run up the columns like that, and I didn’t realize that the other students weren’t doing that. They were going six and four is ten, and saying out loud, going up very slowly, up the column. That was sort of the first indication that I was a little better than some of the 10
kids. That’s the first time I realized that I could do something better than they. That was in the fourth, high fourth grade.
But in the sixth grade, I had a teacher, Miss Donnelly—a flaming redhead, wore high heels, painted her nails, had long fingernails, take the chalk and break it, and then start writing, and scratching at the same time. Her fingernails as she wrote—oh, that was so awful! I liked her. She was having an affair with—.
Now by this time, Brian had been kicked out of—I was in the second grade and Brian had been kicked—no, I was in the first grade. Brian had been kicked out of Catholic school in San Rafael and they put him in the Coleman School, public school. He was a terror, but he was very bright. Right away he skipped a grade and then later, he skipped another grade, so he got out of the Coleman school and he went to sixth grade. He got out of there a year and a half ahead of me. But we remain very close friends and I still see him. He became a lawyer. He went to Boalt at UC Berkeley, became a lawyer. He lives in San Rafael, he has had two different homes. He’s sort of retired now. He and his wife Barbara. Barbara had also gone to—oh, well let me put it in order. Before I got out of the sixth grade, my mother had remarried and we moved to Ross, to a rental house that we were going to—and she put me in—now it’s Ross Middle School; it was called Ross Grammar School. I lost a lot of touch with the old friends I had except for Brian. I kept seeing him right through to college, actually. We would get together to make airplanes. We would get together to make coasters and we just had a lot of fun together.
Swent: Coasters? Not coasters you put under glasses, but—?
Curtis: No. We called them coasters. These were—
Swent: Wagons?
Curtis: Yes, wagons. We built the whole thing, the steering with ropes coming up to a thing that you could turn it one way or the other, and wooden things for brakes and put on the wheels. In those days, you couldn’t buy a kit. You had to buy all these things separately and build them. Then my mother would haul us around with a rope on the car, buzzing along. [laughter]
So we did things like that. He never got into camping or hunting. He had a conscience much earlier than I about these things. Even when we were hunting with bows and arrows and Brian would join us—Brian became a very good tennis player, extraordinarily good tennis player. I played tennis, but through most of that period of time, hunting and fishing was more my spirit than playing tennis. I was moderately good, but not in Brian’s class, but he would join us sometimes. One of the times that he joined us was out at Bolinas with our bows and arrows. We went up around the point there and we found, among other things, a seagull that had a string around its—it was covered with tar, oil spill, and a string around its neck. It was dying; it was choking; it was just in terrible shape. Bert put an arrow in and he said he’d—Brian said, “Oh, don’t shoot that. That’s not in any pain. That bird’s not in any pain. Just let him die.” “Why isn’t he in any pain?” Now this is the conservative, Catholic religion that is taught in Marin County. “Because he has no soul, he can’t feel any pain.” With that, Bert laughed and shot and killed this poor miserable dying seagull. George, who was a Catholic and brought up in San Rafael, he said, “Well Brian, did you ever step on a dog’s foot?” 11
Brian didn’t have dogs. He said, “It’ll bark. It’ll scream. It’s in pain! All animals feel pain.” Now that’s one Catholic to another, but that’s one that had a different experience and put it together. Brian had a cat. That cat belonged to the family and all they did was pet it. They never saw it in pain. But that was the religion that was taught in Marin County. When Brian got over here and went to—what’s the Catholic—? Sort of like a club that they have—
Swent: Newman Hall?
Curtis: Yes, Newman Hall. He found out that Catholicism on the campus was entirely different from the Catholicism in Marin County. When he first started college, and I had a talk with him about evolution, he said, “I really can’t believe in evolution. I’ve had courses in—” let’s see, where did he go first to school? Well, he went—I think he went also for a couple of years to Marin Junior College in Kentfield. Then he came over to Berkeley. Later on in life he told me, “Garniss, I’ve had—I’ve changed a lot of my ideas about things.” One of them was about evolution. But that indoctrination is so difficult to get over.
Swent: The first five years, they say.
Curtis: First five years and they’ve really got you forever.
Swent: Were your family Catholic?
Curtis: Oh, I’ll tell you about that, but let me finish with Brian. He had two older sisters, Sally and Jerry, and an older brother Warren. I think Warren was the oldest. Yes, Warren was the oldest and then Jerry and then Sally. Jerry gave up Catholicism early. I didn’t find that out until I was about thirteen or fifteen years old. And I said, “Why? How can this be?” And Brian said, “Well, in every Catholic family, there’s one who just does not want to believe.”
Mother’s Road to Atheism; Becoming an Agnostic
Curtis: So now to mother, brought up a Catholic. Now, my grandmother was not—she had been a Catholic, but was certainly not a devout Catholic. I never knew her to go to church. My grandfather was an Episcopalian. He never went to church. But they insisted that my mother go to Catholic schools. And I guess my aunt Hessle, who was my mother’s younger sister, who I’ll say something about; that was the mother of my cousin Henry John, H.J.
So my mother was in a convent, Notre Dame, in San Jose, in 1906 when the earthquake struck. She had a roommate—this was an old Victorian -type, wood structure house, part of the school. I should say wood structure architecture. The central heating didn’t exist then. They had fireplaces in almost every room. She felt that first little rattle, or shock, and she was very sensitive because there had been a lot of small earthquakes preceding the big 1906 quake. She woke up. In the bed right next to her was her roommate, a friend, Ethel Laffen, a Japanese-American. She woke her up and pulled her 12
down the stairs and outside. When they went back in, the chimney for their fireplace had collapsed on their beds and they both would have been dead if she hadn’t gotten them out of there. And she said, “That’s it. This is not a loving god.” And she had been increasingly—here she was, fifteen years old—upset about these overweight, fat- necked, high-living priests, red-faced, and the subservient nuns kissing the garments as they passed and all, and the priests just ignoring the nuns. She said, “There’s something wrong here. A loving god—.” Oh, I think several of the girls were killed in—I want to say twelve, but I don’t know how many really were killed in that earthquake. Chimneys.
San Francisco was, of course, closed off. And she couldn’t go through there and get on the ferry to San Rafael. There was no telephone that was working and telephones, of course, were just new. So my grandfather—she just had to stay there for a couple of days, waiting to see what would happen. My grandfather took the railroad from San Rafael. There used to be a railroad, Northwestern Pacific, that went out to the north. Then there was a branch that came around over by Vallejo, and you could get around the bay that way. I think—this is further north than Vallejo. But you could get around and join a line coming south on the east side of the bay. He came all the way down to San Jose, met her, picked her up and took her back that way. She had a talk with him on the train about this. He said, “Well—” he had to admit he was not religious.
But she became a devout atheist. And she didn’t just stop with getting out of the Catholic church; she got books on religion. I still have one, The Ten Great Religions of the World, that goes way back to when she collected that book. She found—she studied them all. Of course, Catholicism comes right out of the Jewish people. She studied all of these, and Hindu and Buddha and Muslim. She said, “They’re all the same. There are these people like Buddha, and like Mohammed, who have something good to say, but then along come the men and convert this into a male-dominated religion. She found out that Mohammed was equal rights for the women, but you would never know it today. Of course, she found also that—now you’re old enough to remember that the Catholic church had something called the Index. There were books on the Index, and the Gospels—
[Tape 2, Side A]
Curtis: —were on the index. Catholics could not read those. Until about the mid-fifties, when the pressure was so—you know, women were beginning to feel their rights right after World War II. I had friends, Catholic friends—well, like Brian. He never had read the— I don’t know if, to this day, he has read the Gospels.
Swent: They weren’t allowed to.
Curtis: They were not allowed to. It had to be interpreted. So I read—a friend of my sister’s who was Catholic and got interested in converting me, said—gave me some of the— what would you call it? The True Word from the Catholic church? So I read through Thomas Aquinas and I could out-argue Aquinas with his proof of God and all that sort of stuff and he couldn’t take that. And I said, “Well, how about the Gospels?” And this friend said, “I can’t read the Gospels.” Here I was, sixteen, seventeen years old at that time. So I got the Gospels. [chuckles] 13
Then I studied—it was quite clear when I got through the Gospels according to John, that he had—he kept saying, as has been said, he didn’t know God. I mean, he didn’t know Jesus. And none of them, it turns out—the one closest to written first, probably Mark—there probably is a missing one, too—Mark, a hundred and twenty-three years after the so-called established death of Christ, that was written and then the others came along later. And each knew what the others had written but they seemed to have, each one has something different to put in there, so I realized the Catholic church is not anything like—very little like what Christ was preaching. It just—they’ve taken it and distorted it for their purposes. In fact, the Catholics didn’t like women. To begin with, the Christians, the male-dominated church, hated women. Mary didn’t come around to being accepted until the fifth century as the mother of God. Then, because people just normally—if Christ was born, he had a mother and they had to have something. The people put Mary into the church, not the priests. Then there were all these competitive religions that were so very similar. Mithras, which also had Mary, mother of God, and the miracles of walking on water and raising the dead; they’re all there in a religion that goes back before Christianity, so Christianity—anyway, my mother, who found all of these things and said, “This is just a way of getting money, squeezing money out of the poor, and male domination.” The only place for women would be subservient people for the priesthood. And, of course, Buddha and the Hindus have other, similar things, but it turns out that they are largely male dominated. But when you read Buddha, and then read what the Buddhists have done since with Zen Buddha—and you know, a whole bunch of them that have used Buddha as their spirit, but have decided to add their particular changes to Buddhism. Anyhow, so my mother became an atheist and that’s the way I was brought up.
Swent: That was pretty advanced—pretty amazing at that time. It took a lot of nerve, didn’t it?
Curtis: Oh, it took a lot. Yes, but she was a bright gal. And she—so she brought my sister and me up as atheists.
I, after reading a lot, decided I have to be an agnostic. There are a lot of things that I don’t understand. I certainly don’t believe in these organized religions, but there’s a— scientifically, here we are, we have to face that we’re on this earth and we are just one, not of millions, not of hundreds of millions, but of hundreds of billions of stars, probably with planets around them. We date—we go back 4.5 billion years to the origin of the earth; our galaxy, from looking at the older stars in it, probably goes back 11 billion years, so the chances, right within our galaxy of civilizations like ours, no matter how rare it is, it’s almost inevitable. And throughout the whole universe, with billions of galaxies, there are not just civilizations, a few of them, there are millions of civilizations. Half of them are not as advanced as we are and half of them are far more advanced than we are.
But what I was leading up to is that life is here and any place that life can form in the universe, it will form and it will evolve into increasingly complex organisms. Now, people don’t agree with me about a lot of things, but I, having done a lot of study of this, say that human intelligence is inevitable if the planet lasts long enough. A lot of planets get destroyed. There’s not a god out there looking after us; it’s purely luck, but the life force is what I see as an essential part of the evolution of the universe is life. That’s an essential part of it, and it’s going to come and it’s going to get a thinking being. But I don’t see any single deity that’s looking out after our good. The laws are there—gravity, 14
positive and negative electromagnetic forces, speed of light, et cetera, are there. And you defy gravity, this god isn’t going to save you. You’re going to squash if you fall off that cliff, or even break an elbow if you fall off of that ladder. Or with Dwight Steele, this great ecologist who was, with Sylvia McLaughlin, were just going to be honored in Texas for all their work. Just a week before that was going to take place, he fell off a ladder in his house and broke his neck and died. God is not looking out after you. And all of these people, like these nine miners in that mine [in Pennsylvania, July –August 2002], they’re praying to God, and the papers say, show signs, “Thank God, we were saved by God.” They weren’t saved by God. How many thousands of miners have died who believed thoroughly in God but didn’t have any God to save them? How many people die in earthquakes? And the moment that this catastrophe, 9/11, takes place, they all rush to church and pray to God. Well, God could have stopped that easily. But you think that there weren’t a lot of true believers that were killed?
It just makes no sense to be praying to this deity whose only purpose seems to be adding up do we love him, how many good deeds have we done, and how much are you going to pay for in hell, afterwards? We’re all going to hell anyhow because of original sin. Who was the original sin blamed on? Eve, for biting into the apple when she was told not to! And that original sin is part of the—I just don’t see how educated people can believe this nonsense. I really don’t. But—
Swent: It’s very powerful.
Curtis: There are these things that really—that I, as a scientist, have to believe, that people have had these visions of things happening and turned out to be true. I’m thinking of—there are books on these, but one particular one. When they were trying to find the Northwest Passage, there were two ships and one, as I recall, was wrecked. They had to get off the boat, and some of them could get on this other, smaller ship, but they all couldn’t get on it. And it took off. This woman, after it had been gone just a few hours, she said to her husband, “That ship is on fire, it’s burning up. I can see it. We’ve got to go save its people.” And he says, “You can’t see that.” Well, it was on fire and they all—those people that got off and then were able to walk back confirmed exactly what she saw. Now, you can say there’s a finite chance that people are seeing these visions all the time. But they become more, as you delve into them, they become more and more difficult to put on chance. So there seem to be communications sometimes between people and between animals, that they seem to sense when the other one is in trouble.
I’ll tell you one. Lloyd Lewis was a friend of mine during the war. I was called back from Christmas, Arizona, and I’ll get into that because that’s important. I was called back by the army to take a test again and go into the service. Of course, they found that I had—that was very strange. I went to San Francisco, to the induction place and had to take the physical. My mother dropped—or my sister dropped me off there. Well, they got my history and they looked for the murmur. They gave me all the heart tests, recording. And the machine wasn’t working. So, “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
Came back the next day, so—went through this whole business again. I had—my mother and sister were just amazed when I showed up on the door. I took the bus back and walked up from Ross to our home, which I haven’t told you about yet. So they took me back the next day, and they did the tests again. Now, they didn’t know how to interpret them. They needed a specialist to interpret them, so part of the test had to be 15
redone and specialists have gotten it from some other San Francisco place. So I came back the next day and they said, “Well, six doctors have looked at this. Four of them say that you don’t have a heart murmur. Two say that they think you do. So, goodbye.”
So I went home again. This time—so I immediately went to—Hazeltine was my doctor in Ross and he listened to my heart carefully, and he said, “You know, I can’t hear a murmur. I think that there may be one if they say so, but I can’t hear it.” He said, “I think you don’t have to consider this at all. I think, just go ahead with your life.” So that’s what I did. But my wife was pregnant with our second child at that time and didn’t want to go back to the mine. So I got a job with Shell Oil in Ventura. Of course, this is wartime and it was very difficult to find housing. She stayed with her parents down in Palos Verdes Estates, and I’ll get into that, too. Maybe all this isn’t apropos of what we’re doing here, but it all adds up.
Swent: Everything’s apropos.
Curtis: So I got a room in a house, a bedroom. I would get together with my wife on weekends. We were—I got the job with Shell and it was a six-day a week. This is wartime, so I would drive down on Saturday night to be with the family. My wife and then with Ann after she was born; Penelope and Ann, and my mother and father-in-law, whom I loved a great deal, and be back on Monday morning at seven to go out with my boss, Lloyd Lewis. Now, Lloyd was married to a woman named Mona. And one day—this is all part of what I’ve been talking about. It takes me a while to get back, but I usually do.
Swent: That’s all right. You’re doing very well at that.
Curtis: So Lloyd said to me, “Garniss, we have to come in early. There’s something wrong with Mona’s father. We can’t get through on the phone.” This was, again, war and you might be able to get to New York, or you might not be able to get to New York for a whole day. I said, “How do you know something’s wrong?” And he said, “Well, Mona always knows when something’s wrong physically with her father. And she’s never wrong. She always knows if he has a cold.” And he said, “But this has got to be very serious because she’s very upset. So we’ll come in early.”
Well, we came in at about three o’clock, cut off. And by that time she’d gotten through. Her father had had a serious heart attack. Now, it’s that type of personal experience, and then hearing things like that from others, and Lloyd, who was not religious at all, who, from having seen his wife always—she had always been close to her father, closer to her father than to her mother, always knowing when there was the slightest thing wrong with him, and always being right, led him to believe—and he wouldn’t even try scientifically to figure out how that—. He just accepted that she knew when he was sick. And this time, he was very—and he knew that so firmly that we had to cut off early in the afternoon from work and found it was correct. So I’ve been reading—I subscribe to a journal, which I almost—well, in a sense, I did. Peter Sturrock was—he’s retired now, was at Stanford in astronomy—in astrophysics, not in the astronomy department, but in a related department; he was in an astrophysics group. He—a very fine guy—he had some experience with UFOs, not personally, but through people who had sent him material to be examined. He had gone all the way to Brazil to look into a case of UFOs that had been sighted and talk to the people, and came back convinced that there was something to UFOs. He heard that I was interested in UFOs. And a 16
friend, Jim Harder, was interested in UFOs. Jim Harder had hypnotized a lot of people that had UFO experiences and he was a firm believer.
Unidentified Flying Objects and the Journal of Scientific Exploration
Curtis: Now, I had seen—at that time I had seen two UFOs, so I knew that there was something going on here, but no one could get these things published. It was always tabloid-type things and they were ridiculed by the—the government set up a series of investigations. The first one right after the famous Roswell incident. The first one was Project Grudge, which went into another project; I forget what that is. It wasn’t until oh, about 19—I guess in the seventies that they decided to stop that second project of investigation of flying saucers.
What they did was, they got—oh, what’s his name? He was head of what was then Division of Weights and Measures, I think that’s what it’s called now. The investigation of the constants of nature—the decay constants for the decaying elements like uranium and so on, Potassium-Argon, and for establishing the most precise measurement of what is a gram, what is a pound, and so on. It still operates. It’s very scientifically oriented. Now, what was his name? Anyway, he was at the University of Colorado. He had retired from this Division of Weights and Measures. They got him to head a committee to investigate UFOs. You know, I have a habit often of forgetting names of people that I don’t like.
Swent: [chuckles]
Curtis: And I don’t like him, because— I have his book. He investigated a whole bunch of UFOs and his final—by the way, to make this a very scientific group, he got a bunch of psychologists to talk to people who said that they had seen UFOs. His name will come to me. But the preface to the book says that in all the cases that they’ve investigated— words to this effect—in all the cases that they have investigated, they see no evidence for continuing the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects. And the way he put it made it sound as though they didn’t have any evidence in the book. The book was filled with unsolved cases that they could not attribute to hallucinations, they could not attribute to mistaken objects in the skies such as balloons, or kites, or birds. There— something like in all the cases, I think that I picked out five or six that just left no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the government was hiding the evidence for flying saucers and that this guy was part and parcel of the whole thing.
Now, what happened with the psychologists was this: one of them found a note that this guy had written to another person saying, “The trick will be to convince the public—” And this psychologist let this letter get published and was immediately fired. All the other psychologists quit because they could see right away that this was again not going to be leading to—. But the cases are there. Well, I’ll give you one of them from an airfield in England. On radar, they had picked up an object from two different radar stations. There were people that said that they could see the object from the ground, so they sent up a fighter plane. When the fighter tried to chase this thing, it went right around behind it and that could be resolved on the radar right close by. They ran out of gas 17
trying to get around to see this thing, and came down and another one went up. The same thing happened again. Then, when it came down, they followed this all by radar up over Scotland, going several thousand miles an hour, not making a sound and disappearing off over Scotland. But there are many of these cases in—it begins with ‘C,’ his name begins with ‘C.’ I’ll get it yet. I had his grand-daughter in a class in Berkeley, by the way.
Anyhow, he published this book and I have a copy of that. Since I saw a UFO right over the campus—a very strange—I won’t go into that one now. And then other times, I’ve seen some very strange lights in the sky with an actual object in the daylight with a big thing out in front of it, going slowly back and forth. At first I thought, “This is a toy,” as it came over by my—up maybe a few hundred feet. But there were clouds coming from the west, fog clouds going from west to east, and way up high were cirrus clouds. This was higher than the fog clouds, which were about two thousand feet up, so it wasn’t a little toy. It was something bigger. Then when these, coming from the north, and the wind was from west to east. This was going against the wind if it were down low. Well, it was much higher, but the clouds from the north were coming down and it was heading that way. It turned out that it went behind those clouds, so it was a huge thing, up— whatever the cirrus clouds were. Perhaps twenty, twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand feet up. It was large! Now, why aren’t those picked up on radar? Commercial radar is just—all of it is just looking for planes down low. They don’t go above a certain angle. So things that are up high, they don’t pick them up. The military picks them up and all of that is kept secret from us.
So anyhow, Sturrock came to talk to Jim Harder and to me about starting a—since he couldn’t get anything published and people can’t publish anything about a scientific study of these things. The journals just trash them immediately. So he started a—he got together enough money to start a journal.
Swent: I’m recalling, and I’d completely forgotten it, but I have a tape recording someplace at home that we made years ago. Jim Harder gave a lecture at the Oakland Museum, and we were so fascinated by it that we taped it and kept the tape of his talk.
Curtis: Oh, yes. Well, he’s a fascinating guy.
Swent: Is he still around?
Curtis: Oh, yes. He lives right up here on the hill. A house that he had constructed. You can’t get to it by automobile, you have to go up a sloping elevator on the side of the hill to get to it. It’s up off of La Loma. You wind up the hill. I forget the names of those streets.
Well anyway, here it is. Journal of Scientific Exploration, JSE. The name was changed, actually. Journal of Scientific Exploration. So that people who have made investigations of anomalous phenomena that are not easily explained, have a place to publish if they’ve got the data to support what they say, and a lot of good stuff is in those things. A man named Stevenson, Ian Stevenson, University of Virginia, has published quite a bit with these. His studies, strangely, have been with these people, young children, who think that they’ve had another life. He has studied them here in America and he has studied them in India, and in Sri Lanka, Pakistan; the Muslims don’t believe in reincarnation, whereas the Hindus, of course, you go on and on and on until they finally 18
reach nirvana, an understanding of everything, I guess. But he’s investigated quite a few families in which the, particularly the Pakistanis, which don’t believe in reincarnation, in which the child maintains that it has had another life. These children, which he has interviewed, and the parents, usually it’s not in the same village, it’s from some other village miles and miles away. These are children who think they have lived as another person in a family in a previous life.
[Tape 2, Side B]
Curtis: And most of the time—I don’t know about most of the time—very frequently we’ll say, the person has been murdered. For instance, a woman’s been killed by her husband, and the child knows the name of the dog, knows the name of his brothers and sisters, speaks a little different accent than the family he’s in, but the same accent of the family that he—. Now, it’s not one or two; Stevenson has twenty or thirty of these. He has sent other investigators back to confirm what he’s said, and they come up with the same thing. These children believe this from almost the moment that they can begin to talk, that “Where’s Momma, where’s Daddy,” or something. They continue and then this memory begins to fade. Seven, eight, nine, it begins to fade and by ten or eleven they’ve lost all memory of that, but he’s recorded these things. Well, you would never get that published in, say, Science or Nature. But—so here’s the journal that he can get that sort of thing published.
Well, there are many others. There are these very strange things. There’s not—I don’t see in this a religious trend at all, but it’s something that we simply do not understand. There’s a classic case, for instance—well, there are many cases—the Russians took mother rabbits away from their babies and sent the mother down in a submarine, and then killed the babies one at a time; the mother just was frantic. Things like that. Well, that sort of stuff—you have to be looking for this kind of literature, and not in the tabloids, but in something that has some credibility to it.
For instance, one case of hundreds that have been cited—Lord Carnarvon supported— what’s his name, who discovered Tutankhamen—Carter in his investigations. Carnarvon had supported him for years because Carter was sure that there were—they knew enough about the lineage of the pharaohs that there were some missing and one of them was Tutankhamen. So when Carter found the tomb, this is 1923—by the way, this was reported in the news here in the Chronicle every day; my mother would read to us what were the latest things coming out of the tomb. I remember that very well. I was very excited. I didn’t know what a mummy was, or what a tomb was, but she described them to me. So that was very exciting. So he, Carnarvon, was not very well, but he went to see the tomb opened. The moment that they had broken the seal and looked in, and Carter had made his famous—when they said, “Can you see anything?” And he said, “Wonderful things.” They left it right there and waited for Carnarvon to get there. He came and saw that. He became very ill. He had been ill, but they think that he got—was bitten by some insect, which exacerbated whatever was wrong. He died there in Egypt. He had a pet dog at home. Let’s say he died at o’clock Egyptian time, and three hours difference, or whatever it was. The dog let out a howl and dropped dead back home.
Now, that’s just one incident of that kind of thing, but if you read the literature, you can find that this has happened many times, when there has been this extremely close relationship between dog and owner and the death of one leads to death of the other, so 19
you begin to realize that there is something going on that we can’t measure, and it’s not reproducible. Science has to have reproducibility, but if you add up all the cases and check the integrity of the observers, you end up with being mystified, so I have to still be an agnostic about a lot of things. Insofar as a single deity up there looking over us, this is total nonsense in my whole belief system, but that life is important and that it is part of the evolution of the whole universe, and part and parcel meaning that it has to be some way tied in with this whole evolutionary, physical evolutionary process—. The formation of stars and planets, and supernovae leading to dust clouds which condense into to planets and solar bodies has happened and is happening all the time and life is coming out of that whenever all of it clicks. Now, if there is a supreme being, which there could be, then you have to say, “Well, who made the supreme being?”
Swent: [chuckles] First cause.
Curtis: Yes. So “first cause.” I won’t go into that any further. We’ll get back into early education. I remember all of my teachers, right through grammar school and high school, and those particularly that I was impressed with.
Swent: We didn’t get the name of the high school. San Rafael—?
Curtis: Oh, the high school. Well, my sister had gone—my sister had gone—I should have, out of Ross Grammar School, I should have gone to Tamalpaias. But my sister had gone to Tamalpaias and something happened and she didn’t like the teachers, or something. I forget now. And she transferred to San Rafael High School which, had I continued to live in San Rafael, I would have gone to. So to commute—we decided that I would go to San Rafael High School and my sister and I would commute on the train together and take it to San Rafael, which we did.
Let’s see. I wanted to go back. You asked me about scientific stimuli. My first, you might say, scientific question that I asked was: I asked my sister—here I was, we hadn’t moved. We moved once in San Rafael to another place in San Rafael, and that was when I was five years old. This happened before I was five years old. I asked my sister how old the hills were and she said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Let’s ask grandmother because she’s been here since before the hills were formed.” [laughter] So I asked my grandmother. She was very brave. My grandmother was very scientifically oriented, by the way. She knew about tides and the moon. Talked about how the sun and moon caused the tides. The reason I knew about tides was because from a very early age we went down to along the shore of the bay and collected mussels from the rocks at low tide, so we had to know when the tides were. How did we know when the tides were? Well, it depended where the moon and the sun were and so on, so I asked her that and she kind of laughed and said, “Well, actually, I think they’re a good deal older than I am.”
That was my first curious—you know, about something like that. It’s interesting that I should get ultimately into something where I would date these rocks, and I would find out how old. My mother was interested in science. She didn’t tell me very much about science, but she did read about—she was interested in earthquakes, naturally, but her interests largely were in literature, poetry and the classics, Shakespeare and Dickens. She loved Dickens. She was reading that rather than scientific journals. 20
Swent: Did she have to be employed? Did she go to work?
Curtis: No, she did not go to work. They’d had money, you see, and she had had tutors and my uncle Harold went to a military academy. My aunt Hessle and my mother had tutors through a woman named Miss Nix. Miss Nix came and tutored them French and world history—all the different things—up until she could get into, my mother, the convent at San Jose. After that, she didn’t go to college, and I don’t know why she didn’t. And she didn’t go to work. She had—she married and she got enough money from my father to keep her going for a while anyhow. I think he stopped paying his alimony before he should have. But she’d met another person named Curtis. Allan Ralston Curtis came from a family that made a lot of money in the lumber business. They got married in 1929, but we—let’s see, they didn’t—. His father was still alive in the old house in San Rafael, and they did get—we didn’t move together to live together until after his father died and the estate was settled, but meantime, he had helped my mother with money that she got from selling her colonial house that she had lived in to begin with. He took the $10,000 that she got for that house, which only cost $1,500 to build—you know—
Swent: Times have changed, haven’t they?
Curtis: [chuckles] Things have changed. $10,000—he invested in and made a lot of money for her, so she didn’t have to work. That was his business, was stocks. Well—and then, when his father died of Alzheimer’s disease, and the estate was settled, he had a brother, Carlton Curtis, who was younger, who lived in Alameda. They settled all the different things and then we moved to a house in Ross. During the time that they were designing—an architect named Evers, who had designed the country club outside of Fairfax.
He played golf—didn’t hunt, didn’t fish. Golf was his—. And the interesting thing—I had a nice relationship with my stepfather, but he wasn’t interested in the things that I was interested in. I could have been interested in golf, but he never once offered to take me out there and teach me golf. He gave me a club and I used to hit balls, and used to putt, and I was very good at it, but he never asked me to join in—his Sunday was with his friends and not to have me tagging along, or supervising me, so I never got into golf.
I love to watch golf today. It’s one of those games where nobody’s throwing a baseball at your head, or tackling you, or doing anything. It’s you. You win or you lose based on—and this is why so many golfers are good friends of each other. They—a golfer wins and a golfer loses, but the one that loses doesn’t lose because this guy has done anything to him, he just was either lucky or better at playing golf. You have every opportunity to be as good as he is if you practice and have the skills. You have to have certain native skills. I love to watch golf. Well, I like all the sports really, but particularly golf. I like to watch, and I think I would have been very good. I was naturally coordinated and, for instance, in grammar school, I remember that when I left Coleman School—we played these sports at recess, and so when we went to Ross, we played the sports at recess, but there, they had teams. There were four teams from the sixth grade on up. and you were chosen into a team. Well, here I was, this jug-eared kid with no self-confidence with respect to girls whom I—you know, I had these “secret sorrows” all over the place; they all attracted me. I didn’t—I felt so insecure, I couldn’t even talk to them. Well, there was one that I did, but that was Louisiana Abbott, that didn’t go to my school. Her mother was a friend of my mother and I met her at Bolinas 21
Beach and we had a short note-passing back and forth for about six months and that was it, at Ross. So I was one of the last people to be picked on a team.
Swent: Oh, dear.
Curtis: And on the poorest team, of course. Well, I got out there and they put me way out in the field. They couldn’t trust me to throw the ball, or be on first or second base, to catch or anything like that. I had to be way out there in the field, so here comes this ball at me and I just jumped up with one hand. It was going over my head and I caught it. I didn’t think anything of it; it was just the way we played ball at Coleman School. You caught the ball, and you hit the ball. I hadn’t even been up yet, and—because, being at the tail end, you didn’t get around to being up before the recess was over. [chuckles] Anyhow, one of the people, his name was Paul, he said, “Boy, that was a lucky catch! How’d you do that?” I said, “Well, I don’t know. Couldn’t you catch it?” Well, it turned out he wasn’t very good and here he was on second base.
Well, I gradually worked—I’d never played basketball. We didn’t have a basketball. Well, I became very good at basketball, extremely good, so later on, I became a captain of the team and we won every game that we had. We got so far ahead that Miss Hubbs, who was in charge of outdoors, decided that we were just not going to have teams anymore. [chuckles] I picked the right people for the team. I could recognize talent where—and I knew what I needed to have and so, soccer, ring tennis, tennis—I had all the right people to just win, win, win. I loved Miss Hubbs. She was in room five and six, and then when I went into the next grade, let’s see. She—now I’ve forgotten her name. She was a Ph.D. and I’ll think of it because I liked—I always liked my teachers. She had two of her own children in school with me, at the same time. Letha Farley Jenkins was her name. Farley—she was related to Jim Farley, who was postmaster under Franklin Roosevelt back then. Mrs. Jenkins had a Ph.D., the first person, and she was very, very good.
Swent: When did you change your name?
Curtis: Not until I got to college. And it was Kemp-Curtis and I thought, you know, that’s— Kemp-Curtis, my sister kept the name Jane Van Norden Kemp-Curtis, and I just decided that was just—I’d joined the fraternity of my step-father. I didn’t know my father, and I thought it would be just simpler to have it Garniss Curtis. So I just dropped it. I was never formally adopted. So if Garniss had been legally—you know, in my birth certificate, I was Chester Alphonse Kemp. But then when my mother changed it to Garniss, she had it legally changed to Garniss instead of Alphonse Hearfield Kemp; she kept that last name. I don’t know why she did that, but she did. Well, so I ended up taking, just arbitrarily taking Curtis for my last name.
Now, going back to early stimuli: I was given, by my stepfather, a little book about that big and about that thick [indicates], and it was filled with scientific facts. The decay constants of uranium. I was fascinated. And this was—now I was in the—. When I got that book I was in the sixth or seventh grade. I just read, and I was amazed. We had two Encyclopedia Britannicas. And then I began to just go into those because they were filled with—they had the 1867 one and a 1911 edition. And so there was all this information. And I was beginning to get very interested in classical music and you could find the histories of Handel and Bach and Beethoven. See, I didn’t understand at 22
that age that libraries were much more than just the school library, or the library that my mother went to to get novels, and who-done-its, and that sort of stuff. There was a vast amount of information that you could get from a library.
Swent: We’re almost ready to wind up here, I think.
Curtis: Are we? Okay. Yes, we are.
Swent: We’ve covered a lot of territory.
Curtis: A lot of territory. So, it’s all a jumble, as you can see.
Swent: No, no it isn’t. I’m very impressed with how you wander away and then come back without my needing to be—
Curtis: Oh, oh. Good. All right.
Swent: No, that’s very, very good. Not everyone can do that.
Curtis: So, yes. I still remember all my good teachers through all—like Mrs. Jenkins, Aletha F. Jenkins and Agnes Hubbs. She later married and I don’t remember—it begins with ‘C.’ I don’t remember her married name. And those through first sixth grades—all of them. I just loved them. By the way, I wanted to tell you that Miss Donnelly, in my—
Swent: Of the fingernails? [chuckles]
Curtis: The one with the fingernails was the mistress of my good friend Brian’s father, and he was having a big, big affair. My mother knew about it. All of San Rafael knew about it, but Brian didn’t know about it and I didn’t think about telling him, nor did Brian’s mother. That was their business, as far as I was concerned. And she didn’t find that out until we were in high school.
So she divorced. I think he died about that time, too, just shortly after the divorce, as I recall. But all of those things were formative of the—obviously, his father was not very—Brian, we called him Mike—Brian’s father was not very religious, I guess. Although you have to follow the form, and you have to bring up your children in the religion that you were brought up in, even if you’ve sort of thrown it over. Ridiculous. So those were impressive things.
But this little book on science really got me thinking about science as a career, and I loved—
Swent: I didn’t realize that the decay of uranium would have been known by then, but of course the Curies were much earlier—
Curtis: Oh, yes. They had a lot of those decay constants—this would have been 1932 or so. The decay schemes had been worked out fairly well. Much more improved now, of course.
Swent: There were still a lot of blanks in that atomic chart in those days. 23
Curtis: Yes, there were blanks and—but I was very impressed with that. When I gave a talk in front of the class one time, I brought in the decay constants of uranium—[chuckles]— just to impress them with my knowledge, which came out of this little tiny book.
Swent: That was impressive, yes.
Curtis: So, they—let’s see. I was in the sixth grade. I’d been there just six months when they gave an SAT, which in those days was the Stanford Achievement Test, which covered your knowledge. They never told me my score, but they took me out of class to talk to me about where did I learn so much, and who were my teachers at Coleman School, and so on. They told me that I had done very well and, for my age, was one of the top people there. But it was just factual knowledge that—I’m a slow learner, but I remember usually very well, so they said that, “Now, you’ve tried to solve the algebra problems, and you got some of them right, but we haven’t had algebra yet and you—.” They didn’t give algebra in—but, you know, you can—simple algebra, you can just figure out how to solve this just intuitively. So I evidently showed some signs there, but we’ll get into this another time. So there we are.
Swent: We’re getting up to the Depression. We’ll need to mention that.
Curtis: Oh, yes. Well, you see my stepfather had been very cautious about his stocks, and he did not lose much in the fall of the stock market. He moved his money into bonds and things—he went every day, so he was watching the ticker tape, it used to be in those days. He did fairly well. What with the money he inherited from his father, which was also pretty much controlled by him before that. We were poor and before my mother married my step father, we had moved to the stable behind the house that was going to be for the servants for the house that never got built. We had moved to and made this into a living house, the old stable. There I lived with my grandmother and grandfather, and my mother and my uncle David. We didn’t have enough money to put windows on; we had screens around the porch that we slept on. I loved the tin roof—you know, a corrugated steel roof, and the rain on it, and the pinecones falling off the tree above us. This was really very exciting for me. That was from age seven to ten that we—we moved to Ross when I was eleven. Of course, again, hunting, hunting, hunting, hunting. I never felt that we were poor. My mother just never—. But we would go to the Red Cross rummage sales and she’d pick out underwear for me and pants that would fit. I didn’t mind that at all. Christmas always was just a magical time. There were presents and—so that was living off—my father had stopped paying alimony, and that was living off the investment of the $10,000, so I had a very pleasant youth.
[End of Interview] 24 25
[Interview 2: August 14, 2002]
[Tape 3, Side A]
Swent: [Now it says?] something and—
Curtis: Are we having lunch today?
Swent: Are we?
Curtis: Well, I asked you last time—
Swent: I’d be delighted, yes. I’d be very happy to—
Curtis: Oh good. Now, I didn’t make any reservation. I wanted to know just what kind of food you like and we can drive some—do you like Thai food?
Swent: I do.
Curtis: There’s a place just—maybe you’re familiar with it—just north of the campus on Shattuck and Cedar, or just above Shattuck and—?
Swent: No, I’m not familiar—
Curtis: Okay. Well, that’s a nice place there, if we get there early.
Swent: That’s sounds lovely. I’d like that very much. Well now, it says that everything is going well. It’s recording and the vol—level looks good. So I think we’re in business.
Curtis: Okay. [chuckling] I was thinking since we—I was giving a lot of biographical trivia that I could go over that and I could cut out the trivia and just get on because—
Swent: Sure.
Curtis: —if that’s—. And repeat what we did in high school.
Swent: If you’d like to. Or we—yes. That would be just fine. You had, in our first interview, you had pretty well done high school and your friendships I think.
Curtis: Well, okay.
Swent: But f there’s more you want, we can do that.
Curtis: The thing that I would just like to say—a few things I’d say, getting through. I felt that at my high school, the important stuff could have been done in two years. And the little inspiration that I got there were from such teachers as Mr. Londahl who taught freshman English and coached the football team, Mr. Money in senior English, Miss Newcomer in math, Mr. Estes in chemistry and physics. Miss Newcomer was a woman who was excellent in algebra, but she was superb. And the rest of the math that I had from Mr. Burt was just nothing. The languages that I took, Latin two years—total 26
loss because Mrs. Murray most of the time just read to us. But I have remembered some of that Latin and it’s been very helpful, besides amo, amas, amant [chuckles], which is helpful too. So—and I have to emphasize again the importance to me of learning to type. That was—that saved me this torture of trying to write things longhand. So that went on with me to college and I could type very fast.
Swent: And at that time, a lot of boys did not take typing.
Curtis: There was no other boy in the class taking typing at that time. In a class of about thirty girls, I was the only boy and I felt that I needed a second year of it, so with Miss Millikan. She was better because that was also not only typing, but introduction to business management sort of things. And she was the one who said, “Garniss, don’t spend time on this here. This is what you have references for. You have the dictionary, you have the encyclopedia and so learn to use those to find what you need. You can’t know it all at this point.” That stuck with me. Miss Millikan was very practical.
Miss Binsacca in biology was nice. I knew more biology than she did because I’d been reading biology and I had a microscope and was looking at paramecium and amoebae, and looking at the parts of tadpoles. I have to confess that I got a sack of the eggs just hatching out of a pond with my eyedropper. I was fascinated about putting the eyedropper in—squeezing the bulb then letting go and watching these things just disintegrate right into the tube. There they were, all stretched out. [chuckles]
Swent: Well.
Curtis: But—
Swent: So you were pretty well prepared for university, then—?
Curtis: So yes. I think I was, except that my maturity was way down. I think I would have done much better at the university had I done two things: work for a year or perhaps two to mature, and stayed out of the fraternity house. That cost me a lot. But my mother was one that thought that I shouldn’t work. I should stay with my studies. And so introduced into the fraternity house, which I was totally unprepared. I just disliked the life that these mature people were leading. I didn’t smoke. They played bridge and I took a dislike to that immediately.
I got in with a small group in my pledge class that I liked very much. I stayed with them for the rest of their lives, and mine, too. One of them just died a couple of months ago and I’m going this next Saturday to his memorial—not this coming Saturday, the week after—to his memorial service. That was Bob Coman. And I just got a letter from Johnny Copeland telling me about another friend, Bob Noyes, who’s done a lot of trips with me, has decided to move up to Ashland from Menlo Park—no, from Palo—well, it’s right on the border of Menlo Park and Palo Alto. Bob Noyes and Mary, known them since college days. They’ve taken trips with me. We’ve camped a lot together and keep in close touch. He and Johhny Copeland, and Barbara are much closer together than I am with them.
But anyhow, we’ve stayed in touch and so I’m very pleased he’s going up to Ashland. He’s not too—Bobby Noyes—is not too well, and his—the neighborhood where he 27
was, which was not a business neighborhood, but has become much louder and much more disturbing to him and to Mary. So Ashland’s a perfect place. They also have one of their nephews that lives there in Ashland and it’s a family that has stayed very close together. I went to one of their family reunions once. There were sixty people there and they do this once a year! And they all just keep in touch with each other. So—
Swent: Well, you have kept in touch with your college friends, too.
Curtis: Pretty much so, yes. That—
Swent: And your high school friends.
Curtis: And my high school friends. My closest ones from high school—well, most of the closest ones are gone. Bryan McCarthy, whom I went through the—from the second grade on with, he became a lawyer, went to Boalt Hall—became a lawyer, getting his degree here—has been successful in law. Family with three kids and they live in Marin County. So—I confess that I don’t see them often, but I do stop by. We exchange Christmas cards and catch up. His wife Barbara McGavin went to my grammar school so I knew her very well before she met Bryan.
Swent: You had mentioned, though, last time, how a number of your best friends, or closest friends, were lost during World War II.
Curtis: Oh, yes.
Swent: Like a high—
Curtis: The high mortality. Kids that I went through—a couple of those like Penfield Baker. Well, he died just as the war started of an appendix that burst. But Milton Nelson—I went form first grade on with him. Burt Young, all through high school. Leslie Watt, who was a brilliant, good fellow. He and I got—were about three other people that got A’s. And Lloyd Lieb. Lloyd Lieb didn’t get killed, but Leslie Watt went down on a ship in the South Pacific. It was a big loss. Burt Young and Milton were killed in Italy. Oh, there were others. Sterling—
Swent: And of course from your ROTC group, you would—there were some also, I think.
Curtis: Sterling—I can’t think of his last name right now—was at Pearl Harbor on the Arizona when it was blown up. You know, it’s taken all these years for it to finally come out that Roosevelt knew all about that ahead of time, and that it was very carefully planned to draw the Japanese to make the first strike. And we knew exactly where they were. We could have given—see they had not only been—had decoded the Japanese messages on radio, not just recently. A woman had been decoding them since 1920. Every one of their codes we had broken right up to World War II, and so we knew exactly where they were in the Pacific—.
Now, I knew this was true even before all the investigations and Kimmel and Short—Short was the Army and Kimmel was the Navy—taking all the blame. A cousin of my mother-in-law, Hewett, was one that was moved out of the Pacific into the Atlantic because they were bringing in Kimmel and Short to take over in Hawaii, who 28
were ignorant of the plans that were going on. He knew them, and he said to my mother- in-law, and she told us, that Roosevelt knows all about this and someday I’ll tell you about it myself. Well, so I was suspicious of Roosevelt from the very beginning. Roosevelt put them in and then they were patsies for this whole damned thing. But we had to get in that war. Although I think we didn’t have to lose twenty-six hundred people.
Swent: It’s very costly.
Curtis: And I don’t forgive Roosevelt for that. But the thought if they were tipped off at all— the Japanese, they had spies in Hawaii and they would have immediately said something, they must know something.
[tape interruption]
Swent: I think so, yes. So I’ll get my little gadget here and I think we’re fine. You had talked last time about jumping ahead, but would you rather—?
Curtis: Well, let’s—where did we leave off? I told you about college, that I goofed off—
Swent: You changed your major. You thought about forestry at first.
Curtis: Well, I changed my major from mining engineering to economic geology after—in one of the paleontology classes I met my future wife, Dorette Davis. I was faced with taking a class in, I think it was engineering, that I knew was going to be just dull as could be, or change my major and take some classes that I wanted to. So I was able to do that and stayed on to graduate in ’42 instead of ’41. So I graduated with my wife to be. We got married the day of graduation, May 14, 1942.
Swent: Oh, you did?
Curtis: —that year was graduation. Her father was an architect, and a very good architect. He and one of his brothers, his older brother—Pier Davis was his name. Pier was his older brother and they made a—they joined forces in Los Angeles and did a lot of buildings there, one of which was the Episcopal Church, which actually was in the 1937 Encyclopedia Britannica. So that being one of the churches he had done—he did others, too—we decided to get married there. A very small group of friends came, Bob Tucker was my best man. I’ve kept in touch with him. He’s one of the few people outside of my pledge class that I had a longtime, long-term friendship with. The other people beyond me—I only—one or two, have I stayed in touch with all these years. The rest of them didn’t interest me. There were those people that followed in my pledge class—the next pledge class—which we called “boomers,” which were just these intense playboys. Our class had the grades and in my pledge class, five of them became medical doctors. Bob Noyes’ brother, Chet and three others—medical doctors.
Chet Noyes, I haven’t said much about him. Not too close to him, lives in Marin County. I’ve been in touch with him. He’s been married twice and both his wives have died from these terrible diseases that come along. So he’s—I think that right now, I think he’s single. But he went into surgery, and Bobby went into—who’s just, I’ve told you, gone to Ashland—went into anatomy and well, that was just the main thing that he focussed on was dealing with women’s fertilization. And he was just a little behind the 29
times with respect to what he tried to do which was get in vitro fertilization going. And he had, I think, five hundred mice that he was experimenting with. He thought that it would happen some day—and it has of course—because he—Mary, his wife, could not bear children and if he could’ve solved this problem, she could have had children. So they adopted two children. Two, a boy and a girl, whom are still—well, they’re being productive. Five years after teaching at Stanford, he made this decision: he would move every five years, so he went to Hawaii and became head of one of the departments— physiology, for five years.
And we used to go there, and go out on his boat. He had a small sailboat. But the— outside of that group that were in my pledge class, I didn’t have friends with all of them—a good many of them are dead. Gordon Watson was a good friend who died.
Swent: Let’s talk about you going on to Arizona, then. Did you go right after your wedding, to Arizona?
Curtis: So, from there on, I left everybody behind for the years of the war. And Arizona was although I had changed my major, I still graduated in engineering and got my first job as a mining engineer at Christmas, Arizona, which really was an awakening for me.
Swent: It must have been.
Curtis: Because I had never had any job—I used to go around with some of my friends in grammar school on their paper routes, but my mother said, “I don’t want you to have a paper route. That’s for the—” she thought that was beneath her social standing, to have a son with a paper route. She had the wrong idea about things like that. Oh, yes. The important things for her at that time were social register—to be in the social register. She was very proud of that.
Swent: How did you happen to get the job in Arizona?
Curtis: I applied—with Dorette’s help, I applied to 140 different places. Mining—which I got out of Engineering and Mining Journal, and so that’s how we got to Arizona. That one sounded very interesting and I was, from Professor Hulin, I was familiar with that type of contact metamorphic deposits and it was a chance to see not only mining close up, but practice engineering. I’d taken the engineering summer camp over in Marin County. We had practiced surveying of all kinds, even shooting on the polestar and that sort of stuff.
Swent: It was a small operation so you were doing a lot of—
Curtis: It was a small operation. I think there were only thirty-five miners and I was the engineer. So I did all the surveying and followed the different headings, as they were called, and drifts and stopes, and measured the amount of ore they took out by measuring the volume. We knew pretty—it was really a check on what—the ore went down to Hayden for smelting and—
Swent: It was copper. 30
Curtis: For copper. So we had to check on the amount that they said we had shipped them and so on. And then I planned where—of the geology, planned where we would be going next, which was a lot of fun.
Swent: You have mentioned also that you did some research on the local mountain peak?
Curtis: Yes, the mine stopped at the 800-foot level because they were told by the early geologists who came and studied it, Ransome and Lindgren were two of them, but there were others that came, too. And all of them referred to Tornado Peak where the section, the whole section was exposed from the Permian to the Precambrian in one—so I—. The mistake that they all made was they projected four miles across to the mine and they put us in the Mississippian formations, limestone formations. And the Tornado Peak formation, which were the Pennsylvanian and Permian formation at the top of Tornado Peak. They said had all been eroded off at Christmas. Well, it took me—
Swent: Christmas was a place, not a day.
Curtis: Yes, that’s right. The—it took me two years to begin to really question this because the beds that we were mining were very—well, they were thin. I think, oh, ten to thirty feet thick. I decided I would walk—well, here’s what happened first: the U.S. Geological Survey put in a couple of people to study the mine. One of those had been at Berkeley getting a Ph.D., Roger Swanson and his wife, Marie—became our friends there. And they were largely doing the surface mapping. I thought that what they were doing was— they even got an engineer in, I forgot his name. And he said, “I can map any adit or drift in one day.” And I said, “I don’t believe that because it’s taken me a couple of days to do the detailed mapping of one of the drifts.” “I could do it in half a day,” he said. He was a very cocky guy. But he was an engineer so he was part of the USGS team and was working on the surface.
Well, at one time they decided, “Well, let’s go over and see Tornado Peak.” So my boss let me off for that day, and we went over and looked at Tornado Peak, and up to the top. They came back and said well, they agreed with Ransom that they had done a good job. But it stuck in my mind that the thin beds were up in the upper Pennsylvanian and the Permian. It looked more—so, after two years of—then I started mapping the geology between the mine and Tornado Peak. And I found a big fault that they should have found.
Then I saw that I could correlate what I had with the top of Tornado Peak, but there was a section along the road to Winkleman, which was the nearest town to us, along the Gila River. I was trying to think of that name last time, the Gila River comes out of—well, it head up in that area, a lot of it—the Dripping Springs is one of the tributaries of to the Gila. So we—I was all alone on this and for the meantime, a—one of the two USGS geologists had collected some fossils from out on the outcrops, away from the mine but in the beds that were in the mine. And he got the fusillinids and sent them off to a man—forget his name—in Kansas, who was a specialist in fusillinids.
Well, I never heard from him about that, and he continued to do his work. But you know, those fusillinids—this was a year before I left—those fusillinids that he knew were Permian—. It never occurred to him to tell my bosses that we were in the Permian, not the Mississippian, and that we had another seven or eight hundred feet below where 31
they had stopped going down. And he didn’t tell them that, Roger Swanson didn’t know that. And I didn’t find this out, that he knew this, until the day that I turned in my report and was about to leave and went around and talked to them, Roger and this other guy, an older fellow. And he (this older guy) said, “Oh, well I knew that was Permian.” And I said, “But you didn’t tell Sam,” Sam Knight was the older of the two brothers, “You didn’t tell Frank and Sam this.” “Well, that would be in my report,” which he did turn in a year later.
So, anyhow, this was—and Roger Swanson never turned in a report and the person overlooking him, who was working with the Survey, was Charles Gilbert from geology at UC Berkeley. And he kept coming down. I saw Gil, as we called him—was trying to get Roger to write his stuff up. And Roger, to the day that the whole—the war ended, had not written up his reports. He couldn’t write a report. So he went back with the Survey. They didn’t fire him and so far as I knew, the last time I heard of him, he was out at Tacoma with the USGS So that was the kind of work that was going on.
Swent: But you did learn a lot, [I’m sure?].
Curtis: I learned a lot from my own work. So they had a report and almost as immediately that I got a job with Shell, I got a letter from—no. It was after I started—. Right after the war I started back to college that I got from a geologist, a consulting geologist, who the Knights had hired, and he immediately sent me a letter saying he hoped he could encourage me to join him as a partner in his consulting business because he saw what I had done there. But, by this time, I had made up my mind I would get the Ph.D. and I wasn’t to be diverted. By the way, Hulin, after he left, also, asked me—he said, “I’ll start you out at 5,000 bucks a year.” He says, “There’s so much to be done and we can make so much money.” [chuckling] But that’s coming up. So, back to Shell and my job there mapping Oak Ridge and South Mountain areas in Ventura.
[Tape 3, Side B]
Curtis: —mapping that. It had been mapped before—but these old maps, they suspected that they weren’t done properly, so they put me on that. I said to my boss, “You know what we need is a better map of this.” And he agreed with me. My boss was Lloyd Lewis. “Dutch” Schmieder was overall boss of the whole Shell place at that time. I think that I’ve told you how I went back to be inducted into the army, and again my heart murmur stopped me.
Swent: Yes. We have that.
Curtis: And so it wasn’t until just two weeks before Nagasaki and Hiroshima that I was classified—four years I was 4F and now I was 1A. [chuckling] But that ended immediately on those bombs being dropped. But anyhow, Lloyd agreed that we needed a better map. And he said, “You know what we’d better do is have this thing flown— take better air photos.” He put that request in and immediately they flew it. In fact, we saw them flying it just a few days after we put the request in. And so we had these beautiful air photos to work on that we could put details on. I realized—I have realized since that the quality of the geology you do depends upon what detail you can see on your maps, whether it be a contour map or aerial photos. If they’re sharp aerial photos, 32
you can see more detail than you can if they’re poor. If you have a very carefully done topographic map, you can get detail.
So Lloyd and I decided that one of the old fields that was held by Union on Oak Ridge, just on the north side of Oak Ridge, looked promising because they had only drilled down to, I think, 1,800 feet. And they had been producing since the 1930s—from the 1920s from 1,800 feet these were old and not rotary drilled, but the old—So we—then we could map that properly, subdividing the different units from the Santa Barbara Formation, which was nominally called Pliocene, which it turns out is Miocene—Santa Barbara beds. But they go right up into Plio-Pleistocene beds and some Pleistocene on top of that. I found right along the north side of Oak Ridge and South Mountain, they knew a fault was there, but they had never seen it exposed. They hadn’t seen it exposed? [incredulous] If you walked along there you found it in several places and I told these other people, “I can show you outcrops of the South Mountain fault.” But that—you look because now you can put it down on the map. And when you have a poor map, you tend to do reconnaissance. And then there’s detailed reconnaissance, but it’s still reconnaissance. Finally, you can do details when you have something to put it on.
Swent: Churn drill?
Curtis: Churn drill, yes. And there they were producing, oh, maybe 200 barrels of oil a day from the whole field. So we looked at the geology elsewhere and decided if they could get an opportunity, which they did later, grab that, buy that from Union, which was— this is what I found out working with Shell. The competent versus the incompetent. Let’s see—who was the old geologist—Lawson was the geologist at Berkeley and his contemporary at Stanford—well, both of them argued over the foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge and they were longtime enemies. I’ll think of his name. The Stanford geologist, Willis, had said that the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge was on serpentine and would be very unstable; it shouldn’t be built there. Lawson argued that there are serpentines and serpentines, and this was good serpentine, not bad serpentine. Well, it’s all bad serpentine, but they did—well, I’ll get into that later. Willis’ son, Robin, became a geologist.
Now, this is all apropos of competence versus incompetence. Robin was an entrepreneur and a freelancer who would look over the geology that he—get reports. Sometimes he would get them from oil companies, old reports. Sometimes he would be able to get—do his own work in the field. Well, he—then he would put together a “play,” as they called it, and sell it to an oil company. So he sold a “play” to Shell Oil and they put a hole down as he had predicted. They put the hole down that he had recommended and they didn’t get anything.
Swent: Oops.
Curtis: So they abandoned it. He bought it back for a pittance—he had, of course, their record. He bought it back from them for nothing, almost nothing and whip stopped off just a little bit and brought in a whole field. The information that he had from that well was what he needed! And he knew exactly where he wanted to be. They didn’t even consult him or ask him, they just drilled what he said and that was it. So here is where there’s competence versus incompetence. And I saw that throughout all the oil companies there. They were way ahead of the USGS who was mapping the coast there, all the way 33
up to Santa Barbara. They had much more detailed maps. The USGS wouldn’t put—if you couldn’t find the fault on the surface, they wouldn’t put it on their map. There it was, subsurface and if you looked on the surface very carefully, a competent geologist would have found the fault. But they published the map without a lot of faults. We just laughed at their mapping.
So, in every company there were very good people. Like Lloyd Lewis was a very sharp person. Paul Pustmueller also. I’ve told you a little about—P-u-s-t-m-u-e-l-l-e-r, very sharp person. I think that I told you how Lloyd—
Swent: It’s Lloyd Lewis?
Curtis: Lewis, yes—had was just a little older than I. And he had spent the war—he was, because he was in a tremendously important business—oil—they deferred him and he worked in Canada for a while. When the—a little after the time the war started, he was transferred to Ventura. It was he who recognized that this oil field on the north side of South Mountain, owned by Union, was ripe for deepening the holes! And the moment that I left, he was able to convince them that—in fact, together we found—I found the fault and I couldn’t find the outcrop of the fault. So we went up the canyon together and he said, “Well Garniss, what do you think this thing is?” It was the big fault, just perfectly exposed. And I thought, well, it was just a landslide. But there it—so anybody can make a mistake, but his experience—and that was the fault we needed to show that the Union field was worth getting. So Shell bought it on what Lloyd said afterward.
Paul Pustmueller—I think I told you how his sister had married an Indian up in Wyoming, and they were killed in an automobile accident—he had been going up to look at the property that this Indian owned and decided that they should drill it. But before—now, he had five girls. They had three boys, the Indian and his sister. Paul recognized—very competent guy—he recognized there was potential there either for oil or gas. Well, all of that property came into his hands to manage plus the three boys that he had and one girl. So now he has nine children to take care of. And he immediately got an angel that—he had an oil person who was retired and had money, an angel, to support drilling in this area in Wyoming. And they brought in a huge gas field. That was the start of Frement Petroleum. So he immediately left Shell Oil to manage that and to look for other oil and gas fields. He made—he spent a lot of money putting down dry holes, but in the mean time he brought in other places and was very, very successful. And he put all of those kids through college. All of them, the three boys and all his girls. One of the—the girl of part Indian became a medical doctor. Two of his daughters became doctors and a very successful family.
Swent: How did you happen to leave Shell?
Curtis: Well, when the war ended, I had planned to leave right away. “Dutch” Schmieder, the head of Shell there, took me into his office and said, “Garniss, why are you going back to school for a Ph.D.? There’s no money in geology. There’s nothing there. I can hire geologists like you for a dime a dozen. Look what you’re getting now.” I think I was getting, by that time, about 300 a month. He said, “Get into the management. That’s where it is,” and so on. And I said—I tried to explain to him I wasn’t interested in making a fortune. I was interested in how things worked. I liked geology because of the 34
problems that were in it to be solved. He couldn’t understand that at all. So, anyway, I came back to Berkeley that following February after the war ended and—
Swent: It would have been February ’46?
Curtis: ’46, yes. The spring of ’46. And immediately looked up my old friend Carlton Hulin who was back. He had been in the war looking for metals in southeast Asia during that whole time. He was back. So started in and my whole attitude to study was very different. Everything excited me.
Swent: Well, by now you had two children.
Curtis: I had two children and we had rented a place—with my mother’s help, rented a place in—I was a teaching assistant at $500 a semester to begin with. That was not very much. My mother helped out. We rented a place in Richmond. My stepfather had put some money into this development in Richmond so we were able to get this very inexpensively. That turned out to be disastrous later. But, back to school. I arrived—the semester before we got two new professors. Jean Verhoogen, who had done a Ph.D. at Stanford in volcanology and had spent the war in the Belgian Congo. For his Ph.D. he had studied, of all things, he’d studied Mt. St. Helens. And Frank Turner—you’ve heard of Frank Turner?
Swent: I’ve heard the name.
Curtis: Esmée was his wife. So we became—we got involved. Frank and Esmée were great social people. He was a brilliant person in metamorphic geology, petrology particularly. And Verhoogen was in geophysics. The reason that we got them—we got—it was through Howel Williams. Now, have you heard of Howel?
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: Well, Howel had come to Berkeley as a Commonwealth Fellow in 1927. He spent two years—he was a Commonwealth Fellow—at which time he studied the Sutter Buttes up in the Sacramento Valley. Then—he published that. At that time, it was called the Marysville Buttes because that’s what the topographic sheet was named by the topographic division of the U.S. Geological Survey. So it had always been called before that “Sutter Buttes,” and later the name was changed. On recent editions of new maps of the Sutter Buttes, it’s the “Sutter Buttes.”
Well, he published that and then went back to Wales. He had been promised a position at Aberystwyth. When he got there he found that—two things, the position had been given to somebody else, but there was another position for him in another lesser university. But it was—when he arrived it was raining. And it was raining, and it was raining, and it was raining. So here he was sitting at a pub, the rain coming down, when he got a telegram from Louderback at the University of California—Louderback, at that time was the chairman of the department, George D. Louderback—offering him a position at Berkeley. Howel said, “I jumped out of that chair. I packed my stuff, went down to the shipping office,” and what do you do? You—there’s a term for getting a ticket to cross the Atlantic—you—? 35
Swent: Booked passage?
Curtis: Yes, booked passage. You’ve got it! Booked passage back to New York. He said, “I’ve never regretted, not for one moment, leaving Wales or England.” He didn’t go back to England until after we had spent a week at Katmai in 1953, and he was invited to give the William Smith lecture. I haven’t told you about—well, you may know who he was. He was the first person to map geology—this was with respect to putting in the canals across England—studying the geology of the formations there and recognized that the—he could recognize the same fossils from one place to another. And they were always in the same sequence, even though sometimes the beds were limestone in one place and shale in another. But they could be correlated in time so he mapped based on using the fossils. So he’s a very famous person who was the first one to really start mapping, putting geology on maps in a scientific way. 1830, I think. Just about the time of Lyell. So he came back and—
Swent: You said you were a teaching assistant. Were you assisting one particular—?
Curtis: Well I assisted, to begin with, I assisted Howel Williams in microscopic petrology because I’d taken that, and Carlton Hulin in his courses. Then—
Swent: Did you start going up to the Sutter Buttes, then? Or had you been there before?
Curtis: No, that comes up in 1948 when Hulin took a sabbatical leave, then a leave of absence to do consulting work and never came back. It was then that I took over extensive field courses that—of—well, the year before that, 1947 had started me teaching, mapping, taking students out in the field, in the Berkeley Hills. Now I was given the spring field course and that’s when Howel Williams took me up to Sutter Buttes. He said, “Here’s a place where you can do some geology, but not that first time. He just took me up in a reconnaissance. The first time, I went with him into the foothills of the Sierra. That was sort of—there was mild interest in that, but you couldn’t do very much in one week. So the next year we went to—he showed me the Sutter Buttes. Oh—not for a whole week. I decided that the Sutter Buttes could take a whole week. That would have been 1949 when I spent a week out—. In fact, for two years I spent two spring semesters, the Easter break, I took them to Sutter Buttes because it had every thing you needed from thrust faults to easy petrology, easy petrography, recognizing the formations were very distinctly recognizable. In the Sierra they’re not so easy. In one week, it’s difficult to get something across and I explained that to Howel Williams. Yes, you could get the Mariposa Formation and the Logtown Ridge, but there were other formations that you—difficult to get to.
So that got me started and the thing was that they all unloaded their courses on me. As soon as, in 1948, as soon as Carl Hulin announced he wasn’t coming back, they made me a lecturer, which is not a ladder position. The pay, of course, went up commensurately from 500, I think I was getting now 1,500 or some—maybe—no, it wasn’t that much. 1,000 bucks a month. 1,000—no. It came to 1,500 a semester or 2,000, but it was a lot more than—. So that enabled us to live a little bit better. The experience with teaching is a much better way of learning. I had three courses of Hulin’s to teach. I had the field course to teach. I was given the hand specimen petrology course to teach. That had a lab. The field course was all day Saturday and here I was giving lectures every day of the week and trying to do a thesis. 36
Now Hulin had said, or he first said , “Well, there are a lot of places in Nevada that need study. Battle Mountain.” So he said, “You should check with the USGS because they may be up there., but I think that Battle Mountain has so much that you should really get up there.” So I talked to the Survey and they said, “Oh, no. Don’t go in there. We have plans to put some people in there right away.” So then I went to another area. Let’s see—another big mining area. The—now you will remember this.
Swent: Well, Battle Mountain, of course, has become the center of a lot of mining since then.
Curtis: Yes. Well that—do you remember there was this invisible gold?
Swent: Well, Battle Mountain was one of the places—
Curtis: One of those, and then north of—
Swent: —Carlin Trend.
Curtis: Say that one?
Swent: Carlin?
Curtis: Yes. Carlin. That was the first of those. It was—you just found the gold by assay. This was just shortly before I came back to school that that Carlin was found. Hulin was fascinated with that because he said, “You know, I have walked over material exactly like that, but I can’t remember where.” So I asked the Survey about Carlin. “Oh, no. We’re going to be busy there.” Then Austin, Nevada. “Oh, no. We’re going to be— we’ve got people ready to go there. We’re going to be doing a huge mapping project.” Do you know they didn’t get around to Battle Mountain to study that for twenty years afterwards? I could have walked in there and taken over, but instead Hulin said, “Well, there’s an interesting place at Markleeville, this old—” and I knew the specimens because we used them in the polished section course. And he said, “That’s an interesting place. It’s silver. There was Silver Mountain and there are a lot of old mines there that no one has studied since the ‘90s.” So I went up there. Now, that’s 1946, summer. These other three places had been written off for me because of the USGS. They never got around to Austin. They did Battle Mountain and Carlin, but Battle Mountain was twenty years afterwards. Carlin was about ten years afterwards. So when I had my students and they wanted to do field projects in different place, I said, “Well, check with the Survey and if the Survey says they’re going to do it, pay no attention to them. Get out there.” And so this is the way it worked. The Survey was—they were so greedy, they just wanted everything. And they didn’t want any students in there. I really cursed the Survey for that because there was nothing at Markleeville. The mines had all caved. There wasn’t even—
Swent: This was at Markleeville?
Curtis: At Markleeville—had all caved, no way to get in. The county assessor had—who became a good friend, I gave you his name before and now I can’t think of it—had been interested in gold and silver. He had opened one of those mines and taken the old records which he got out of a publication, which I have here, by the way—and how they assayed. He assayed exactly the same outcrops in this mine, which sounded very rich. 37
There was virtually nothing there. It was all a stock proposition. So this—what little came out of there went into collections at Stanford and Berkeley, I think. But there was nothing for me. Meantime, I got interested in the volcanology there because now I had two people that had done work in volcanology. Howel Williams was head of my thesis committee, and Charles Gilbert. It was Gilbert, Turner, and well, Howel Williams was the head of it. So they all came out. But the one that helped me most in the field was Gilbert. Gilbert, not only did I show him things, but he showed me things. Williams was fine, came out, but he came more to look, also. And he came just once and Turner came that time with him. I showed him what the problems were with respect to the sequence of volcanism, the rhyolites, and the andesites, and the different things.
Swent: Where was this?
Curtis: This was Markleeville. The regional name for these volcanic rocks were the Mehrten Formation. Well, I found all kinds of interesting things in there that had never been described, which I—. Some of these things were pelean nués ardents, which had been described by LaCroix in 1902 in the great eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique that wiped out the town of St. Pierre. It was –I don’t know if I told you about these deposits, but they—
Swent: I don’t think so, no.
Curtis: They played an important part in my research later on. He described—well, we had a description from the people who lived through that great eruption of 1902. The Pelée itself had erupted over the years a couple of times, but no big eruptions. Now it was building up. There were lots of warning signs. There were rumbles. There were earthquakes. There were the hot springs around the town heating up. Everything indicated an earthquake. The priest—of course, this was French Catholic—and the priest had said, “God will not permit anything to happen to us.” But I think a couple of thousand weren’t that convinced about this and left. But it left some thirty-five or thirty- six thousand people in there that believed the priest.
That morning—I think it was May 2, 1902—that ships off the harbor there saw—I would say this was about six in the morning—saw this thing shoot up in the air with a big cloud above it and then a glowing avalanche coming down very, very rapidly down the side of the mountain, right toward the city. Part of it, the actual course, turned and came toward the bay, but it overran that and went right into the city, destroying it, killing everybody except one person down deep in a prison cell below the surface. That’s the only person that lived. All of them wiped out.
Well, where it turned and came out onto the water, there were ships there. Most of them were destroyed, but one of them about a half a mile out—early in the morning there were people on deck. One of the people saw this and we have his description of this coming across the water. He realized that this thing was traveling so fast that it was going to hit the ship, which it did. But he got under a great big canvas tarpaulin and he got cooked in there, but it didn’t kill him because the wave, this heat wave, which was so intense, passed over. But the poor people that stood out on the deck, as this heat wave came over them, they breathed in and their lungs were seared. They were screaming in agony for water. The captain was one of those. They jumped into the ocean just to cool off and they died in agony. So this person had one of the few eye witness accounts— 38
[Tape 4, Side A]
Curtis: —one, a succession of them after that came down, too. And because they were glowing avalanches, he called them nués ardents, clouds glowing.
Swent: Let’s spell that—n-u—
Curtis: N-u-e-s-s—no, let’s see. N-u-e-s-s, I guess, a-r-d-e-n-t-e.
Swent: Okay.
Curtis: I guess there’s only one “s” on that, but I seems to me I see two. So he was the first to describe these in detail because he saw the smaller ones come later, and—
Swent: Glowing clouds—?
Curtis: Glowing clouds. Well, the material is so hot. It’s all particulate material that has exploded in the conduit and blown apart. Then it comes to the surface and moves down the mountain. The particulate material is so hot that when it comes to rest on land, it sticks together. It agglutinates and it makes what looks like a hard lava. But when you cut a thin section of it and look at it under the microscope—you know about thin sections and microscopes?
Swent: I’ve heard of them, yes.
Curtis: Well, you can see the angular fragments all stuck together.
Swent: So it’s different from lava, then?
Curtis: Yes, it’s very different from lava and he described that.
So I found these deposits in Markleeville and now I was reading the literature, all the volcanologic literature, because all I had to say to Howel was—oh, and then he’d pull out LaCroix, he’d pull out Javanese stuff. Can’t think of that guy, a very great geologist. So I found these deposits and of course Howel was very keen about them. Charles Gilbert was more interested in the structure, but also the volcanics. He—well, he was interested in both. He, for his Ph.D., had studied the—and named it—the Bishop tuff. Have you heard of that?]There were, again, other eruptions of Pelée in 1928 to ’31, I think it was. A man named Peret, an American of French origin, but he pronounced his French name Peret. He was a great volcanologist and he went back and studied the eruption in 1928 to ’31 or ’32, even putting a hut up where he could be protected from the heat of these new waves coming down and finally ending up in the later part of the eruption of—. Well, in 1902 a great pillar went up, a protrusion of a core, solid core rose and it sloughed off slowly over the years. He was up there to watch the new waves go down their different channels in—. So we have a lot of detailed stuff from him about—. And he nearly got burned up once. This was—for science, doing something as stupid as that, but they do it. A lot of geologists have been killed studying volcanoes.
Swent: I’ve heard the term, yes. 39
Curtis: Well, have you been down 395 on the east side of the Sierra?
Swent: Right.
Curtis: Well, as you go down Sherwin Grade to Bishop, you’re on top of the Bishop tuff, which is a larger version of a nués, but instead of just a little thing that puts out a few tens of thousands or a million cubic meters, it had 600 cubic kilometers of ash, which went as far as—blew as far east as the Mississippi and as far south as Guatemala, I think. Some of those deposits from that are in upper Santa Barbara beds. The place to see beds above the Santa Barbara formation—I didn’t spot them when I was there, but they have been found. Well, I didn’t spend much time with the Pleistocene when I was with Shell. I spent more time with the older rocks. But there in Ventura—so this, of course, was stuff that blew up in the air, and the estimate of 600 is based on the distribution of that ash, which is pretty much a guess. But some of these are even bigger—and welded, of course. The Bishop Tuff is welded. The small nués ardents versions of those get welded also and I had the small versions at Markleeville.
So I became fascinated with volcanology and the—since I was also very interested in ore deposits, the great eruption of Katmai in 1912 fascinated me, which was very closely studied by C.N. Fenner from Carnegie institute and Carl Zies of U.S.G.S, I think it was. Zies had studied the fumaroles that came out of this big ash flow, which is welded at the bottom, that filled the valley, now called the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes—came from Katmai. So the different people have studied different phases of this, but principally Fenner had written an extensive amount.
Now what Fenner had said about Katmai, which fascinated me. Zies had studied the fumaroles, that are mentioned, and around the fumaroles were all these ore minerals, sulfide minerals that were found, containing silver, tin, copper, things that you don’t normally find together in one deposit. There they were being deposited around the edges of the fumaroles. So the mechanism, which was of interest to me was, well, they had to be carried by very hot gas. Where did they come from? How did they get—was that the magma, or the ash flow itself? Well, Fenner said no. He said that the ash flow had come out of fissures in the old valley below what is now called the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, that this is where it came from is out of fissures. The flow itself, he said couldn’t be the source of the minerals because it’s only 250 feet thick. That was his estimate of the thickness. So it persisted.
Now, that was 1912, and they didn’t get—let’s see, what’s his name? Griggs, David— Robert Griggs was a biologist, a botanist who wanted to see what recovery had taken place from this vast eruption. And he wanted to see, had the fish reoccupied the streams, had various flora grown on the ash? Had the animals come back in? So he wrote a classic—Griggs wrote a classic tome on the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and if you haven’t seen that—
Swent: The eruption was in 1912?
Curtis: ’12, yes. So they didn’t get—
Swent: He wrote this years later? 40
Curtis: So they didn’t—he didn’t—. He first went in in 1916 and saw the valley with the fumaroles coming up and realized that he needed a geologist. So the next time, he brought Fenner with him and other people. Then that would be ’17 and ’18 Zies got in there. And the fumaroles—that would be six years, six—’12 to ’18, six years later—still measuring temperatures of 800 degrees. Most of them were—let’s see. I take that back. Most of them were five to six hundred, but I think the hottest one was around 750 degrees. It was very, very hot.
Swent: You were there in the early fifties?
Curtis: I was there first in 1953, but that was just for two weeks to get Werner Juhle started. I had planned to do more, but when he died in 1953, I came back the following year and had three months there. However, what fascinated me was that Norman L. Bowen, also at the Carnegie Institute, had done research on the crystallization of magma. He showed and he wrote the diagrams, phase diagrams, for the crystallization. He wrote a famous book, The Origin of the Igneous Rocks, which I have a copy of, but not here. Or maybe I do. Anyhow, this was the bible for those people in petrology and taught by Turner.
Turner took the phase diagrams and showed that Fenner had to be wrong because Fenner said that Katmai is largely andesitic. Rhyolite had come up and dissolved the top of Katmai. There’s a crater there. It’s three miles long and two miles wide—had dissolved the crater in this soup of rhyolite and then blown that out in the form of pumice, which lay all over the place. He showed thin sections of the rock, showing what he considered was the rhyolite dissolving, in the thin sections, dissolving the andesite. So this had to be restudied because it was as rhyolite melts at a lower temperature than andesite, Fenner had to come up with how it got this super heat. And he said that it was—he used a term—. Now I can’t remember—that it got super heated in some way and was able to dissolve the andesite, then the explosivity came from the gasses in the rhyolite, the eruption.
So I wanted, of course, to get there and study this. Well, I didn’t have—when Werner Juhle, who was put in charge of the—. When I applied at the Survey for help to get to Katmai, they told me that a young geologist named Juhle, J-u-h-l-e, was going to be studying the Katmai area and he was being given two assistants to help him on this. But knowing that I had friends in the Survey and knowing that I was interested in volcanology, and that Howel Williams was a famous volcanologist by that time, that they would like us to go and help Werner at Katmai. So that was 1953 and we got up there on June 21st, I remember. Freezing cold. We were given—they were doing not only the geology of the area, but they were studying all phases of Katmai so they had a mammalogist; they had a person with fishes. They had botanists to study the flora and mamologists to study fauna. Everything was being studied. There were about twenty-one different scientists involved in this project.
Werner was one geologist doing the Katmai area, which was a fairly large area from the Pacific on the south side to—oh, I forget the—. Well, it would cover an area of about close to fifty miles by fifty miles, something like that. But the whole project of the Katmai National Monument included all these other people. So when he disappeared, and he was—by the way, I’ve got to tell you a little about Werner. I think I told you this pre—
Swent: You did, but we didn’t tape it. This is— 41
Curtis: Yes. Let’s tape this because this is important. When Howel and I arrived on June 21st in 1953, Werner, who was to be in charge, wasn’t there, nor were his assistants. So I had done a lot of camping and I said, “Well, if you could put me in there, I’ll set up the camp.” So a pilot—let’s see. What is his name? I’ll think of it in a minute. It’s a Czech name. Stan Chebul was a bush pilot and he introduced himself to me and his principal business was, in the summer, flying fisherman out to the big salmon places and to their boats. He had pontoons and he did a lot of business in the summer. He could change to wheels and he put on his wheels. And he said, “Oh, yes. I’ve been into the Valley of— I’ve landed in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.”
So we went out with a load of equipment, tents and a rifle for me because there were bears, he said, or they said. It’s about oh, sixty miles from the Naknek Air Force Base at a place called King Salmon. It took us about an hour to get out there. Flew over it looking for a place to land. He said, “Well, here’s a bench right next to Knife Creek, right here. This should give you protection from the wind—it gets windy in here. There’s a big ledge there. If we can land on this bench—” the river had cut around the bench, about fifteen or twenty feet lower. Nice bench there, large enough for him to land on.
He said, “Well, there are some boulders on there, but this plane takes the boulders pretty well.” So we came in—we did a run like this first and then he flew up. He said, “I’ve got to pick another little area. There are too many big boulders there,” so we came around. Well, from up above, I could see these little mouse tracks around there and wondered what they were. So we came around and landed this time, a little bit bumpy. We pulled up very short—he was a very good pilot—and we got out. Oh—he shook my hand. He said—yes, shook my hand because we had a safe landing. He said, “This is the first plane to land in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.” And I said, “But you told me you’d landed.” “Oh,” he said, “that was on when it was covered with five feet of snow. I landed on skis one time and I took off again.” [chuckling]
So anyhow, unloaded, got out, and these little mouse tracks that I’d seen from the air were bear tracks like that, big brown bear tracks. So I looked at the gun and I said, “Do I need this?” He said, “Well, no. You probably don’t need this. They’re pretty—they’ll run from you pretty much, but you ought to have it.” I said, “Well, where’s the ammunition.” “Oh, I didn’t bring it. I’ll bring it next time.” [chuckling] So—completely uncertain, but I’d done a lot of hunting and a lot of reading and—but I wasn’t familiar with this type of bear because I knew grizzlies were very unpredictable and these are just super large grizzlies, the Alaskan brownie. So I wasn’t certain. I didn’t want to see any. Later, we found that they were terrified of us because poachers had been coming in and killing them. That, I think, is taken care of now. But the—we had wonderful service from the National Park Service that year. We waited almost a week for Werner to show up, but meantime clear, almost no wind, wonderful sun. Howel and I walked up to the crater, the crater edge, and took pictures. Beautiful green water down below, and—
Swent: Were the fumaroles still steaming?
Curtis: There were very few fumaroles. The fumaroles that were still extant were around Novarupta. We walked over to Novarupta, which was a big, rhyolite dome with a rampart of pumice around the outside of it. It’s about 1,300 feet in diameter and around 350 feet high. Steam was—we hiked up onto that. Steam was coming out of cracks in 42
the dome and there were fumaroles around the outside and for a distance of about half a mile from Novarupta, maybe even a little bit more than that. Later I had a thermometer the next year and I took temperatures in all of them, but we didn’t at that time. This was strictly reconnaissance.
So, by the time Werner arrived, we had reconnaissanced this and we were quite convinced that what we were looking at was mixed magma. A rhyolite magma mixing with andesitic magma at depth and not rhyolite dissolving andesite. So the—anyhow, that’s another story. So here comes Werner in. Now, my picture of this Werner Juhle was this cocky young kid. He was twenty-one, just gotten his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and he had worked on the Iliamna Mountain, on the south side of the Alaska Range there, the range of volcanoes. Iliamna is the volcano he worked on. I pictured him as being very sure of himself and he was going to take over and these old crusty has-beens, Williams and I would be sort of nothing, you know? Gung ho guy.
I had heard that he was physically tremendously strong. Well, he was about six feet one, maybe six feet and a half inch. Was not—he was taller. Thin, spare, and instantly the picture I had of him totally vanished. Here was this young fellow, very impressed about meeting Howel Williams, whom he had read about and knew everything about his publications. He had heard about me and almost immediately my whole picture of him changed. Well, among other things, he looked at the food that we had and he said, “You know, I think we need more powdered milk. I like powdered milk.” So this was before the pilot, Stan Chebul, had even left. He said, “Let’s put in an order for ninety pounds of powdered milk.” They came in ninety-pound sacks. You know, that’s a big sack. I thought, “Well, if you like it—.” So we ordered it.
Now Stan was going to bring in some more equipment so he took that order and left because he was going to bring in some more tents as we were going to have some guests. We were going to have to have a tent—we had to have three tents, one a guest tent because people would be coming probably, and one for storage material, and one to live in. He had brought me a tent, but I had not put it up until Howel got there, then I put that one up.
We didn’t bring any more tents until Juhle came and these were sort of experimental tents. They were designed by the Navy and they were superb tents, octagonal tents that had double walls so they could be used in very cold climates. Now that first summer, it was hot! Didn’t need the double walls at all. But to keep them from getting blown over, one of the walls, you had to dig a big trench around this and you put the tent wall down in the trench and then you filled it all in. You dug down about three feet and brought the flap down and up, and then filled it in with boulders and with sand. That was to pro—we knew that we were going to have winds because Griggs had descr—his camps were blown away almost every season by the winds that were so strong so we had to be prepared. And it was a half a day—
Swent: That’s a lot of work—
Curtis: —to get one of those things up. That’s why we didn’t put up more of them.
So anyhow, Werner ordered the ninety pounds. Stan went off to get more tents and more food, and everything else. We then started out right away with Werner, wanted to look 43 around, so we walked up on this bluff above us, which we hoped would block some of the wind, of about, oh, about thirty-five or forty feet up to the top of it.
Then we pointed out the big shoulder of Katmai itself, five glaciers coming off of it. So he, Werner, looks up at the embedded material on this big shoulder of what Howel and I thought was Naknek formation. We hadn’t really dug into it, but we thought it was Naknek. And he says, “Oh, I see those bedded ashes up there.” And Howel said, “I think that isn’t ash; I think that’s Naknek formation.” And Werner said, “I’ve been working with that stuff. I know that that’s ash.” So I don’t know—none of us were really betting people, but the bet came up as to who was right. I said right away, “It’s Naknek formation. No question about it in my mind.”
So it was—I should give you the history of this. What happened was this—on the way to the airport to fly up with military air transport from Moffit Field, I had forgotten to put in either a bottle of booze or a flashlight. I knew that Howel liked, not scotch, but bourbon. So Howel was with us and I said, “What do you think we should get?” And Howel said, “Well, the most important thing probably is to be able to see at night, so a flashlight.” We didn’t have time to stop and get booze, so that’s all we had. Here we were in the valley without any liquor and a flashlight that was as necessary as a hole in our heads. We could read the newspaper at one in the morning, you know? [chuckles]
Well, I forget what the—we were about fifty latitude, fifty-five, something like that, so here it was June, the longest day in the world—the longest day in the year with no liquor. So the bet became two bottles of Four Roses or Jim Beam, or something like that, that we bet. Well, we didn’t get up Katmai that day, but when we did get up, it was what we said it was, Naknek formation. It was not ash at all, so Werner, on the next flight out that time, ordered two bottles of—so we had a little hooch for the rest of the time. And although he was a young guy, he liked bourbon, too.
Now what had happened that’s remarkable about Werner was not only that he’d got a Ph.D. at twenty-one, he had read everything that Williams had written and almost everything else about volcanology and he had read one of my first publications. He had read about the Franciscan formation and the problems that had—where did it come from? It’s very different from the Great Valley series and each of—Lawson had his ideas where this—Louderback had his ideas. Taliaferro had his. Each of them, Louderback and Lawson broke up over Louderback’s theory of where the Franciscan formed—you see, Lawson named it the Franciscan, so naturally he felt very possessive about it. And Louderback had disagreed about the origin. I forget what Louderback’s origin was, but Taliaferro and Louderback broke up over Taliaferro’s ideas about where the Franciscan had come from. Well, Juhle had read all this and he had ideas about this. And he wanted to come and do a post-doc with me at Berkeley, and we would write up the Katmai stuff, and he could then get on with studying the Franciscan.
Now, let’s say this about Taliaferro, who had his shortcomings, he was a good mapper, but he had decided that the Franciscan didn’t come from the east, which quite clearly, is so different from anything in the Great Valley sequence, the Cretaceous. He had called it all Jurassic in age and it didn’t look like Jurassic deposits in the foothills of the Sierra, nothing like the Logtown Ridge, which is volcanic, nothing in it that looked like the Mariposa formation, which are the slates that you see. And he decided that from the 44
coarsening of gravels westward, in the Franciscan formation, that it had come from the west. Where did it come from? From Cascadia, which had disappeared under the sea.
Well, interestingly, we now think that the Franciscan was first deposited far to the south of where we are and has been moved northward in Cretaceous times to be plastered in a series of microplates against the Great Valley sequence to the east. And there was a lot of argument about that, but the paleo-magnetism suggests that that is the case.
And I’m sure that Juhle would have figured this out, if he had lived. But that September, when he was to show up at Berkeley, September 8th, I think it was, yes. I was working in my living room, putting up the molding around the domed ceiling. My father-in-law had designed a Renaissance type octagonal living room with paneling and pilasters with capitals on them. Chinese gold leaf on the ceiling, panels, and all that sort of stuff. I was working on that one day and I was on a ladder when Dorette came in and said, “There’s a phone call from the university for you.” And they told me that Juhle had not shown up at the pickup point where he was to be to get the plane back to Naknek. It took two weeks to find a trace of Juhle. They found his pack next to a very narrow gorge cutting through the ashflow near its terminus. The pack had a musette bag next to it, also an empty camera case.
[Tape 4, Side B]
Curtis: Let me describe the scene first. The ash flow, Grigg’s “sand flow,” as he called it, came down and had filled the valley. Of course it buried all the previous streams. There were about five different streams that came together from five different glaciers which later joined and cut down through the ash flow. Not where the old stream was before, but it cut through at a new place right through the tuff and made a very narrow slot gulch about a hundred feet deep, where all of this water from the various tributaries was pouring out—was right about its peak about that time, I guess. So, they found his pack. His footprints were here, on one side, and right over there, on the opposite side about 46 inches higher was his pack. The slot gulch was about 43 inches wide. [gesturing] Well, he was tall enough. He just reached over and put his pack, et cetera, over on the other side. They thought his—well, there was a little musette bag by the side of it and his camera case. So they thought, well, he attempted to go across and fell in. That was the thought. Of course his camera would have been in his hands or something and lost. So when we got there, we didn’t have time immediately to go look down at where—
Swent: How much later was it that you got there?
Curtis: We came the next year, but the search party found these things about two weeks after they had last heard from him.
Swent: Through the whole winter?
Curtis: A year later, Jack Sheehan and I went back in July to see if we could find his body. At that time, I had not met Juhle’s parents in Maryland. They had a tobacco farm, or ranch, or something, but—and I hadn’t corresponded with them. [Added during editing: Speaking of their farm, I found out much later that Werner had lived on dehydrated milk for several field seasons while he was a student at Johns Hopkins, so that he could pay off the mortgage on the farm, which he had done before he died and had never told his 45
parents. The powdered milk came in 90-pound sacks and was very inexpensive. I remember ordering two sacks for him for his field season.] So I did know that they—I had the information from the USGS and I had his field notes, which the USGS gave to me. How they got that: that was in his pack, his field notes mixed with his diary, and that was given to me. That’s sort of interesting. I’ll get into that in just a minute. But we didn’t go look at this crossing until we ran out of food. Now, that year, 1954, when I took over, the year after Juhle had disappeared, it was absolutely the worst year possible. It rained all the time. We were lucky to even get in to land and set up camp again. The tents were left. No—there were two tents. We got one more tent, that came in 1954. There were two tents that we had set up the year before. And we set up another tent, so three tents—one to put supplies in.
Swent: And you left them there through the winter?
Curtis: Yes, left them there through the winter.
Swent: I see.
Curtis: And they were very strong tents. They would take the snow very well. Well, I told you it had been windy and so we set up then a new aerial for the radios that we were given and they were called “angry nines.” I don’t know. That has to do with the letters; that’s an acronym. And you crank them, a generator. They used batteries, too, but you had to crank also. What with—well, here it was, raining every day, terrible communications by radio. Almost never could I get through at my call hours, which were in the morning and at night. It was just static, static, static. Wind howling. The wind blew down our animonitor at or seventy-four miles an hour and we had stronger winds than that. But these tents were so strong, the ones that we’d put in. They took it; they just—oh, that wind would howl!
My assistant, Jack Sheehan, was doing a geology thesis for a master’s degree back up here in the Berkeley Hills. Sheehan and I would say, “Well, is this it?” or, “Are we going to live through this one?” That wind would—you could hear it start. It would come from the ridge to the south of us and blow northward. And the strange thing is, both the rain would fall hardest on a rising barometer and die down on a falling barometer. But the whole time we were—that whole three months that we were there in 1954, we had only three days without rain where the temperature went—it was between thirty-two and forty every day. Only three days did it get above forty, where we had a little sunshine, and the rest of the time it stayed right down there. We didn’t have any snow; it was always this cold rain. And it—
Swent: You were out tramping and mapping in this?
Curtis: We were trying to do that, yes. It would be, instead of steady rain—sometimes it’d rain steadily for several hours, we had these little boxes which we’d call “five and ones,” that they—this was the army food. There was enough for one person for five days or for five people for one day. Those were very stout cardboard boxes, four inches high. Sometimes we’d put one of those out blocked in to find out how much rain we got. Sometimes that would fill up over night with rain: four inches in one night. But it was windy and the wind would—it didn’t blow all the time, but just would come in these 46
spurts and when it came, it was just unbelievably hard. As I said, it blew down our animonitor and broke it, so we didn’t get the wind.
Swent: What sort of equipment did you use for mapping in the rain?
Curtis: Well, I have—I don’t have it here. I had a box, a plywood box, that is sort of—would hold maps in it and pencils, colored pencils, and protractors and things of that kind, and a rubber band around it. Essentially, it was waterproof and if it were raining very hard, Jack would hold a hood over me. So between rain, I didn’t have any problem, but many of my notes, you can tell, are done in the rain. So that was terrible.
Well, they couldn’t get any food in to us, so we were going—we had enough to last, oh, I guess, the first month and a—oh, about—well, certainly we had more than a month’s food. From when we first landed, they stacked up these “five in ones” for us and we gradually went through them. We had plenty of water. We had no liquor, by the way. The one time that they got a plane in to us—and I’ll tell you about that in a minute— they brought in—. Well, I’ll tell you about that later.
[Added during editing: Katmai was a multi-disciplinary study including anthropologists, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and geologists. Funding came from the US Army, Navy, Air Force, National Park Service, and USGS. There were 30- 40 scientists working in 15 parties of two or more. Because everything had been so completely destroyed by the eruption, they wanted to see how rapidly life came back. At this time one of the anthropologists brought along one of the first tape recorders and used it for recording Aleut languages, especially those isolated on islands for years.
In 1954 flying into our storage area, we could see four or five trails coming from different directions to our tarp-covered food and gasoline storage area from the previous year, on the shore of a lake that the river out of the Valley of 10,000 Smokes dumped into about 17 miles from our camp. When we landed we found all five-in-one boxes, which were made of very heavy cardboard, had been “found” under the tarpaulins by bears. Every 16-ounce can, whether pork and beans, meat, fruit, juice, jelly, et cetera, had been crushed into a nugget with the food sucked out. Even the tobacco in small tins and sugar tablets were gone. Everything! Now, the stacked cans of gasoline were all intact except for one of the five-gallon metal cans that had a single claw mark and it was empty. The rest were untouched. The bears knew!
We had heard that Bob Spring, a freelance photographer, was coming to get photos of the crater and do an article for a major magazine, maybe LIFE. He didn’t show up when scheduled. One sunny day, a wash-day, which we did in Knife Creek and either hung our clothes back in the tent as it rained most of the time, or laid them out on the rocks on the only three sunny days we had that entire three summer months, I decided to walk in the sun, a mile on the ash flow by myself. Suddenly I came across tracks heading toward the crater in Katmai and back: two people! Jack Sheehan and I had been waiting for a clear day to go up there, too. I was amazed at the stamina of these two who had gone up and back in a short period of time. I sat down for a few minutes and thought about Mozart’s 40th symphony. Suddenly I saw, about a quarter mile away, a single tent with a man next to it. I ran down to introduce myself, “I’m Garniss Curtis.” He exclaimed, “We came to see you!” We hadn’t been told that. “Where’s the other guy?” I 47 asked. “He’s very ill with stomach ulcers.” Well, we then all walked back to our camp very, very slowly.
The person in charge of the needs of all the scientists was Bob Luntey, a wonderful fellow and an employee of the NPS, and he was at the Naknek Air Base 60 miles away. Jack and I had tried for weeks to be in touch with the air base on our “angry nines” radio but had consistently failed because the weather was so bad. Now, with the very sick man in our tent, I tried again, and on the very first attempt I got Bob’s voice loud and clear. I said, “We have a very sick man here with a ruptured ulcer—he’s dying!” Then nothing. No more connection. The next day the clouds were at a seven foot ceiling (when it rained the clouds were down to ground level) when we heard a plane coming! Our camp was at 2000 feet. I said, “He can’t land here—the ceiling’s too low.” It was hopeless. But the sound came closer, then 100 yards, right to the edge of the terrace which dropped off into Knife Creek, the plane appeared at ground level and barely below the cloud cover. I knew the pilot, Woody, a German who had flown with the Luftwaffe. He had followed the creek canyon up because it was wide and deep enough and had the visibility he needed, while we had only the seven feet above the terrace level. We loaded the sick man on and then they took off into the clouds. The man who remained was Bob Spring and he stayed with us at least a week. I still have the spectacular photos he took. Many days later at the King Salmon I asked Woody why he had taken such a dangerous chance to get to us. His reply was, “I would like to think someone would do that for me if I were in similar trouble.”
We went back to where Juhle’s packs were found, hiking for two days (30 miles) to reach the Brooks River Camp boat at the mouth of the O Creek, 17 miles down the ash flow (where Juhle’s packs were found), and we stayed there over night. The next morning I went down early to check the vernal pools below the 600-800 foot drop in the creek that was near the convergence of five creeks. The next day we walked along a moose trail in the tundra and I stepped into a large water-filled hole made invisible by the tundra, going down into water over my head, but popped back up, and Jack and Bob grabbed me, pulled me out, and we went to meet our 6 pm boat pick-up. At five or ten after 6 pm, we heard the boat in the distance, fired off a rifle, and the boat took off. Well, we were pretty wet (especially me) as we walked in rain most of the second day, so Bob found a dead, albeit wet, log, cut away (with his small hatchet) the wet wood to get to the dry wood, making a “fuzz stick” to light a small fire. He kept chopping off more dry wood and before long we had made a huge fire with flames 20-30 feet high and 10 feet in diameter. We took off our clothes to dry, which they did in an hour and a half. While we sat there, a wolverine came up, lay down and watched for five or ten minutes, then got up and continued walking up the beach. The boat returned around 8 pm, and we went the 10 or so miles (in dried clothes) up to the Brooks River camp. The next morning we fished—huge fish that took our tackle. The plane came in later and took us to Naknek AF Base. Bob took a plane from Naknek to Seattle. We loaded up with food which we had run out of because of Bob and his sick friend. Then Jack and I flew to the beach where our food had been eaten by bears. Bad weather kept us from flying to camp so we had to walk along the far side of Knife Creek to go back to our camp, but Knife Creek had risen so we couldn’t cross and had to hike—12 very rough miles with our 50 pound packs loaded with the food before we could cross Knife Creek and get to easy hiking on the ash flow for the last five or six miles to camp. Woody would fly in food once more with enough to last us until we left in early September. 48
When we broke camp, we called Luntey for our pick-up. We had to take down our aerial which had been wired in three directions to a long pole (formerly a dry dead tree). This is a pole that withstood 74+ mile per hour winds (our wind-speed indicator had died at that point), but when we pulled it over to take the aerial down it snapped—good timing for us. You might wonder how we managed in the tent with those high winds. Well, our tents were made of very fine-woven material and had a flap around the outside perimeter than went into a trench we dug three feet deep. We put those doubled-up flaps in and then refilled the trenches with sand. The flaps actually were all one piece of material which went back up the other sides to become the actual side of the tent. It worked out very well.
We stayed in Naknek for two weeks because of bad weather. There was a bar a couple of miles from the nearby town of King Salmon, about four of five miles from the base. This bar was in the middle of nowhere. We go in, no one’s there, some guy walks in, pours himself a drink and leaves. So we did the same, there was a place to leave money, and we paid. Good thing because the owner did come by.
While at Naknek, I met a meteorologist who was keeping track of permafrost. He said he could tell how deep it was down to the permafrost just by looking at the ground. I followed him for a while, pointing to spots in the ground, he’d say how deep it was to the permafrost, then he’d dig and he was always right. Twelve inches, 16 inches— amazing.
There were bushes, 18 inches high around the base which were just covered by the most beautiful blueberries, I filled a bag. The base served four meals a day, one at midnight. Jack and I would always get up to have that meal, too.]
So we did a lot of mapping. Well, I looked around at the problem here of where did this pumice come from? Here was—the missing mountain was about—I forget, five or six cubic kilometers in the mountain were gone, a huge crater there. As I say, two and a half miles long and two miles wide, and a lake in the bottom of it. It had been an 8,000-foot peak and the rim around it now was around 6,000. We knew the height from a survey that had been done back when there had been a gold rush, 1897, up along the coast there. And the prospectors came through Katmai Pass and through what is now the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, and down to the lakes, and made it out to Biscay Bay and up to—I think it’s—well, it’s several miles north of Biscay Bay where there was a gold rush, which turned out to be nothing. But the USGS got in and mapped the mountains very crudely. So we had the elevation of Katmai before the eruption, which was June 6, 1912.
So there’s no question there was a mountain there, but where did all this pumice come from? Well, I saw that the pumice was layered and I could recognize layers around in different places. So I thought, what I’ll do is I’ll map the thickness of those layers. I forget, there were maybe ten or twelve of those. I’ll map the thickness wherever I can see them. So that’s what we did. For a month and a half, Jack and I went everywhere we could to map the thickness of those layers.
Well, we were unable to get over into Katmai Pass where Fenner had done detailed mapping of the layers of material there. We couldn’t get there. I got a sore heel that kept me—I could do two or three miles, but to do five miles there and back in one day would 49 have been too difficult. So I thought, now, if we—now, we didn’t have any helicopter service, which we’d had in 1953. This is ’54 I’m talking about—because they’d spent all their money looking for Juhle with helicopters all over the place. So their budget was just about zero and there was just enough to keep us there in the valley with normal, small aircraft to get to us when they could. Well, they weren’t able to get to us
So we mapped all those and what I found then was that these thicknesses thickened toward Novarupta. They did not thicken toward Katmai. The two are six miles apart. All of the layer thickened toward Novarupta, so all that pumice, every single bit of it, did not come from Katmai. The mixed pumice with so-called rhyolite dissolving andesite came from Novarupta. Then, it slowly began to dawn on me that those big fissures around Novarupta where the fumaroles still were—they were just barely coming out— they all measured to that elevation, 2,000 feet. They all measured right around, very just under, a hundred degrees centigrade. They were just boiling water. None of these were the extremely hot fumaroles that had deposited these metals in the main ash flow.
So some of the big holes were still steaming. I said a half a mile—one of those was about a mile from the crater, still steaming right on the edge of the Naknek formation, which bounded this whole valley, and the tuff. So it began to dawn on me that the ash flow had come from Novarupta. I began to work on how thick that ash flow was. Fenner had said, two hundred and forty feet. I forget how he got that. Well, I thought that it had to be much thicker than that. There were phreatic craters where the water or ice, buried by the ash flow, had created steam, and blown out fragments of welded tuff through the ash flow. Some of those had welded solid. That’s how I knew the upper part was all—was just consolidated ash, but it wasn’t welded. So I knew that this thing had to come from a deeper zone that was not visible at the surface any place.
Well, we had, when Werner was there, we had this wonderful helicopter service and we’d flown down the ash flow. We had seen where this creek, Knife Creek—one of the peaks there was called Knife Peak, where the stream had cut through with big columns, but they were not welded. But it did not cut deep enough to expose the welded part. So two hundred and—now, since Fenner had been there, in some places that gorge was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and was still not down to the welded ash flow. So it told me that there was something that was much deeper. Well, I’ll tell you about that in just a minute. But anyway, after I had plotted all of the data that I had gotten, it was quite clear that none of this had come, except perhaps the final little dusting of andesitic ash from Katmai.
Now, in the crater itself, when Fenner and Griggs got up to the crater rim, was a little volcano—yes, call it a volcano, within the crater, which had clearly erupted. That ash was around the inside of the crater everywhere and it might be that was the only thing that we saw on the outside. So what had happened? Well, the Novarupta had been the source of all of this. That had—so somehow or other, there was a cauldron of—well, we called it a magma chamber of rhyolite, which tapped—which when it started to flow out, Katmai itself was ready to erupt. And it—that lava from Katmai came over and mixed with the rhyolite from Novarupta. So we start with pure rhyolite in the first eruption of Novarupta and at the very end, we end with pure rhyolite. In between is the andesite. The side toward Katmai was where most of the mixing took place, you could see, this is the side of the dome with the mixed andesite and rhyolite. On the other side was 50
almost no andesite. So the source was clearly at depth and then had come up mixed on the way up before being been blown out.
Incidentally, in wandering around this crater of Novarupta, or this dome of Novarupta, I found on the south side of that a—no, on the west side of it, I found a boulder with C.N. Fenner carved in it. He’d carved his initials in this big pumice boulder. So—
Swent: Now, you were doing this for USGS?
Curtis: I was a “while actively employed,” WA—
Swent: WAE, yes.
Curtis: WAE.
Swent: And you were in charge of the group then, the second summer?
Curtis: Yes, I was in charge of everything the second time.
Swent: So you wrote it up, then, as a paper for USGS?
Curtis: Well, I’ll get to that.
Swent: Okay.
Curtis: So, anyhow, most of it was fairly clear except how the ash flow could get out over Katmai Pass because it would mean that Novarupta, which was now lower than Katmai Pass, had to—how could it get up there? Well, finally it dawned on me that the Novarupta was not where it is today, it was much higher. And it, too, had collapsed downward about five hundred feet. And when it was up higher, the material would have been lower, and so it would be just simply gravitation that would have taken the ash flow over to the pass. So I had all these—this information and data. Meantime, I should get—how’s our time going?
Swent: It’s fine. It’s noon.
Curtis: It’s noon. Well, let’s stop there because I’ve got to tell you about what was going on behind my back, back at—which I was involved with. And that’s with Evernden and the Potassium-Argon.
Swent: —to get into that. Okay. Let’s see. Now, I have to—[tape cuts off]
[End of Interview] 53
[Interview 3: August 15, 2002 ]
[Tape 5, Side A]
Swent: Yes. Now we’re—I believe we’re in business.
Curtis: Do you plug that right into a computer so you can type the stuff?
Swent: Some how this gets transferred to a tape, ordinary cassette tapes.
Curtis: Oh, I see.
Swent: And then I—and then someone transcribes from the tape onto a computer disk. Then I go back and listen to the tapes, compare them to the transcripts and do light editing.
Curtis: Okay.
Swent: Light editing is the term. I call it quick and dirty, but it sounds better to say light editing. And then you check it.
Curtis: Alright.
Swent: And then it’s final typed and so on, but—now this little disk gets somehow moved onto tapes.
Curtis: Well, I was reading, looking over some advertisements for things like this and they said that it could be plugged right into your computer, and if you want to type notes that you’ve taken, or minutes of a meeting—
Swent: I’m sure there is that connection also. Of course I don’t—coping with this is enough for me. But yes, it does go on into computer technology also. It’s pretty amazing.
Curtis: Are we ready?
Swent: Yes, I think we are ready. This is the third interview on August 15th, and I wanted to get started with your academic career and research, teaching and research. You wanted— said that you would like to say a little something further about Lawson.
Curtis: Yes, well this—
Swent: You have talked quite a little about Lawson, but—
Curtis: But most of the talk I’ve given you about Lawson has been off the mic, so—
Swent: Well, possibly, but I’m more interested in your career than in Lawson’s. So—[chuckles]
Curtis: Yes. Well, I’m not going to—I just wanted to give you one thing about Lawson.
Swent: Good. 54
Curtis: He was a strange person in that he didn’t know his students.
Swent: You did know him, however, didn’t you?
Curtis: I always said hello to him, but he didn’t know who I was.
Swent: I see. You were never one just to—
Curtis: No, he had long since left teaching, but he came to his office everyday, and gosh knows what he did there. He, in his teaching, he would say to the people in his seminars or whatever, “You, there on the left. You second from the left. You from the right.” This was a seminar. Didn’t know any—he never remembered any names.
Swent: Did you adopt a different tactic in your teaching?
Curtis: Yes. I’d try and know, in my small classes. You know, sometimes I’d have as many as thirty out in the field and that would take a little while, but I, within two weeks, I knew all the names of those. And in my seminars I always knew all the names. But one of the interesting things, which I haven’t seen reported, is that he would go into his class and precisely on the hour, or ten after the hour, and lock the door.
Swent: Yes, I’ve heard this.
Curtis: But—so one day he came in and he had a little—he sometimes carried a little, not a cane, but a sort of a—what the army call the sticks that they swish around. So he came in one day and there was a hat on the podium and he just knocked it off and started writing with his lecture, just like that. The next day, the hat was back and he left it, didn’t knock it off. At the end of the lecture, a student came up and took the hat. There was a brick underneath it. He was a very difficult person to trick and in his petrology, very much the same thing. Somebody put in a piece of hard chocolate for the rock one day and he picked it up and looked at it. He said, “This is a bit of impudence.” And he threw it away.
Swent: [chuckles]
Curtis: But he was so proud. Now, this I saw. He was coming down the steps one day, leaving in the afternoon, and he tripped and fell. And one of the students with me—I’d been over having coffee with—ran up to him to help him. He said, “Don’t lay a hand on me, young man. I’m perfectly capable of getting to my feet myself.”
Swent: Oh, my.
Curtis: —no, thanks. You know, that was the way. Okay, that’s all I wanted to say about him, to get a—catch a picture of this very proud, very—I could tell a story, but I won’t. It takes too much time. I’ll tell it to you later over lunch one of these days. Not today, though, because I have another engagement.
But Louderback—I had taken, as an undergraduate, I had taken one of his graduate courses. I had all the pre-reqs for it, and when I came back afterwards to go to school, I knew him then. And he was just this wonderful fellow. He had a messier office by far 55
than this. It was stacked that high with everything. And I went to him one day because I couldn’t find certain specimens. I found the specimens, but I couldn’t find the descriptions from where they came and one of them had Louderback on it so I said— told him about this. And he says, “Yes.” He came to me five minutes later. He had found this in this big pile of stuff. Now, another time I went to him and he—I asked him for a reference of his about some stuff he’d done in the Basin and Range province. And he said, “Oh, I remember that reference! Yes.” And he reached over, into this pile of old papers. He had them stacked along the walls and he reached in and pulled out the reference without even—. He just knew where it was. But there was—
Swent: So the disorder was not real.
Curtis: There was order in the chaos, yes. But his career—he was, at one time, dean of the College of Letters and Science. And this was a time when Benjamin Ide Wheeler was the president. Now, the faculty had been very upset that all the power was in Benjamin Ide Wheeler and the administration, about courses, about everything that dealt with the faculty. While Louderback was a friend of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, he was also very concerned about getting the academic senate going. So he was the power sort of in the background that organized this revolt against the system. Because he was friendly with Benjamin Ide Wheeler, he was able to convince Wheeler that instead of having a strike of the faculty to get this power, that he should yield. And he did. That’s when we got the academic senate, was through the work of Louderback.
Swent: Were you involved very much with the academic senate?
Curtis: Just when I would go to these academic senate meetings and I was not one to jump to my feet to—there were always these groups, particularly the outspoken liberal English and social sciences professors; those in the physical sciences usually kept quiet until the—remember the Free Speech Movement. Then we had people from engineering that would come. And most of the engineers were absolutely quiet. There were just one or two that would ever get up and speak, but it was dominated by these other people; so when motions were passed supporting the students, they won overwhelmingly. Well, so few people came to those meetings that they finally decided to reduce—to have a special group to be a group of about—you know, the academic senate’s huge—a group of about one hundred, from each department there would be chosen somebody that would be speaker for the department. My department, being small, they joined my department with geography and with paleontology. And the very first time I was for two years on that special thing.
Swent: Did it have a name?
Curtis: Yes, the General Assembly, I believe. I haven’t thought about this for years and years, but I was there when, of all things, we were now in the—well, it started to be a quarter system, but nobody came to the summer sessions. The problem was that the summer sessions did not—let’s see. We had a lot of teachers, middle school and high school teachers, that came during the summer to the two summer sessions, that, because the school got out and then the summer sessions started in at the time of when we were on the semester system, right at the end of the semester. But then, when we got on the quarter system, it became very difficult to come because the quarter system went way into the summer, then in the middle of the summer, the next quarter started. So, they 56
changed it to a trimester system. That didn’t work much better. That was supposed to give more faculty to the different departments. The problem there was the faculty did not—we did not get faculty members and where did all that money go? It went to the administration to administer first the quarter system, with students supposedly going throughout the whole year. This was pushed by somebody in the state legislature who thought that Cal was wasting a lot of time. Well, students had to work in the summer. They couldn’t go to school; most of them couldn’t. And there weren’t enough of those who could, amongst the affluent, we’ll say, that it wasn’t—.
So, we go to the trimester system and that didn’t work either. They got people into that middle—there were three, of course. Finally, they sort of had to drop that and call it the trimester system, but everything was out of kilter so when on the the trimester, of course, the three semesters—it made the semesters shorter. And that meant you could give one midterm and not two. The old system with two semesters, you could give two midterms. You cut out a lot of the people that were in high schools that didn’t coordinate well. And the professors who had had the—if you talked to professors who had had the semester system versus those who had the quarter system, those who had the semester system felt that they were teaching much better than those who were teaching in the—than when they taught the quarter system. They just were not—didn’t have enough time. Those who were brought up on the quarter system for some reason loved it. Well, there were not many professor that had ever been, had gone through the quarter system. So, while I was on this special thing for the academic senate, and it had some name which may come to me, it came up, shall we abandon the trimester system. Now, we expected, because you never got an agreement in the academic senate, always everybody had an opinion, so when the vote was called for, guess how many people voted against changing back to the semester system. None. It was one hundred percent wanted out of the quarter and trimester systems.
Swent: How—?
Curtis: And of course the administration didn’t like that. They were profiting by this system. They tried to say that, well, UCLA would have to go along and they wouldn’t. They were on the quarter system and of course the people in this group who were motivated, immediately called UCLA and said did they have any objections. No objections there, whatsoever. They could keep on with their quarter if they wanted. But still, the administration fought it for about three years, but finally we went back to the semester system. And of course, it meant that they had to change things again. At first they carried on the second semester into January, which was an absurd thing.
Swent: Oh, yes.
Curtis: Coming back for final examinations in the second week of January just— So finally, they faced up to it that they had to make it the way it used to be, get out in May, come back in August and change things a little bit. But the year was ended in December when you had the Christmas vacation. But they got their—for instance, when they got the quarter system going, there had been one dean of the College of Letters and Science. Then they divided it up and they had five deans.
Swent: My. From one to five? 57
Curtis: Yes. I don’t know what it is now, but there were different parts of the whole system that they got. Added deans and they added administrators all over the place. That’s where all the money went. Didn’t go to extra faculty. We got nothing out of that.
Swent: So you preferred the semester system?
Curtis: I preferred it. When I taught in the quarter system, it just seemed that you started, and you’d give the midterm and you were finished. It was terrible.
Swent: Yes. And what did you do in the summers, then? Did you—?
Curtis: Well, that was another problem. We had our six-week summer camp. We could work around almost anything; we could start it late or early, so that wasn’t too bad, but it just—. I know I’ve talked to many professors at Stanford and other places that think, “Oh, the quarter system’s fine,” but they have never had a semester system. Giving two midterms is so much better. Then you find out that the late bloomers show up and they’ve begun to get the message that you’re teaching. So anyway, that was a mixture of things that I wanted to get in here.
Swent: Right. And your work with the senate. Do you have any more to say about the Free Speech Movement, and how it affected your department?
Curtis: Well, yes. There were different parts of the Free Speech Movement; it got totally out of hand at the end. They got their demands of free speech, but they wanted to keep going. And—let’s see, what was his name that had led that? He was—
Swent: Mario Savio?
Curtis: Yes, Savio. He left and went to—he’d had a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, and he spent a year there, decided he was “needed” back at Berkeley (he had loved the adulation of the students). But when he returned the FSM was dead and the students weren’t interested.
Swent: But how did it affect your department?
Curtis: Well, let me tell you. I was going to say it affected the students. And when this got to the point—now, not the faculty. We supported part of that and I gave money for supporting some of that, but there were parts of it that I didn’t support whatsoever. The students supported one absolutely ridiculous thing and were going to strike. And I said to some of my graduate students, “You strike, and I will not—and you walk out of my classes— I will not write a letter of recommendation for you when you get your degree. This is absurd. You’re asking for more power than you deserve. You are graduate students; you’re here to learn. You’re not here to run politics.”
And one of them came to me afterwards and he says, “You know, you are lucky. They voted it down,” that when they had their student meeting. I said, “No, I wasn’t lucky. You were lucky. I wouldn’t care what you did. I would not have—” I said, “You’ve asked me to write a letter for you for University of Alaska,” tchew. [throwing sound]. We stayed friends. He’s retired now. He did a good job on his thesis, but politically he wanted power. And the last person to have power was this fellow. He did a good job on 58
his thesis, but he never did any research up there in Alaska, just one or two papers came out of his whole term up there until he retired. So anyhow, I won’t mention his name.
Swent: Now you taught, you started out teaching geology.
Curtis: I started out teaching almost every course. I was teaching more than anybody there. Turner, for instance, had a seminar and one class. I had three classes a week and two labs, two labs during the week and all day Saturday, and I was supposed to be getting my thesis done. Well, it cost me an extra year. It took me five years to do that. So, speaking of that, Turner was a great lecturer and I was inspired by him, but when he came up to my—here I was, working on my thesis. He and Williams came up and I showed them around. He brought no food or anything. We supplied the food. You know, we were cooking; we were camping.
Swent: This is up at Markleeville.
Curtis: Markleeville. We were camping. We supplied the food for both of them. Dorette, my wife, cooked for them while taking care of our two small children at our campsite. When Gilbert came, he brought steaks; he brought food. He brought vegetables; he brought fruit. He came up and helped me twice. He spent three days each time with me. Well, what I found out later was—because the secretary there was a friend of mine in the department—she said, “Do you know that Turner put in for expenses for this trip, including meals?”
Swent: Oh, my. Uh-oh. [chuckles]
Curtis: Yes. So—. You find these things out afterward.
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: And so there were no expenses other than just driving.
So anyhow, the focus of my research, which went from metalliferous deposits to volcanology, was solving the problem of how did these rocks get broken? How did they fragment? Now lava flows, like basalt, flow and they cool and they stop. These—and nobody has seemed to have observed this. They’re not well exposed until you get in the canyon. They would flow and then they would start to break up, not just on the top, right in the middle and sometimes stringers, all fragmented. What caused them to break?
And then I found these dikes that Cord Durell had described in the Blairsden Quadrangle and they, sometimes, would have chilled margins of six, eight inches thick of andesite on their margins and then be all fragmented in the center. So basalt dikes, you never see them fragmented in the center. You see basalt flows with the tops getting fragmented because the top chills and as this stuff flows under it, there’s a great deal of stress and the top breaks up into big blocks. So I had examined these in thin section. I had studied Cord Durell’s explanation of rapid crystallization forcing the gases out. These didn’t have much gas. They were very, very viscous, and the bubbles in them were bubbles that worked their way around the crystals already there, no round bubbles 59
as you see in basalt. So I was thinking about this and here I was, writing my thesis. And it was just going to be descriptive if I didn’t come up with an answer to that.
At four in the morning, it hit me because I went through the whole process. Obviously, those bubbles had formed deep down in the earth because even dikes have them, that I had seen exposed along the canyon walls and road cuts, which had been thousands of feet below the old surface of the Mehrten formation. The rivers had cut big gorges. I found, even the deepest that I found, always had these irregular shaped vesicles; so the vesicles had developed deep down in the earth under high pressure. Then I thought, well, of course it’s going to be cooling, and it’s going to be moving up. And as lava coming up from below, it’s going to chill and sometime, it’s going to fracture.
Now, this is where—what finally hit me. What would the fracture look like? I wouldn’t be a perfectly planed surface; it would be a curved surface. And as it moved, it would make an opening. What would happen then? Here were those vesicles, the gases in them, under the pressure of thousands of feet of rock. What would be the pressure as this curved sheerplane opened up a little bit? The pressure would be zero in there and the vesicles would be under pressure of thousands of pounds per square inch. They would just explode into the empty space and then it would begin to break up as more surfaces were exposed. So you would get this matrix of fine material in these blocks as it continued to move.
With lava flows, the same thing, but once it began to fragment, then it would be no longer a fluid flow, it would be a viscous flow. But once it began to fragment, the resistance to movement would increase as it fragmented and it would bring the brecciating flow to a halt, so you could find parts of it brecciated and parts of it unbrecciated. And I found this over and over again. As soon as brecciation started, the flow stopped flowing. So that then, of course, you have to get this into a river because some of these breccias got into rivers and they were carried away. And the blocks were oxidized red from being hot and steaming in the water. Some of them went into rivers, others poured out on the surface of big domes and broke up. Then gravity moved them down to the rivers, but they were fragmented ahead of time. So you see virtually no andesite or andesitic lava flows in the Sierra, and yet most of that Mehrten formation is composed of these autobrecciated lava flows, and that was the mechanism.
Swent: This came to you at four in the morning?
Curtis: Four in the morning. And oh, what a relief that was! So I published that right away and that was the principal part of my thesis. Then there were these different inspired moments. For instance, at Katmai, after measuring all these beds and plotting their thicknesses, each bed—you could tell which way the wind blew at the time of the eruption. Most of the wind was coming from the southwest and was blowing north, but there were sometimes winds that were blowing southwest-northeast. There were times when the wind was blowing from the due south and blowing north because that layer would make a great big arc around of constant thickness, the contours of equal thickness. See, when I measured them, I had to plot them and then draw contours on them. So they made these beautiful curves all around Novarupta; not one around Katmai with its great big crater. That was tremendously inspiring to me, too, of showing that the Novarupta had erupted. Had all of that material, twenty-six cubic kilometers, had come out of Novarupta and while there were five or six cubic kilometers in Katmai crater, 60
there was no volcanic material that came out that was on the surface. So it destroyed Fenner’s argument and supported Bowen’s, Norman L. Bowen, which was based on his theoretical work.
A student later went in. I only put in that one summer (1954) there because there wasn’t any money left (because of the costly search for Juhle) to do further than that. But Wes Hildreth, one of our students and a good friend, went back and he did a much more thorough job. He spent 20 years on it. He didn’t do the measuring of the volcanic ashes that I did. He accepted that. But he found outcrops of things that I had missed with respect to the number of outpourings from Novarupta that came out and some other features of these eruptions. He was able to get over on the south side of Katmai, which I couldn’t get to because of the bad weather, and he did quite a bit of work there. He came up with some ideas about big deposits inside the crater that I thought were—came from this little volcano within the crater, what we call a resurgent dome—but he said, and I think he’s right, were the crushed material as the crater collapsed. There would be this huge amount of crushed and fragmented rock.
[Added in editing: One thing that did bother me was a layer of welded or partly welded tuff about eight feet thick lying on the northwest crater wall. This had also been observed and collected by Juhle. Wes and his assistant looked for it but evidently it had all slipped into the crater lake. The significance of it was that it had thyolite pumice fragments in it. Wes never discussed this in his publications although he had our samples.]
[Tape 5, Side B]
Curtis: Back now to K-Ar dating. John Reynolds, in physics, had designed a new kind of glass mass-spectrometer of very high precision. He had in mind looking at the gas components in meteorites, but he knew geology needed dating badly. Since potassium is such a common element in igneous rocks, the geologists would be interested in the decay system of potassium mass 40 to argon. So John asked me if I could help him geologically. Well, here I was, planning this foray to Katmai and I looked around for somebody else to help John. I found Bob Follensby from Alberta, Canada, down to Berkeley on a sabbatical leave with us, with not very much to do, not any research to do. So I introduced him to Reynolds and things worked out very well, until toward the end of that year Bob Follensby’s, his sister, I think, had an accident— either was killed, or her husband was killed. I forget which. And he had to leave immediately because there were children involved and somebody had to take care of the family, and his own wife couldn’t do that. Bob came to me and he said, “Garniss, drop everything.” Here I was planning Katmai. And he said, “Drop it—” and I had all the backing of the USGS by that time to go up there, and he said, “Drop it. You’ve got to get into this. This is the most important thing in geology.” Well, this was at a time when I had come back. I’d just stayed on. It was a position opened for me when I finished my degree. But Jack Evernden, who had gone through undergraduate and graduate work with me—he had been in mining, but he had emphasized seismology and loved math and seismology—he had, when I got my—finished in ’51 and was hired, he was not hired. There was no position for him, but his mentor, Perry Byerly, head of seismology at the department there, tried very hard and within about a year, 1952, had a position for him. So Jack came back immediately to be in the department as a seismologist with the seismology group. But Evernden did not get along with Byerly.
Swent: I think you had talked about that. 61
Curtis: And he—I don’t know if we have it. But he came to me and he told me, “I’m going to go back to Standard Oil. I like the people. I like the work I was doing. I have a lot of freedom to do what I want and there are a lot of seismological problems that they need me.” Then I told him about Follensby and described the importance that we could date things that nobody else could date for a hundred million years. And a tremendous amount has happened in a hundred million years, you know. We go from the dinosaurs to the mammals to the humans and so on, and all the branches of the mammals, all of which were just guesstimates. The glacial—how old was the—when did the glaciers start? That was all estimated. I said, “We’ve got all these problems to work on.” And he immediately went to Reynolds and they were two soul mates because they were both very hard workers. Jack was incredibly motivated. But, of course, what happened, if you’re going to do geology and you’re going to separate minerals with potassium in them from all those that don’t have potassium, you need to have crushing equipment. And you need to—how to separate the minerals either by heavy liquids, or magnetically, or various other ways in which—or you can hand pick them.
So he said, “I need your help, Garniss.” “Well,” I said, “Look, I’m going to be in Katmai all summer.” This is now 1954. He had learned the techniques of glass blowing and electronics that were needed, but now he wanted to get involved in dating rocks. So I gave—maybe I did a couple of samples for him before I left that spring, 1954. This was after Juhle was either killed—by the way, I didn’t tell you that I had good evidence that he didn’t fall in there.
His mother found—came out to where he had supposedly fallen into this big chasm, into the stream below, and been carried away. His mother had come out and had found along the trail nearby a thread of wool. And she recognized it immediately as from a sweater that she had knitted him for this particular summer. There’s no question about it. And that was hundreds of yards away. So I’m quite sure that Juhle was killed by either a bear with cubs, elk with babies, or a moose with babies. All of those are dangerous with their babies. And the wolves probably finished off the body if they didn’t eat it. So—but I think I told you that.
Swent: Yes, off the tape.
Curtis: Off the tape. And how the rest of that—
Swent: Good to have it.
Curtis: But there’s a peak named for Juhle now—
Swent: Good.
Curtis: —there in that volcanic range, which he certainly deserves.
Anyway, getting back to Jack.
Swent: How did you get to Seaborg?
Curtis: How did I get to—? 62
Swent: Meeting with Seaborg about the Miller?
Curtis: I’d had to drop writing up Katmai. And it didn’t come out until it came out in this one here (the volume dedicated to Howel Williams), but I supplied samples for the Potassium-Argon project. We did samples. I collected them. We did all basic work to begin with: testing things, how could we get the extraction line clean (without gases in it) and so on? In that time was when Adolf Sprague Miller died and left a few million dollars to start an institute of basic research in science at the University of California Berkeley campus. They just kept that money for a few years. It wasn’t really enough to do what he wanted until Mary, his wife, died. Then, I think a total of $17 million, which was a good start for this was—. So I said to Jack at that time, I said, “Jack, we’ve got to get one of these Miller Institute things. We have all our time free; they supply a professor to replace us, teaching our courses. The travel funds—” all that sort of stuff. They’ve cut a lot of that out by now, though. But anyway, finally I dragged him up there. He said, “No, there’s so much more we really need to know.” I said, “All the basic stuff, we do know.” Now, there were these things that he wanted to do that he did later when I was away on my part of the sabbatical, and that was doing diffusion of the different minerals. That was beautiful work that he did, but we didn’t need to do that to go up to see Seaborg. So, dragged him up, and we talked to Seaborg. He asked us a number of pertinent questions. Jack answered a few of them, but I did most of the talking about the geology and how important this was to geology. The different things that we needed to have information about, which I’ve just said to you about: rate of evolution and where did man, humans—I don’t like to call them man anymore—where did humans evolve and so on, and the glacial periods and calibrating the different epochs of the Tertiary, the Cenozoic. All of those had to be done.
So he listened to us and then, as he just was very chatty. And then, as we got up to leave, he said, “You know, what do you think of this new idea that the universe is older than we have thought?” That is, it’s older than seven or eight million. And since I had studied this in—and I knew that they had to be wrong, I said, “I’m sure that they’re wrong. This new estimate of eleven million years, by somebody, I think is very reasonable, but I would guess it’s even older than that.” And he smiled and he said, “I think so, too.” Well, I don’t know what that did, but the next day we got a letter from the Miller Institute saying that we each had fellowships and we could take them whenever we wanted. We flipped a coin. Jack won, as he always did. We knew that the important place to go was Europe. That’s where geology sort of began.
Swent: Yours was 1958 and 1960—
Curtis: Yes. His was ’57. I was ’58. And I went the other direction because we had Turner in New Zealand and he knew the Tertiary stratographic section that was very good. And it was correlated. I won’t go into how it was correlated, correlated by fossils, some of the Tertiary Epochs. And Japan correlated by fossils with the European section based on a principal that Lyell had established way back in the 1830s. So Jack went off and he collected in Sweden and England and Wales, and all over the place in Europe, but in England he met—oh, now I’ve forgotten the name. The person who proved that famous fossil was phony—do you remember? I’ll think of it. Didn’t come prepared for this. He was told that he should see Leakey in—go visit Louis Leakey in Africa.
Swent: When did you first—? See Olduvai was 1960, so— 63
Curtis: Well that’s—I’m getting to that. You need a little basic information.
Swent: All right.
Curtis: So when he got to Rome and Alberto Carlo Blanc, who was the anthropologist millionaire, anthropologist at the University of Rome, said, “Oh, yes. You should—do you know Louis Leakey?” And Jack said he didn’t. “I’ll phone him.” He got on the line and just minutes later, Jack was talking to Leakey and immediately flew down, the next day to Nairobi and met with Leakey, and went out in the field—
Swent: You were here in Berkeley?
Curtis: I was here in Berkeley, running the lab. At that time, when he was gone, I had—let’s see. I had a graduate student from Switzerland working with me.
Swent: Where did Drake come in?
Curtis: Oh, that’s much later.
Swent: That’s later, all right.
Curtis: So, anyhow, I had—by this time, there were a couple of graduate students working with us so that’s what I did. Then the next year, ’58, I collected in New Zealand and Australia, a couple of things in Australia. I went first to Canberra and people were getting very hot on paleomagnetism. There was a fellow there—let’s see, what is his name? Can’t think of it right now, wrote a wonderful book. Anyway, when I arrived at Canberra, at the university, I went into the library because I had to wait to get a room. Looking over the library, I found a book on snakes and there were something like 125 snakes in Australia, of which a hundred of them were poisonous. Twenty-five of those were deadly poisonous and two of those were unbelievably deadly poisonous, the tiger snake and the—oh, what’s the other one? I’ll think of that, too. Nobody had ever lived from a bite of those, except one person bitten on the foot. He had what we would call a machete, but they call it—it begins with “p.” I forget. And he just cut off his foot. The only person that ever lived from a bite until, of course, they got antivenene. So, I asked—oh, I’ll think of his name—this fellow that I’d come to see. I was going out with him to get—I knew he was doing paleomagnetic work, but he was working in volcanic rocks of the Devonian and Ordovician. This would be very important to get things that could be dated at the Devonian/Ordovician boundary, at the base of the Devonian/ Mississippian boundary at the top. So I said to him, “Are there any snakes where we’re going.” And he said, “Oh, yes. But,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about them.” “Well, how about the—” Taipan is the snake—“I understand that this is in this area.” T- a-i-p-a-n. “And the tiger snake.” And he said, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about those. They have very short fangs. They’re very difficult to get angry. They’re lethargic. And,” he said, “besides, with those short fangs, they won’t go through your boots.” I showed him my tennis shoes and he said, “Garniss, nobody lives forever.” [laughter] Well, we didn’t see any snakes and I got some good samples, later got some very good dates of those.
Swent: Did you invest in some boots? 64
Curtis: No, because I’m so used to looking for snakes. We have rattlesnakes here and they are also in the Coast Ranges—well, most of the places that I’ve—. They’re sort of difficult to get angry. I’ve only seen one or two that have really got angry and came toward me, rather than away from me. But the rest have been all very lethargic and wanting to get away. I’m always looking for them because if you surprise them you can be bitten. So I wasn’t too afraid of these small deadly poisonous snakes. It becomes second nature to look for snakes when you’re out in the field.
So we got some good samples and I got some from New Zealand. I saw both north and south islands, went out in the field there and collected. Then on to Japan.
Swent: You’re looking for—? What exactly—what kind of samples were you looking for?
Curtis: I was looking for samples that would date something like a boundary between Periods or Epochs. We have what is called the geologic time scale, and that’s broken down into Eras and Periods and Epochs. The paleontologists have broken them into even smaller units which I won’t go into, but the geologic time scale was established by just the law of superposition.
Swent: Were you looking particularly for things with potassium?
Curtis: Oh, yes. Rocks with potassium in them. Oh, sure. We had to have those. And most volcanic rocks, even basalts. We’re dating basalts with a high degree of accuracy. We didn’t at first. We eschewed basalts, but until—at Olduvai we dated a basalt there and we got a good date on it. But they have so little potassium, there’s a high plus or minus on that. Anyhow, so Jack had brought back a lot of samples from Olduvai Gorge concerning—by the way, the first human hominids were not found there when he was there. It was after we got his stuff dated that we—and some of it was with respect to artifacts. Leakey took them to many places besides the gorge. So we had a lot of dates on later developments of humans, but while I was—I think, 1959. I was back again from around the world trip and got a lot of good samples, but what we were trying to do is put physical dates on the geologic time scale. That we succeeded in doing. And since paleomagnetism was just beginning to come in to be studied—
Swent: This is the idea that magnetic—
Curtis: Reversals were important. To begin with, we didn’t know if these reversals were worldwide. There were reasons to believe that some of these reversals took place, if the chemistry of the magma was such, that the reversal as the magma cooled the paleomagnetic moments in there could reverse or if reversed, could become normal. It might be, then, very local and not worldwide. So different people wanted us to date their rocks to see if they correlated at this particular age with the same age someplace else. So we did a lot of that work and collected for that anyhow. Then, got back and we realized when they did find what they first called Zinjanthropus, later Australopithecus boisei, this heavy jawed, large teeth, sagittal crest up here, holding huge muscles that went to the jaws, making this a rather distorted looking hominid. At Olduvai, they found that. Well, we had the date. Jack’s collection dated the rocks in which that was found, but we didn’t know precisely where the fossil was with respect to the dates. Were they right above it or below it? If they were below it, the dates could be much older. So I had to go back and I chose to go back in ’61 on my second— 65
Swent: Back to—?
Curtis: To Olduvai. And collected in 1961.
Swent: This was your second—?
Curtis: That was my first time there; Jack was there in 1957. And I went to the gorge, again with the Leakeys and with Richard Leakey, who was going to stay with me. They were busy, so they showed me the various outcrops that they had taken Jack to and some that they hadn’t taken Jack to. I would collect those with—they had left with us two help, which they called “the boys,” and Richard, who was going on seventeen. He was finished with school. He had quit school. School didn’t interest him. He wanted out. And he was a wonderful kid. He was a great help and a lot of fun to be with. Then I spent the next week and a half with him, collecting these samples.
I have a funny to tell you about going out with Louis and Richard. Mary had to go back first, and she—
Swent: Mary is the mother?
Curtis: Mother. And she went back first. She had brought a vehicle. They all had Land Rovers. So Louis stayed with me for a couple of days with Richard. One of the places we went to, we—there were faults going across the whole gorge and there were offsets on those faults. We were going up to what is called the fifth fault, where we had to cross from the camp, across the upper part of the Olduvai Gorge and get up on a cliff and then go along on that side. We stopped at right about the fifth fault and Louis pointed across the way, about five hundred yard away, a cliff with a bed of gravel in it. He said, “It’s in that cliff there.” (In the bedded gravels where he had found handaxes.) That’s not a likely place to find anything I can date. The boulders won’t tell you anything date-wise. Most of those came from Pre-Cambrian rocks and would be billions of years old. So I said, “Well, I’ll go look at it, but from here it doesn’t look very good.” So we walked on the trail, cattle trail, toward a great thick growth of very young thorn trees. You know, the thorn trees that characterize sunset pictures on the Serengeti Plain, these things that go up and flat on top?
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: Well, they’re young—I could see that they were about three inches in diameter and maybe twenty feet tall. There was a forest of them all over there. It must have been optimum time, sometime maybe ten years before that was a good seed year. So the trail went through there, but just before we got to those thorn trees, I looked down and saw tracks of a female rhino, and next to them a baby rhino. I had hunted so much and was a very good tracker. I knew those tracks were not hours old, they were minutes old. You develop that technique. And I pointed to the—they were talking and they didn’t notice.
I said, “Louis, what are these?” You know, deferring to him. And he looked down, he says, “Oh, that’s a rhino.” Richard looked, “Oh, yes. That’s a rhino.” I had to point out the baby tracks next—“Oh, it’s a baby! Oh, listen—” Of course, Richard, also was skilled at tracking and he said, “You know, she’s heading in this direction. We can catch up to her.” I said, “Aren’t you worried about a rhino and her baby?” Louis turned to me 66 and said, “Garniss, you don’t have to worry. If she charges, you will know instinctively what to do.” And I looked up at the car on the cliff above. “My instincts,” I said, “are to go right back up there.” “No, no, no.” So they led off. And I looked at those bushes. Oh, no, the next thing he said was, “Besides, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that she’ll charge.” What wonderful odds. Gee whiz, I feel so safe.
Well, we followed those tracks and they went right to a little canyon by the cliff that I was going to, up a talus slope, and look for—he had found artifacts there—and look for volcanic ash. But just as we got to that little canyon next to this, there was a mound about, oh, the size of this room. Thirty feet across, twenty-five feet across, maybe seven or eight feet high. The tracks led right by the mound, up into the canyon. Well, Richard said to Louis, “I’m taking Dad up to show him some stuff I found up here a year ago, when I was here looking around.” So he just ran up that slope.
Well, I got on—I saw that the tracks disappeared and they had told me that she’d gone to a spring. I would see the spring when I got to the base of the cliff. I looked around and I didn’t see her so I started jogging up the slope. And Richard, who was walking away, laughed at me and he called from about fifty yards and said, “You can’t run up that hill faster than a rhino. Take your time.” And just then I got to the cliff and I said, “Well, she might run up this slope faster, but she’s not going to go up this cliff. I can climb this cliff.” So, anyhow, I looked around and there were no tuffs. There was nothing I could date there, absolutely nothing, but I looked around for the baby and the rhino at the spring and they were not there.
Where could they have disappeared to? Everything was visible, hardly anything growing. I could see the spring and that’s the only place where there was any life, except for this big forest of thorn trees. So I came running down after a while and went around the other side of the dome. Immediately, I saw her tracks. She had come in, knew we were right behind her, and had gone around the dome, keeping it between us and so that we couldn’t see her or hear her. Then, when she got back on to where we had come in, her tracks were on top of ours, so I knew she was right there all the time. So just then, Louis and Richard came down and I pointed out the scenario to them. And then they said, “Oh, Garniss, we’ve got her now!” “Oh?” And so they started running where we had come. Well, we had jumped across a little creek about oh, three feet wide and four feet deep. We just hopped across that. And she had jumped into that and was now running down the bottom of it with the baby following her toward another grove of thorn trees. And the Leakeys were right after her. I said, “I can see her. That’s fine.” Well, they chased her to the trees and she disappeared in the trees and that was it.
Of course, they knew what I didn’t know, after all my reading, that these animals are going to charge you all the time. That’s the African hunter stuff that I read. Teddy Roosevelt book, Martin and Osa Johnson books and movies too. You had to shoot these animals. They wanted any excuse. Well, they’re smart enough to know sometimes that they’re trying to protect their baby and they’re trying to get away from any danger that they can. They’re not going to charge you unless forced to. And it’s true of lions—[tape cuts off]
[Tape 6, Side A] 67
Curtis: —and everything else. I began to realize that all of this nonsense I had read about the big game hunters defending their prowess of hanging these animals all over their walls, heads and skins and so on. It was just so much excuse to go kill innocent game that had no intention of charging us at all. But I did learn that from him. I did find out from Richard later on—do you want another story about Richard?
Swent: Oh, sure.
Curtis: Okay. Well, he stayed with me and I had found a living site of where a living site could be recognized by the number of different bones from different species that were at that place, now uncovered by erosion. And the only way they could get there is if humans took them there and butchered them there. So I said, “I have the living site that I found down in the gully.”
I forget how I—it was one of the days when both Mary and Lewis were there and they took a nap in the afternoon. I went walking down and went into the—one of those times I went walking—I confronted a leopard which did not move and I walked back very slowly and got away from it. Anyhow, I found this—well, I took Richard down this trail and what did I see but snake tracks at least fifteen inches wide. Well, of course when a snake turns and slides it makes a wide track, but then when it goes straight, you find out how big it—and it was about three or four inches across. And I knew it had to be a puffadder, but I deferred to Richard and I said, “Richard, this is—what is this?” And he said, “Well, that’s a puffadder.” And I said, “But it’s going the direction we are and you can see that it’s just minutes old.” He said, “Yes, but Garniss, it won’t—we won’t see it. I tell you, we won’t see it. It’ll hear us, it’ll get in the bushes. It won’t—we won’t see it.” He had on tennies, I had on tennies. And he had on shorts. I had on pants, so he just dashed down ahead of me. We didn’t see it.
Took him right to where this collection of bones was, and artifacts, too. Pebble tools were all over the place there. We collected, but there was nothing I could—there was not an outcrop there that was worth collecting. So I said to him, I said, “Have you ever been scared about—out in the—?” He said, “No, only once.” Now, they lived north of Nairobi about ten miles and there’s a big mountain there made famous by that woman who wrote Out of Africa—
Swent: Baroness Blixen?
Curtis: Yes.
Swent: Isaac Dinesen.
Curtis: Yes, Dinesen. She describes this mountain because it was near where she had a house at the time. And she was a very good friend of the Leakeys. Richard had gone up there with one of his—all his associates. He didn’t get along with his younger brother, Phillip, and his older brother Jonathan, was very busy with snakes. He had a snake farm there at the Coryndon Museum.
So he grew up with blacks around him all the time. So he and his father—all of them spoke Swahili and—what is the dominant tribe? Begins with “k.” Well, I’ll get to that, but his boyhood friends were all blacks. And he was with one of these and they had 68
climbed this hill described by Dinesen. And now they were going to come home. There were talus slopes on the side. If you haven’t run down a talus slope, you don’t know what fun it is. You take these great leaps and you hit this loose talus and you dig your heels in and you slide. So you take these bounds of twenty or thirty feet. I’ve done it. I used to love to do this in the Sierra Nevada on the right slopes! And you travel at tremendous speed.
So they were going down this and there was a—they were coming to a tall, grassy little spot, probably a spring on the side of the mountain there. Richard was in the lead and he saw that there was a, when he got close, there was a big bull Cape buffalo. And they are the most dangerous animal. He said, “This is indeed a dangerous animal. They charge without any provocation. They just are nasty.” And he said, “I came so close I could have patted him on the butt. And when I got past, I heard him—I heard the noise of him leaping out and I could hear him coming after me.” And he said, “I was scared to death. And I ran and he kept getting closer and closer. I thought, well, that heavy [mass?]—if I cut to the right, he’ll shoot by me.” But they’re so agile, when he cut to the right, there was a bunch of rocks kicked past him and he could hear this beast following him. So he went down and cut to the left and the same thing happened. Well, the gully was coming and he thought, “I will jump across that gully and that bull will land right in the gully.” Well, he slowed just enough at the edge of the gully and he was hit with a boom, knocking him right to the gully and this great weight across his legs, falling on top of him. When he sort of regained his senses and looked around, there was his companion across his legs. It was his companion that was behind him the whole time, not the—
Swent: Not the buffalo? [chucking]
Curtis: Not the—[chuckling]. And he looked back up at the buffalo, way back up there, still feeding at the same place, hadn’t paid any attention to either of them. He said, “That’s the only time I’ve been absolutely petrified.” He thought it was over.
So anyway, it was quite a family. We took those samples and I cleaned our samples—to speed this whole thing up, I cleaned the samples. I got the bromoform; I was able to buy it at a drugstore there.
Swent: The what?
Curtis: Well, the heavy liquid that I could separate feldspar sanidine. In Africa, these were very rich in sanidine, which is a potassium aluminum silicate, feldspar. I would separate it from all the heavy minerals including plagioclase if you make the right density by mixing alcohol with it. I got all of those things, so was able to clean up some samples and I flew them back to Jack. He had dates for us when I got back. I was there a total of about six weeks—
Swent: I’m interested, how did the connection come between Berkeley and the Leakeys? Why did they choose you rather than somebody in London or—?
Curtis: Well, Jack went down and met them on his trip—
Swent: Yes, but were there no other people doing the kind of work that you were doing? 69
Curtis: At that time, nobody else was doing that kind of work.
Swent: Okay, that’s what I was wondering. There were no—?
Curtis: No, we were the only ones and we sent the dates that we got from Jack’s collection in 1957—Leakey had them. We hadn’t published them yet and I—
Swent: How did he get them?
Curtis: How did he get the dates?
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: We did them in Berkeley and sent the dates to him.
Swent: So you were aware of what he was doing?
Curtis: Oh, oh! You mean the one—no, I’m talking about 1957 dates from the collection that Jack made the first time.
Swent: Right.
Curtis: He had dated those.
Swent: But I’m just wondering how you even knew—how did you know about the Leakeys and how did the Leakeys know about you?
Curtis: Well, I was working with Jack and of course Jack, in corresponding with the Leakeys, telling them the progress of dating their rocks collected in 1957.
Swent: But how did that connection begin? Just because of the man in Rome? Is that—?
Curtis: Yes, yes, but there was another anthropologist in London who first mentioned the Leakeys to Jack, Kenneth Oakley, who discovered the fraudulent Piltdown Skull.
Swent: I see.
Curtis: And Jack flew down and introduced himself, and went out with them to Olduvai and other sites. They were thrilled to have somebody dating their rocks, very, very impressed. In the meantime—
Swent: You had no competition, in other words?
Curtis: There was no competition and we had—competition came later, but Jack knew that he didn’t have time to study the strata and so on. I knew I didn’t have time either. So what I did was—and Mary asked me, “Garniss, can you find us somebody that would come and put in the required time?” I was good at reconnaissance work, but this needed study of the interfingering of beds and so on. It needed careful work. She said to me, “We have a fellow named Shackleton working on this,” But the problem with Shackleton is that he’s afraid to go into the gorge because of the lions and he does his geology from 70
the cliffs above. She said, “I just don’t trust him.” Well, I looked at his drawings and he had cross-bedded volcanic ash windblown that was just airfall ash, absolutely horizontally bedded. But looking at it from a distance, he had imagined sand dunes. It was terrible. So I told her I would look for somebody and I had two people in mind. One was Dick Hay, who was a professor there, that had joined our staff in the fifties, a young fellow. And a fellow named Tom Wilson, who had done a nice master’s degree with me up at Lassen. I thought—naturally, I would speak to Dick Hay first and I thought he would turn it down, but he jumped at the occasion. He spent the next, oh, close to ten years, every year studying Olduvai Gorge and he came out with a great big thick volume on the geology of Olduvai.
Swent: Now who funded these various expeditions? This—
Curtis: The first one, of course, was funding by the Miller Institute. And mine was funded by the Miller Institute. We’re going back there—uh, oh, I touched that [referring to microphone]. Later, by this time, now, we were applying to the National Science Foundation and getting a lot of help from them. We stayed with National Science Foundation right to the present time. We’ve done very well with the National Science Foundation.
Swent: The Leakeys did not—?
Curtis: The Leakeys had no money whatso—
Swent: No, they were looking for money, too. [chuckles]
Curtis: They were looking for money, too, but once they found what they called zinjanthropus, and they published that work in National Geographic. They had funding from the National Geographic for the next twenty years and each year, they’d find something different to get another publication. Well, that first publication, which they describe zinjanthropus, I had a companion thing on the dating of the samples there at Olduvai.
Swent: That, I think, was in 1960, wasn’t it?
Curtis: I don’t know. Sometime about then. Oh—
Swent: —so a big year. ’64 was Homo habilis.
Curtis: Oh, yes. Well, that—Homo habilis had been found after Jack was there, three feet below zinjanthropus. So that had just been found a short time before I got there. I measured the—I collected tuffs right there and above and we couldn’t improve on our dates. We couldn’t separate habilis; in those three feet there was no difference in age whatsoever, but clearly habilis was older than boisei, the Australopithecus boisei, because it (habilis) was underneath it.
Swent: Now Lucy wasn’t dated until ’75.
Curtis: Well, it wasn’t found until much later and we didn’t do the first dates on that. That was done by—what’s his name? A fellow in the east, a heck of a nice guy, by Potassium- Argon, and it wasn’t a very good date. 71
Swent: So by then other people were getting into that—?
Curtis: Oh, other people. Before that, Miller at Cambridge, a physicist, got into Potassium- Argon with a new system of—not a mass-spectrometer, but a thing that’s sort of like a cyclotron, that you separate the elements by spinning them. Those with heavier mass go in one direction, lighter mass, of course, go in another. Let’s see, what’s that—nobody uses that anymore and I can’t think of the name of it. But he did a lot of work, Miller did. And we crossed swords with him in northern Kenya at what used to be—it’s now called Lake Turkana, but it used to be called Lake Rudolf and it was first, before that name was fully accepted, it was East Rudolf, which then became East Turkana and it then—
Swent: So that was—is that Laetoli?
Curtis: Lake—
Swent: Laetoli?
Curtis: Laetoli? No, that’s not Laetoli at all. Laetoli is very near—is in that same frame. It’s very near Olduvai. It’s about forty kilometers from Olduvai Gorge and Turkana, as the crow flies, is about six hundred kilometers from Olduvai Gorge.
Swent: Now I have the 1470 skull, that was Turkana?
Curtis: That was at Turkana, yes.
Swent: Turkana. That was later.
Curtis: That led to the problem. At first, this—I’ll just get into that while we’re about it. Well, the reason that I didn’t get involved there happened this way. Jack had gone to an island in Lake Victoria called Rusinga. It’s in the Kaverondo Gulf of Lake Victoria, when he was there in 1957. He had collected a lot of material and the importance of this was that Leakey had found, when he was there, back in the thirties, he had found two—I forget what he named them—but they were two species—actually there are now three—of proconsul. This he recognized, because of the teeth, that this was a forerunner; it was going to be in the hominid line. The teeth—it was tailless, and he suspected, and I think it’s still fairly well accepted that a proconsul africanus is—there’s proconsul major and proconsul something else. One of those proconsuls does lead to humans and he wanted that dated.
So Jack collected stuff there and we dated it, but the only date that we could believe was the one at around, oh, around 15 or 16 million years. Leakey did—some of these things were so contaminated, we got a hundred million years for one of the samples he collected. And Jack said, “These are all—” well, of course, I was the one examining them and seeing contamination. I said we can’t believe these. Lots of the mica was altered. Rusinga was the flank of an old volcano and there’d been a lot of steam action and it was difficult to find fresh biotite. Jack knew that. So Leakey said, “16 million is much too young. This is Eocene in age or not younger than Oligocene.” Well, by that time we had a few dates and we knew Oligocene was, I’d say, roughly 25 to 30 million years and Eocene, by that time, we knew was something of the order of 60 million 72
years, or 55 million something. We later refined these things. So putting it way back to—well, even to 25 to 30 million years. He thought that was too young, so 16 million—just didn’t agree.
So he wanted—we discussed this at a meeting at Burg Wartenstein, which was a place where it was supported by a very rich person. They had bought a castle in southern Austria, up on a hill, a whole castle. And they renovated it so that meetings could be held—anthropologic meetings could be held in the summer. Just a wonderful place and they did it right. You gave your papers and then in the evening you had these wonderful meals. Dinner and then afterwards discussions and drinking, whatever you wanted, wine or scotch or anything. And the next day was another workday and you did work very hard. So at one of these meetings, in which Louis and Mary were present, he came to me and he said that—
Swent: Louis?
Curtis: —that the Wenner-Gren—
Swent: Louis came to you?
Curtis: Louis came to me in either 1962 or 1964 at the Wenner-Gren Burg Wartenstein castle. Wenner-Gren was the outfit that had supported this. So Wenner-Gren Foundation still goes, by the way, but they lost a lot of money in bad investments and they had to sell the castle. But for several years there, for about ten years, it was the place to go. I went twice and I wasn’t an anthropologist. But the anthropologists were making sure they got there almost every year.
At this particular time, Louis asked me if I would come and recollect the samples on Rusinga. I said, “I can do that. I’ll take out a—I’ll get a sabbatical leave this fall—” or no, the next fall, I guess it was, and, “I can make it.” Well, fall came and I was on leave and I was preparing to go to Kenya. I wrote to Louis and said, “I can come over there in December.” He had told me the best time would be December to come there. So when I wrote to him, he wrote back and said, “Well, this is a very bad time, Garniss. There’s a hole in the boat, I can’t get out there. This is the wrong time of the year.” All of this had been by his invitation and by his own planning. So he said—what did he tell me then? Well, there was a series of letters back and forth.
I stopped writing and went to Europe with Dorette for a trip to Italy. Well, when I got back, there was John VanCouvering, a student at UCLA, knocking on my door, figuratively and literally, and he had come to see me. “You’ve been in Africa, Professor Curtis, and Louis Leakey has invited me to come to collect samples for dating on Rusinga Island.” Well, it wasn’t John Van Couvering’s fault, of course, and I replied, “Yes, I’ve been there.” He continued, “He wants me to collect samples because he’s got Jack Miller at Cambridge to date the rocks.” So, I wrote to Leakey about this and he said, “Well, Garniss—.” It seemed that Jack and he had a lot of excuses. And he said, “But what I would like you to do is check these dates that he’s getting so we can—.” I said, “Look, Louis, dating minerals is expensive, besides, we have international standards so that we don’t have to check each other’s dates. We have international standards that we check each lab with.” I was furious, of course, that he had the guts to ask me there, then cancelled this trip. And then ask me to do the dates pro bono, just to 73
check Jack Miller, which would take money from my grant. He wasn’t going to supply money and those dates are expensive, both in time and effort. So I told somebody that I’m not going back to Africa as long as Louis is alive. Can’t trust the S.O.B. That got into the book, I think, that we—.
Swent: Yes, it did, but he didn’t live very much longer, so—.
Curtis: No he didn’t live very much longer and I continued to have a good relationship with Mary and actually, Louis didn’t know how furious I was with him. So when this thing down in the Mojave Desert began at Calico—Calico Hills, have you heard of that?
Swent: Well, I’ve heard the name of it, yes.
Curtis: A woman, I can’t think of her name now, oh yes, Simpson, who was at the San Bernardino Museum, had found artifacts. Now, there had been a lake out there during the Pleistocene and around the edge of that lake, on the surface, were artifacts. Small arrow heads and spear heads.
Swent: Tools?
Curtis: Well, yes, spearheads or arrowheads. Clearly they were old, but, because the lake had been gone for ten thousand years, so they—maybe not that long. But, in the meantime, Simpson had dug into some bedded deposits near the margin of the lake mud flow deposits of rock debris next to the lake—she thought maybe these arrowheads had come out of these, so she dug into them. And she began to find chert “tools”. Now, this all happened in 1960, just before I first went to Africa in 1961. When I was there in Nairobi with Louis, she sent a picture of these “tools” to Louis and said, “These are very old because these deposits are clearly older than Pleistocene.” Louis was quite certain before this that there would be evidence of early man found, in the United States someplace, early man going back more than the Carbon 14 dates of say 12,000 years for Clovis Man and so on. So he was ready to believe this. Well, some years later, he came over to meet Simpson and see the artifacts, and he was much impressed. Well, there was a lot of argument about this and they decided—a lot of people had looked at the artifacts and said, “No, these are not true artifacts.” They were natural tool-shaped “artifacts” and not man-made, except for those found on the surface next to what had once been a nearby lake. I looked at the “artifacts” and all of them had come from the same rock type, a yellow chert, except for those found on the nearby land surface which had been flaked from several different rock types—fine-grained basalt, obsidian, and metaquartzite, and they were all arrowheads of similar shape and size. But those coming out of the nearby hill slope that Simpson had found were all composed of this yellowish chert, of fresh water origin in my opinion. Boulders of it up to a foot or more in diameter were in a nearby creek, and a blow from my geology hammer caused them to explode into fragments with a loud “pop” indicating there was a great deal of moisture in the chert. By that time they had identified, including the surface artifacts, approximately 75 “true” artifacts, no two alike, out of some 400,000 fragments (actual count) that they discarded as not true artifacts. Over the years following, this number was almost doubled.
There was so much controversy over this matter, Simpson, I think, decided to hold a big conference, a world conference, right on the site itself to study the deposit of the 74
“artifacts”. It was, including both Mary and Louis Leakey, well attended. Carl Butzer, from Yale I think, came and decided that well, yes, the soil on top of the deposit indicated an age of about 200,000 years, which mean, of course, that the tools below were older. He thought the “tools” were genuine. I never had much respect for him anyhow. Then a fellow from Santa Barbara, a good friend, but I can’t remember his name. His expertise was Carbon 14 dating. He looked at some red oxidized boulders that were uncovered that formed a U-shape and thought they might have been a hearth. He had collected some carefully oriented samples from these orxidized stones and had their magnetic moments measured at a lab in Europe that did paleomag work, and he found that they all had the same orientation of their magnetic moments, so they had been at a temperature above the Curie Point of about 570 degrees Celcius, hence supporting the hearth idea. I looked at that hearth and knew instantly what happened. The “hearth” opened downhill which indicated to me that these were stones that had collected around the uphill side of a pine or other large tree growing on the slope when it was covered with trees under more favorable climatic conditions. A fire, probably from lightning, had burned this forest and this then dead tree down to its roots, causing the rocks to be oxidized and heated above their Curie Points, thereby resetting their magnetic moments so that all showed the same magnetic moments. It turned out that yes, they had found other reddened piles of boulders but not in the form of a hearth.
I walked up the slope above these mud and rocks debris flows that composed the “artifact” deposit to the edge of where these deposits appeared to have had cut by a fault with over 100 feet of displacement leaving a drop-off in front of me to a flat-floored, pebble-strewn surface stretching about half a mile or more to another fault upside of about the same amount facing me. It was beyond that second fault from where these debris flows with the chert boulders in them had come. These were both typical Basin and Range type tensional faults, where, only a few miles from here we had dated a basalt flow at six million years that had buried faults of a similar kind without being offset, which, of course, does not prove these faults at the site to be that old, but it suggestive of the age of this site.
Back, now, to the conference and Louis, who said, “But these artifacts have all been knapped by human hands, Garniss. This is one single culture. The type of flaking exhibited here cannot come about naturally; it is a very particular type of knapping,” and then he gave it a name that I don’t recall. Well, Mary looked at these “tools” and told me later that she agreed with me, they were all naturally-formed fragments. People, now, were all over the place, many crowding around Louis on his knees on a pillow before a chert fragment protruding from a wall recently excavated with this large fragment left in situ for Louis to examine. A tape recorder held by a young man was recording Louis’ every word. When the tape ran out, if it wasn’t changed, another tape recorder was there to replace it. Louis would scrape off a little, then brush it off, the tools being placed in his hand that he held up without taking his eye off the chert object in front of him. Mary, standing back of the onlookers with me, whispered, “Louis adores this adulation. He lives for it. This is total nonsense.” Mary was a specialist in stone tool making, and she had published a seminal paper distinguishing the early Olduvan and late Olduvan cultures.
The thing that came out of this conference was a collection of short papers from each of us. There were the “believers” like those I have mentioned, and the “non-believers” like Dick Hay, Mary Leakey and myself, plus others whose names I can’t remember. 75
Swent: They were not artifacts at all—?
Curtis: They weren’t artifacts. But they’re in the museum there at San Bernadino and there are those that believe in early man in California, Butzer having said the soil was 200,000 years, they’re giving that credence. There’s no credence to it whatsoever. It’s just nonsense.
Swent: What about the spear points, though?
Curtis: Oh, those? There was no way to date those. You just can make an estimate as to when that lake was there. It has a name, you know, Salt Lake was once greatly expanded. Then there was Lake Lahontan, and this lake was probably the same age.
[Tape 6, Side B]
Curtis: —there was a big lake there. But when did it dry up? I don’t know. But they were around the margin of that lake so, clearly, they are pretty old, several thousand years. I don’t know that they’re any older than—well, even as old as Folsom or the other one that goes along with Folsom points—Yuma points. So we—I’ve been continuously involved with anthropologists and archeologists now in this country and in Africa. So after we had dated those things, oh—I haven’t told you about—I’ll just—
Swent: We haven’t gotten to Java yet.
Curtis: Well, you’re not going to get to Java until we get through with Africa.
Swent: Okay.
Curtis: At an area called Koobi Fora, where the KBS tuff was found and dated—where they found what they first thought was Homo habilis and which Tim White still thinks is Homo habilis, but they’ve now named it Homo rudolfensis, named for the old Lake Rudolf—rudolfensis. Tim White says scathingly, “That damn thing. They’ve just put it together wrong. All those fragments, they glued them in wrong. They made a flat face where they should have rounded it.” So anyhow, a tuff was discovered by Kay Behrensmeyer, a good friend whom I tried to get on the staff here, but she was turned down by the male “chauvs” in my department.
She had a Miller Fellowship here for two years with us and she was doing some very good work over in engineering with how streams will—bones that fall into streams get sorted from the pebbles and often make local deposits because of their shape, they get— . Any—you know, you can understand that they would move differently from a rounded pebble. But anyhow, Kay was out there at Koobi Fora and she found a tuff which overlay by about ten meters, which was, oh, half a mile away at least, the finding of this rudolfensis or Homo habilis called 1470. That tuff, then, was important to date and what Miller—Jack Miller and Frank Fitch. Fitch was the geologist, and a pretty good geologist. I liked him very much, but the trouble with both of them was Fitch knew no physics—and didn’t try to learn anything about the physics of dating by the Potassium- Argon system, and Miller didn’t try to learn any geology. You see, Jack and I had both ends. We had the physics and we had the math, and we had the geology and we had the mineralogy. Between us we had a damn good team. 76
So they got a date of 2.6 million years for what became known as the KBS—Kay Behrensmeyer—Tuff. That would push—and since there were several meters, about ten meters—thirty feet of shale underneath, the KBS Tuff it would push the age of the fossil older than 2.6 million years. This is all on the delta of the Omo River that goes into Turkana. That is a fault bounded basin and that Lake Turkana has been filled up and faulted down, and the streams have gone out one way one time and out another way another time. The deltaic material, it spreads all over both west and east sides of the lake basin. So, Koobi Fora was in sediments brought down by the Omo River and they—so you can’t tell at ten meters whether that took two floods or 10,000 years or 50,000 years to deposit. There’s just nothing there to date, but it’s clearly older than that, so it would be 2.6 million year minimum. Well, the thing was this.
Basil Cooke came from South Africa and he had studied geology, mining, and so on, but he was particularly interested in fossils. He had studied the fauna at Olduvai and he recognized that the fauna at Koobi Fora, not the humans, was identical with that at Olduvai. He pointed this out and he said, “2.6 million years is too old. It’s got to be younger than that.” So, how did, as Richard has confessed publicly—"at that time we were always anxious to get the oldest human so we liked 2.6 million." Well, those of us [who?] were a little more scientific didn’t like 2.6 million. Now, Fitch and Miller had redated my work at Olduvai, Jack and my work at Olduvai, and they’d come out with the same dates. Here’s 2.6 so they have to explain how the fauna remained isolated here in a cul-de-sac that couldn’t get out for about a million years, 700,000 years, and then spread out—it was just so absurd.
So they—I said, “Well—” now Kay Behrensmeyer, when she was here, she had a piece of the tuff, and I said, “Well, can I see—.” She said, “You can see it, but you can’t date it. They don’t want anybody to date this.” So I looked at it. I could see that there was a lot of altered material in there. I was suspicious of this thing, but—well, I shouldn’t say altered material. There wasn’t altered material. It was encrusted with secondary minerals. That’s what I want to say.
Anyhow, one of the people going to work there at Koobi Fora—. Richard put together a big assortment of scientists and T-h-u-r-e, Thure [pronounced Terry]. Thure Cerling was going to be there working with Richard and his group on—he was concerned with climate, looking for evidence of climate change and so on. So also, he had worked in our lab with us getting dates on some stuff that he had done earlier. So we were good friends. He said, “I’ll collect the tuff for you and I won’t say anything about it.” Well, the moment we got that tuff from him, the sample of that and some others, we got— now, by this time, Bob Drake, whom had been working under—well, he worked with another professor first, Mark Christiansen. We’d call him Chris and Mark Christiansen. I was on his thesis committee in the Sierra Nevada and he started working in South America with Bob Drake when he became involved in the political situation on campus. He was not a dean at first. He was something and then he became a dean and then finally up into the administration. And finally he became chancellor at Santa Cruz.
Well, so Chris said—he was just a wonderful guy, love this guy to this day. When I was sick one time with hepatitis, he took my classes and taught everything for me. Anyhow, he turned Bob Drake over to me, who was doing a thesis in the southern Andes in the Mauli River—well, southern Andes, not down in Patagonia, but just north of Patagonia in the Mauli River. I took over and went out in the field with Bob. I had had him in a 77
class, so I knew him. We became very close and he stayed with me for many, many years, right up until the Berkeley Geochronology Center—I mean, to Institute of Human Origins.
Well, getting back then to the KBS, Bob was working with me, dating his samples from South America. He rewrote Tertiary history—of the Andes, which was all just guess and by gosh. Things that they called Cretaceous turned out to be only four million years old. So he straightened all of that out and a number of very fine papers. So Bob dated in the lab, I could turn over some of this work to him. He dated the—well, both of us worked on it, of course—the KBS tuff. And what did we get? 1.8 million years, which is, with the new constants, was we’d gotten 1.75 at Olduvai, but with the new constants, that became 1.8. I corresponded with Frank Fitch and Jack Miller, and I said, “We’re getting 1.8 for this.” And he said, “Well, when you’ve dated it as many times as we have, you will—.” Well, that’s no argument.
So about this time, there was a meeting in England, which I went to and which Jack Miller—I presented my evidence and Jack Miller said, “Well, we’re dating by this new Argon/Argon technique and Garniss is using the old Potassium-Argon technique. He’s done some fine work, but our dates are much more precise than he can get with a Potassium-Argon.” And that’s true, but we were getting greater accuracy than he. He had made some mistake someplace. So with these damning with faint praise complements, he cut me loose. So it was agreed, though, at that meeting that what we needed to do was use a different method. That is, use the fission track method of measuring the number of fission tracks, measuring the uranium in zircon and the fission tracks that they make. There’s a simple formula for getting an age from zircons. So it was agreed that they would do that. Well, they did. Some young fellow from Jack Miller’s lab, a fellow from the USGS whose name I’ve forgotten—and I’m not going to try and remember it—and a fellow from Australia, Andy Gleadow.
Swent: We can [add?] it in.
Curtis: These three—
Swent: Miller’s lab was where?
Curtis: At Cambridge.
Swent: Cambridge.
Curtis: And this other lab—
Swent: Cambridge, England.
Curtis: —was in England someplace. I think that was at—well, it could have been at Cambridge, too, where they did the fission track dating. And then the USGS did the dating in a lab in, I think, just south of Washington D.C. Andy did his dating—
Swent: Australia, [isn’t it?]?
Curtis: Well, it turned out that they got 2.4 million, and— 78
Swent: All three of them independently?
Curtis: Well, they all agreed on this. It turns out they didn’t have very many zircons. They had only eleven zircons, of which they had forty-three fission tracks. Now, Buford Price was one of the people that invented fission track dating and we had gotten him, with my help, we got him to the Berkeley campus. He’d been with us a while and I took this information to him. He looked at this and he said, “I can’t believe—” and he named the person in Washington, at the USGS, who was doing the fission track work. “I can’t believe that he—I’ve got to call him. He’s—you can’t get that kind of precision that he’s quoting,” say 2.4, plus or minus, say five percent or something like that. He said, “These few fission tracks, forty-three, forty-six fission tracks and eleven grains.” He said, “This is absurd.” Well, almost had Andrew’s name. He realized it was absurd and with his own money, he went back to Africa and collected, recollected a lot of material, from which he got 1,200 grains of zircon. He came out with 1—at this time, our date was 1.83. He came out with 1.85 and subsequently, we got—with Argon/Argon we got—oh, Ian McDougall at Canberra, a person who had learned Potassium-Argon. While Jack was away, Ian came up and spent a year with me and got into Potassium-Argon dating and then got his own equipment. Well, that’s another story. He dated and got 1.87. So those three dates were very good, 1.85.
And at a meeting of—a geological meeting in Colorado—oh, I can’t think of his name, the guy that—. Well, Frank Fitch was there. Jack Miller wasn’t there, but the guy that had—from the Survey was there. He turned over his shoulder and he said to me, sitting behind him, “I guess I have to eat crow.” And I said, “Yes, you do.” But they would never let that sample out to me to be dated by us, that they got the 2.6. Oh, when they got 2.4, Miller looked and he said, “Oh, I’ve found a mistake in our standards and now, when I correct that, I get 2.4, not 2.6.” Gee, get out your violin. So, once that was all cleared up, that was about 1976, Miller said, “I’ll never go back to Africa again.” And he didn’t. And he got a terrible reputation of not doing any more research, but doing dates for commercial outfits in mining all over the world. So he’s never spoken to me again.
I said to Frank Fitch, “Let’s have lunch today and talk about this.” And he says, “Yes, that’s fine.” So I met him where—I went to where we were going to meet. He wasn’t there. When I found him later, he said, “Oh, I had an interruption. I’m terribly sorry. But let’s have lunch tomorrow together.” I said, “Fine.” Well, he didn’t show up again—
Swent: This was in Colorado?
Curtis: This was in Colorado. So I went to find him and a thought came to me. He’s checked out. And sure enough, he had checked out.
Swent: Oh, my. Now you later—you did go on and do Argon/Argon dating as well?
Curtis: Oh, yes. We got—when we got Don DePaolo on the staff, this was 1984, I think it was—
Swent: Who?
Curtis: Don DePaolo. 79
Swent: DePaolo.
Curtis: We stole him away from UCLA. He was a student of Wasserberg’s and just a brilliant guy. He was in an entirely different field. He was in heavy elements and solid source mass spectrometry, high precision stuff, entirely different from what we were doing in Potassium-Argon. So we contacted the head of—the Institute of Human Origin, which had rented all this space. I knew Don Johanson before that, in fact, had done some dates for him. So he was very happy to get us into dating here as part of the Institute of Human Origins. So, of course it’s getting pretty late, but that’s how we got started over here.
But, meantime, I wanted new equipment. I got permission to move my old equipment over, so I went back and talked with people. I had friends at the National Science Foundation. I needed a new spectrometer for that and some other stuff.
Swent: How much does a spectrometer—did a spectrometer cost?
Curtis: Well, the stuff that DePaolo has costs about a million bucks. We have a much simpler system with the Potassium-Argon. It costs about $275, 000 for the spectrometer. And then of course you have the peripheral equipment, extraction lines and computers and all that sort of stuff, recording instruments, that bring it up to about $300,000, a little over $300,000 for one. We now have three of those here and—
Swent: Of course you have to pay for that by every time you date something, that cost goes against—
Curtis: Yes, that’s right. But we got good support from the National Science Foundation and some from other places like Leakey Foundation and National Geographic for something. Those, of course, are very small. Those are sort of emergency things. We got, to get to Java, I got some from Leakey Foundation.
Now, about Java, which comes in and overlaps here. We—
Swent: Now, were you still with the Institute of Human Origins when you went—?
Curtis: We were up until 1994. We were with the Insti—this was 1985 when we first moved over here with a bunch of students. The reason that—I was going to retire in 1989, but Bob Drake and his family lived here and he wanted to stay, even though he had divorced his wife, or she had divorced him, he wanted to be close to his family. I wanted to have a job for him because I had kept him all that time. We talked about this and what he suggested, we do commercial work. Some people had done that and there was a good field there. I said, “Yes, we could turn out wonderful dates, but neither you nor I are businessmen. We would go on the rocks in six months if we tried to start a business. We’re not organized along those lines. We’re scientists and that’s what we—we’ve got to find somebody else.” So we got a lot of help from the Institute of Human Origins to fix up some rooms downstairs. The remodeling cost $60,000 and they came up with that money.
Swent: Where were they? 80
Curtis: They—where were they?
Swent: Physically. Where is the Institute of Human Origins?
Curtis: Well, Don Johanson was in that room across the hall from me.
Swent: This same location?
Curtis: This same locus. They had started out on the south side of the campus, but about 1983, they had moved here. We joined them in 1985. At first, we were supplying all of our own money, but then we had an accident. We didn’t know that the National Science Foundation had changed it’s dates from February to December to get proposals in. Two proposals were not ready. That was inexcusable on our part. We should have been checking to see when proposals were due. So we then needed support from the Institute of Human Origins. They did give us support, but they demanded that we drop the name Berkeley Geochronology Center at the Institute of Human Origins and put the Geochronology Center at—let’s see, of the Institute of Human Origins. So for a while we had to drop Berkeley Geochronology Center.
But we had a bunch of—these were all former students of mine to begin with, and all of them were very productive. Paul Renne hadn’t joined us at that time. He was at—doing a post-doc with Tulles—well, at Princeton with Tulles Onstadt. Anyhow, he was doing a post-doc with a person at Princeton who had—and I set up. So we got, at that time, we gradually got out of Potassium-Argon dating. We got the—oh, this is a funny one. We got the money for the spectrometer, but we decided that we were going to do laser dating rather than the radio—frequency dating that we had been doing. That is, to fuse the rock we were going to use—well, an argon laser at that time was about 20—I don’t know. Quite a bit. Maybe more than $20,000, $50,000 perhaps. So how to get that money quickly and with ancillary equipment, a moveable stage and so on. I went to Gordon and asked him—and I told him what our problem was. And he says, “How much do you need?” Well, at that time, I had 55,000 as a rough figure. And he said, “Now, Garniss—”
Swent: This is Gordon Getty?
Curtis: Gordon Getty. And he said, “Garniss, I don’t like to be nickeled and dimed. You better figure this out very closely and don’t underestimate it.” So we did a more careful job and we came out with, I think, $76,000. The check was on—when I told him that, the check was on my desk the next day. So we could immediately start buying the equipment to start getting into laser dating instead of using the old type of fusion, using radio frequency to fuse the minerals. It was much, much faster and better. So that was 19—let’s see. We started in ’85 with the old equipment. I guess that was early ’86 that we started getting into laser fusion and into Argon/Argon dating and when we got the new spectrometer, which was much more precise. We did that.
The argon dates—the thing about the argon dates is it’s very difficult to get all of the argon out of them. You get 99.8% of it out, but you don’t get that last little bit. With fusion dating you get it all out. You don’t need to get it all out, let me put it that way. All you need is one little sample of the very first stuff that you get off of it because you are not measuring the potassium separately from the argon. You’re measuring the 81
potassium by converting potassium to argon, some of the potassium, so you can measure your argon Argon-40/Argon-39 all at the same time. So you can do it in small increments. The ones—you don’t have—we used to add 38 as a spike by which we calibrated the different runs. With Argon/Argon, you use a standard that has been established by all the different labs and, fundamentally it goes back to Potassium-Argon, but you have to check on that. So when you have a sample radiated to convert some of the potassium to argon, you have your sample standard, also, so that the flux that you get doesn’t have to be fixed because you’ve got a sample that you know the age. So you can compare that to the amount that you’ve got and that gives you the precision and the accuracy. So you measure two argons at the same time the—well, you measure three. You measure the 36, the 40 and the 39. You don’t need to measure the 38; you can do that if you want, but we’re no longer adding 38 so it’s not needed.
However, the interesting thing is that you get your date—every time you take a little sample of it, you have a date. So what—you improve your precision by taking several increments from each crystal that you date. You can get—by the way, you can deal with not very much sample, with our present precision—we can deal with much smaller samples than we could with Potassium-Argon. So each one, you take off maybe eight or ten increments. You could take fifty if you wanted. Well, the first increments will show you the stuff on the outside of the grains, which would usually be mostly air, but it can be other things too. You can usually discard those first increments and then the samples— if nothing has happened to that sample, geologically happened to it, so it’s buried and metamorphosed—each increment will give you a point on a diagram. When they all line up, we call that a plateau age and that is the true age of whatever number of samples that you’ve run. So that determines your precision.
So when Carl Swisher dated Chicxulub, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, he got 64.98 million years, plus or minus 60,000. He got 65 plus .01, plus or minus 60,000 years. All the dates that he ran on different samples came out just almost a flat 65 million years, with a plus or minus 60,000 years. The precision is that high. Now, if the decay constants are ever changed, that would change those dates. But as long as we stay with those same decay constants, which have a lot of uncertainty to some of them, but very little—when I say uncertainty, we get the same age if we date a 4.5 billion year old meteorite as you do by uranium lead. The constants are not very far off, but they’re very difficult to determine.
What this allowed us to do then, was Al Deino said, “Well, we can program this whole thing with a computer. We don’t have to be there. Or we can open it, put automatic openers on the valves. We can program the whole thing.” Well, we did that. We were the first to do that. We could walk away from it, and, over a weekend, you could get—well, we can put as many as, in some of the disks, we can put as many as two hundred little pits with samples in, but we usually have something around a hundred pits with samples in them in there. We can get those done over a two day weekend. If something happens and things crash, we call it that when something goes wrong such as if the computer stops or something, or something goes wrong, we can call in from home and find that out, and in some cases even correct it over the phone.
Swent: Isn’t that amazing? 82
Curtis: So Al Deino’s been just a genius. Well, a friend up in Canada, Derek York at the University of Toronto, was doing this work. He was the one that really got everybody into doing laser Argon/Argon work. Derek continued this work based on work that had been done by a physicist at Brookhaven.
Swent: That’s okay.
Curtis: Anyhow, I went up and saw his outfit and that’s why I wanted to get into it because I saw him burn a hole right through a large crystal in which he could date from the outside to the inside of that crystal. That, I wanted to do because, I won’t go into it, but it seemed important. Well, this was something that Tulles started before we really got going and which Paul Renne went back to Tulles to learn the technique. Well, we could do that but we’ve never done that. We’ve—Tulles had published some seminal work on that and showed that the dates in some things, like in pegmatites are much older in the inside than the outside or vice versa, the gradational dates. Well—[tape cuts off]
[Tape 7, Side A]
Curtis: —pegmatites are a very unique, final phase of the crystallization of a magma where all kinds of gasses and a lot of argon gets collected in there. so the dates that you get from, say, biotite or feldspar in a big pegma—you know what pegmatites are?
Swent: Oh, yes.
Curtis: These huge crystals.
Swent: The Black Hills is famous for pegmatites.
Curtis: Yes. Well, if you date those with Argon/Argon, you might get—well, one of the dates that we did from something in Colorado was 13 billion years, when the earth was— there was a lot excess argon in it. So it grades, too, because the quantity of argon in a pegmatite is changing with time. Anyway, Tulles did all that but we never got into that phase of things, which I particularly wanted to get into, but we—it does turn out to be a wonderful way of getting very precise dates.
But I’ll have to get into Java, which my first realization after dating in Africa was, this was back in the sixties, that Java was where early man was first found by what’s his name? I’m blanking date—the names.
Swent: I don’t have my notes with me on that book either, so I don’t remember—
Curtis: Yes.
Swent: Jacob?
Curtis: No, no. No, Jacob is a colleague there and I corresponded with him to come over there and see if we could collect samples to date the different Homo erectus that had been found since 1890. Let’s see. I think the first one was found about oh, in the early 1890s in Java. That was long before— 83
Swent: Let’s see. Mojokerto was 1992, I think.
Curtis: Yes. Well, my first trip over there was—
Swent: You went there much earlier. 1969, I think—?
Curtis: Yes, well I would have been there in 1964, but that’s when Suharto overthrew Sukarno.
Swent: That wasn’t a good time to be there.
Curtis: Not a good time. And Jacob, who had been in anthro as a student here at Berkeley, had kept in touch with him. He—
Swent: He was not a geology student?
Curtis: No, no.
Swent: Anthropology.
Curtis: He’s an anthropologist and he’s pretty good. He said, “I think this isn’t a good time to come, Garniss. I’ll let you know when—.” So that was 1968 when things had quieted down and the best time to come would have been say, after the rainy season, which ends about—it ends in different places in Indonesia, by the way.
Swent: Really?
Curtis: But in Java, it ends around, generally, end of February or end of March. He said, “Well, if you get here in April, that would be fine.” So, my wife and I planned a long trip. I would collect there and then we would go to see Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. This was just before Pol Pot took over with his Khmer Rouge. That was a great trip. We went to Japan, too.
Anyhow, we collected a lot of samples and at Mojokerto—I went to almost all of the localities and I got samples from almost all of them, but the problem was these were very low in potassium. They were—we were still using Potassium-Argon method where potassium was measured by flame photometer, a very low-precision instrument. These minerals would have only three tenths of a percent of potassium max, most of them two tenths of a percent potassium. Well that problem of air argon—reduced the accuracy of our dates considerably. Just a small amount of air is always present, but the smaller the potassium, the more difficult it is to reduce the air argon so that you have a relatively high amount of radiogenic argon mass 40 remaining. Every atom of 36 that you measure is primordial argon that came with the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago. It doesn’t come from the decay of anything. But argon of mass 40 comes from the decay of potassium mass 40. So over geologic time the amount of argon mass 40 in the air has been steadily increasing. Thus, today the ratio of argon mass 40 to argon mass 36 in the air is approximately 1/296, so that for each atom of argon mass 36 you measure in your sample you must subtract 296 atoms of argon mass 40 from your sample. You may end up with a date that is say, ninety percent air argon and ten percent radiogenic. Well, that ten percent then has a very high plus or minus. Well, that’s what I was lucky to get, even that with the samples that I first dated from Java. However, at Mojokerto I got 1.9 84
twice and the geology out there, which was a big fold, an anticline that had been eroded, it had been eroded away, so it was pretty old. I believed that date.
So I got—we got dates all over, but most people did not believe them. At Sangiran, where most of the fossils have been found, I got dates of around 850,000 for Homo erectus, several Homo erectus that were found in one location there. 850,000. And, of course, immediately the anthropologists threw out the 1.9. That’s impossible. And they threw out 800,000 because Jack and I had dated a sample that Von Koenigswald had sent us. Van Koenigswald is a famous anthropologist, had sent us a sample and we got 500,000 for it. Well, I found out later that it’s fifty miles from the nearest fossil hominid. You can’t do that. So I don’t know what he was thinking, but you see, that’s the difference between an anthropologist and—a formation one place is not necessarily, even though it looks the same, the same as another formation someplace else.
So my dates weren’t believed and I understood why—because anthropologists believed, firmly believed, that man didn’t get out of Africa until he could make tools, hand axes, and didn’t get to Europe until not more than 300,000 or 400,000 years ago. Do you know that [Richard Kline?]—oh, by the way, we went back. I knew we had to go back.
Swent: Wasn’t there a question about where actually where—
Curtis: Oh, the Mojokerto child, yes. There’s a question about that.
Swent: —bones had been found?
Curtis: Well, it had been described by Von Koenigswald for—well, he was one that didn’t find it, but the sample ended up in his hands. A man named—begins with “a.” I have a nice letter of his. On short notice, I’m just not doing well today.
Swent: That’s okay. We can always fill in.
Curtis: Von Koenigswald had been at the site and the skull was found in a rhyolite tuff. Now that rhyolite tuff—
Swent: You could date that.
Curtis: —which I had collected and—dated that very tuff. There is only one rhyolite tuff at Mojokerto. There aren’t a bunch of them. There’s just one, and it ranges from oh, up to four feet thick down to a little layer like this. But if it came out of that, it’s all of one age, so it doesn’t matter if you know precisely from where it came, it came out of the tuff. And how do we know that it—since the skull is all clean that the—beautiful little skull, just beautiful. Well, when we went back, when Carl and I went back—by the way, Von Koenigswald, before he died, sent this fossil back to his friend Jacob, so we have the very fossil itself, not a cast. And we looked at that. “What is this black stuff on here?” we asked. And this was the first time I’d seen it. Jacob said, “We don’t know, but there are stains on some of these things.” Well, Carl looked at me and he said, “Do you have your knife?” I usually have a little knife and a hand lens, so I took it off and handed it to him. And without asking permission or anything, he just dug in to where the—you know, where the backbone goes into the skull. Anyway, he dug through the 85
foramen magnum and what does he dig out? Pumice tuff. So we know that this thing was deposited at a time when its cranial cavity was empty and—which means shortly after it died and it got filled with the same ash that it was buried in.
So, now here’s the difference. My dates 1.9 with plus or minus twenty-five percent. When we redated it, Carl’s dates were 1.81 plus or minus four percent. Excuse me— plus or minus .04, not percent. Plus or minus .04, or forty thousand years, which would—
Swent: That’s 1.8 million.
Curtis: Yes. It would make it—it could be slightly older or slightly younger. And we didn’t do it just once. He has several dates. They all came out at 1.81. Now having done that and publishing all of this, Richard Kline at Stanford has ridiculed our dates, and at a meeting, he got up and he said, “Well, I have seen no evidence of a hominid in Europe or Asia older than 500—.” Oh, by the way, lots of things have been published, different idiots have published decrying our dates. Before that, my dates to begin with, and then ours since. And he said, “I have seen no evidence—in this meeting—of man being out of Africa earlier than 500,000 years.” So I got up and I quizzed him and I said, “Richard, you’ve read our paper?” “Yes,” he said, “but those dates will need to be checked.” I said, “Look, we’ve checked them with paleomag—.” Who was going to check them? “We’ve checked them by dating two minerals. Which former student of mine is going to do it? There’s nobody else can do it as well. I’m proud of what we do.” So he then brings out his second edition of his book on anthropology and in it, he has repeated the same nonsensical statement. This was just last year, 2003, in the spring that he published it, “—no evidence of hominids older than 500,000 years has been found in Europe.” Before his second edition had come out remains of two Homo erectus had been found in Europe, in Spain in a rock debris-filled cavern exposed in a railroad cut about 200 km north of Madrid, and the other somewhere in Italy—I forget just where—a Homo erectus skull was found together with a vertebrate fauna that had been dated elsewhere at about a million years. The bones in the Spanish deposit lay below the Bruhns- Matuyama paleomagnetic boundary dated at several places with lava at close to 780,000 years.
So when I last saw Klein and asked him about this he said—this was at a party at the Getty’s where I brought this up, asking, “What do you say about this Spanish material, Richard?” And he replied, “Well, that needs to be checked, too, Garniss.”
“That paleomagnetic boundary work they did has been published. I’ve read their paper. That’s very good work, they obtained magnetic data several places below that boundary, all of them reversed. Do you understand anything about obtaining paleomagnetic data?” No reply. I started to explain further and saw that it would be hopeless, so I said, “The grains of iron bearing sand, as they settle, are like tiny magnets and become aligned like compass needles with the magnetic field of the earth. Gradually they become cemented with, in this case, calcium carbonate, and become fixed into place. Measuring the average orientation of these magnetic grains is fairly simple. All one has to do is collect samples of the cemented sand, marking their orientation on them, and run them through a magnetometer. It takes care, yes, but it is easy to do, but you have to take many samples, which they did, and all showed reverse polarity. What they don’t know about them is which reversal they found. They assumed it was the Bruhns-Matuyama, that 86
being the youngest magnetic reversal. It could be an older reversal, which you probably would like even less.” He turned around and walked away.
Now, all of this was subsequent to the finding of fossil hominid Homo ergaster skulls at Dmanisi in Georgia. This locality is between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Those were first dated rather crudely at 1.7 million years. Carl was invited to go there with Susan Anton, who’s an anthropologist, and now his wife.
Swent: Susan Anton?
Curtis: Susan Anton, just a wonderful girl. She got a Ph.D. here with Tim White at Berkeley. They’re working together. She’s in anthro there at Rutgers and he’s in geology, Carl is. He left here. He couldn’t get along with Paul Renne. Susan first went to Dmanisi, so then they invited Carl to go. Now, those deposits in Dmanisi are right on top of a lava flow, which had been crudely dated at 1.7. We dated it and he gets 1.80, I think, for the lava flow, good dates. The skulls, the two that they found there before all this talk with Richard Kline, those were found and he wouldn’t believe the 1.7 because it was a crude date. Now, those two have been very carefully dated—I haven’t had a chance—. Everybody’s believing those dates now and Richard’s left holding a sack of stupidity. So just, you may have seen, just in the last month, they’ve found another skull, which has made a lot of news.
Swent: Down in Chad?
Curtis: No, not Chad. This one at Dmanisi. Now, the interesting thing about this, you see, I am saying, and have said, that man got out before 2 million years ago because Homo erectus doesn’t appear in Africa until 1.78 million years, the only physical date. There’s some evidence that some beds lower than that date, which you guess the date, is probably older than 1.78, but you don’t know how much, so you may guess that it’s 1.8. But he suddenly appears. Where? Right where Homo habilis, from which he’s supposed to have evolved, has been found in several places. He appears on the scene, 1.8 million years ago, just as in Java. And at Dmanisi the same thing, but the Dmanisi fossils are much, much smaller. So I have said that Australopithicus got out of Africa much earlier than 1.8 million years ago and evolved outside Africa into Homo erectus, and that some people want to call these at Dmanisi Homo ergaster and have come out of Africa; Carl and Susan believe that. Others say that it’s just a variation on Homo erectus. They look almost exactly alike. Whatever. They got out of Africa earlier than the dates that we’re getting and they diverged enough to give a high crown for ergaster, or erectus in Dmanisi, and a lower crown for the Homo erectus in Java. So they’ve been separated for some period of time, how long, we don’t know. But it didn’t happen in Africa.
So, that is my thesis. When I tried to put that in our book with Roger Lewin, he would have none of it. And he says, “What’s your evidence? Where is the progenitor of Homo erectus?” I said, “Well, where is it in Africa? There are much better exposures. There are many more outcrops than you have in Asia, many more, and you haven’t found a predecessor that goes—habilis has short legs. We have almost an entire skeleton of habilis. It has to do a lot of changing before it becomes Homo erectus. Besides, they overlap right where—. So what happened to habilis? Well, of course Homo erectus ate it!” And somebody said to me, “Why do you say that they ate them?” “Well, we eat monkeys, don’t we?” A lot of people eat monkeys. I’m not calling them cannibals; they ate 87
whatever they could kill. They could kill habilis, it was much smaller. They were six feet tall, more powerful and habilis disappears right after they get there and spreads all over Africa. You find it from South Africa to north Af—up to Morocco.
Swent: Erectus?
Curtis: Homo erectus, excuse me.
Swent: No, you said that.
Curtis: Yes.
Swent: Erectus is the one that has survived. That’s—
Curtis: Yes. So if you want to call those in Africa ergaster, that’s fine with me, but that’s what we come from because once they were on the scene, you can talk about this bushy group of hominid looking things before that time, but once they’re on the scene, ain’t nothing left. Homo—Australopithecus is gone in South Africa, boisei’s gone, all of them. Almost all get wiped right out when erectus appears and for the next million years, we have nothing in Africa except erectus and a slow evolution of those.
Swent: You think erectus became sapiens?
Curtis: Oh, yes. I’m quite sure of that. We don’t have anything else. Well, it became not only sapiens, but became Neanderthal. They were separated, but the forebear of Neanderthal is Homo erectus. Yes, they find the Mauer skull dated about 400,000 years and they give a different name to that, but it’s clearly right in that Homo erectus line and advanced. They’ve now found that also in Spain, but it’s, as you would expect, it’s advanced. But I’m not an anthropologist so nobody’s going to listen to me.
Swent: You’re close to one, though, aren’t you? [chuckles]
Curtis: Anyhow, you’re getting hungry and it’s close to one o’clock now.
Swent: Oh, is it already? Okay, well, we’d better call it quite I guess.
Curtis: I’m trying to make up time here.
Swent: No, that’s good. Okay.
Curtis: Oh, anyhow, Roger Lewin wouldn’t let me put in our book that I thought something preceding Homo erectus left Africa,and erectus and ergaster evolve separately. I mean, from an intermediate one. Well, now people are beginning to talk about when did hominids get out of Africa? It’s an interesting concept.
Swent: What is it—I suppose you shouldn’t take time now, but I was wondering what’s it like writing a book with two other people? That’s sort of a—
Curtis: Well— 88
Swent: Takes a lot of negotiation, I imagine.
Curtis: Yes, it does. We let—Roger’s much more—
Swent: I should say, the book we’re talking about is Java Man and there were three authors. Swisher was the voice that was chosen to—
Curtis: Well, I put Swisher in there. He needed the—he’s been doing the recent work. And, of course, I’m the senior, and I could have been—taken that position, but I didn’t want that position. Roger Lewin was the one writing and I wanted him to build up Carl because I loved Carl and I loved Susan. I want them to get ahead. The fight that came about with Paul here— He’s just—but he is the most productive person we have here and we have two very productive people. Ken Ludwig is now the director.
Paul was the director. Paul became director before we had the big fight and the divorce from Institute of Human Origins in 1994. It was largely a matter of jealousy on Don Johanson’s part. He wanted—we were far more productive than he,and we were turning out lots and lots of papers. He and Bill Kimbel would get out and they—between them one paper a year or something. There was a lot of jealousy and it led to a number of other things. With the final—we were on the verge of a divorce for a long time, but the final straw was this. We gave a paper on our Java results at a Leakey meeting in the home of Kay Woods, the president of Leakey Foundation. She’s still president.
One of the people that wanted to be there that couldn’t was Phyllis Wattis. She gave money for the Hall of Man over there at Cal Academy [of Sciences] and she couldn’t come, or she didn’t want to come. She’s very deaf. So afterwards, she contacted us and said she would like to hear what we had to say about early man in Java. Well, at that time—now she was giving money, supporting anthropological research. And at that time, Don Johanson had made an appointment with her, to have lunch with her—no, an appointment with her, to meet with her the day following the meeting that Phyllis Wattis wanted with us at—and we—Kay Woods was there. Let’s see. Betty Howell was there and Barbara Newsom, three women, Carl, myself and Phyllis Wattis. We met at Chez Panisse. Well, Don just that happened that day to come in and he saw us eating there. He thought that we were seeing Phyllis Wattis to get—this is all in that book—to get money from her. All we were there was to tell her what she missed about our work in Java. We were not asking for money or anything. We had a rule that if somebody was applying for funds from some one person, that the other person couldn’t get it, but you better find out at first if that’s what we were doing. But he came up to the table and he looked at us and he stomped away. We were still talking when he came—when he finished lunch. And he came up again and looked at us. We all said, “Hi, Don.” He wouldn’t answer.
He goes back and he tells the—he calls a meeting. It just went from bad to worse. It’s all in that book Java Man. I wasn’t aware that Don was going to have this meeting, and I couldn’t have cared less anyhow because I wasn’t asking for money. And here I was brought on the carpet. Anyway, it led to an IHO board meeting in which the board took the vote. We (the BGC scientists) didn’t want to leave IHO, but the paleoanthropologists wanted us out, so Gordon Getty got up and he says, “I’m taking my money with me,” or words to that effect. He had been giving matchable 1 million dollars a year. If we got a million—if we could come up with a million elsewhere, he 89
would match it. There was a story there, because several years before I went over with Don to a meeting with Gordon and, again, I did the talking to him. He really gave that money because I was here and I’d been a friend of his for a long time. So this blowup was a very messy thing. It went to court, and first the judge kind of ruled in their favor, but we gave them some more evidence. We were willing to compromise and settle.
What they wanted, you see, was the equipment and they had nobody to run the equipment. Well, they thought they had with a fellow named Bob Walter who didn’t know how to run the mass-spectrometers. They broke with Bob Walter later, but he couldn’t have run the equipment. But they could sell it. Well, they couldn’t sell it for very much. A $300—$400,000 worth of—well, actually, probably we had closer to a million dollars in all our equipment. They might have gotten 100,000 for everything, but they needed the money. And of course, with Gordon pulling his millions out, they were in deep straights. The final ruling said, “Well, let’s compromise with them and pay them something.” And Gordon says, “No. We have a case here.” And he said, the night before the decision was made, he had almost agreed with us that we should pay them something and he says, “No. I’m going to stick it out and see what the judge says.” The judge ruled in our favor and we got everything.
So they moved out because our equipment was all down there in the basement. They went up to—well, they called it El Cerrito, but they were in Solano down by the REI area on Gilman, in an old abandoned—I think it had been making beer at one time. Then, they went from gradually bad to worse. They got one of Don’s schoolmates from Chicago where he graduated. He was a student of Clark Howell, who had graduated. One of Clark’s—as Clark said, “The worst student I ever had became chairman of the department at Tempe of Arizona State,” and invited Don and some of his cohorts to join the department there. That’s where they are now. Whether there’s still an Institute of Human Origin, I don’t know. But that’s what happened to them.
Swent: You’re still here, anyway. And your equipment is here in the basement of this same building.
Curtis: Yes. And since then, we’ve added more equipment to it and more people.
Swent: It’s a nice facility.
Curtis: After that, we got Ken Ludwig. He was with the U.S. Geological Survey at Colorado. He left before the big break up of the Survey because we gave him a nice offer. He is solid-source spectrometry in dating Uranium Series, which means that—. I don’t want to bore you too much, but with this, if you date the decay series of uranium you can, since the series is different from mass 235 down to lead 207, and from mass 238 down through eight decays to lead 206. Well, the rates are different. You can take any two intermediate decays—one from one series and one from another.
[Tape 8, Side B]
Curtis: It has to have a certain level of uranium (because the fewer atoms the less the accuracy in measuring ). It doesn’t take very much. But shells are good, carbonates are good. Stalactites and stalagmites and so—. They’re having a great time now, turning out U series dates from caliche cementing glacial cobbles and boulders in till deposits of—and 90
outwash deposits of the different Ice Ages. We’re finally getting some very good dates. So, anyway—.
Swent: How did your friendship with Gordon Getty come about?
Curtis: Well, that was through the Leakey Foundation. Joan Travis lives in Los Angeles and she had been supporting the Leakey Foundation, and at that time, Clark Howell told me that he’d belonged to the Leakey Foundation. He says, “There’s money there that you might need from time to time, money that Gordon Getty has put into the Leakey Foundation.” So I gave a couple of talks in Los Angeles. The president was down there. And I stayed at Joan Travis’ house. She broke with the Leakey Foundation when some idiot got in that just didn’t know how to manage anything. She supported Don Johanson, he was starting the Institute of Human Origins. Don hated the Leakey Foundation, the Leakey Foundation didn’t like Don any better. And so I met, at Joan Travis’, I met Gordon at a dinner party. I sat next to him and I didn’t know whom I was sitting next to, but I was talking about Olduvai Gorge and I’d talked that day about something. And he was asking interesting questions. It was only later that I found he was Gordon Getty.
So that began a friendship and when the presidency was—well, the whole organization was moved to San Francisco. Of course that was—Gordon had supported that and Kay Woods became president. They kicked out this other guy who did nothing for the organization. At one time, Richard Leakey wanted to take it over, but he wanted to move it to Africa. Well, nobody was going to give money to the Leakey Foundation— movie stars and so on—give money to the Leakey Foundation if they were in Africa. So that is one of the things that—oh, they said no to him and then so Richard pulled out his support of the Leakey Foundation.
But it’s had its ups and downs, but Gordon’s given it quite an endowment. I think 10 million bucks. And they do continue to get donations so they’re able to support a lot of research in anthropology and paleoanthropology. Not to very—some of the grants are $25,000, that’s about as big as they get, but many of these people working on—all they need is a little shoestring to support them. Digging out in Arizona for a summer, they don’t need very much. They have everything except the food and water. So they—and preparation of specimens costs a little. So they’ve been serving a very good purpose. Once Gordon found that I liked music and particularly Schubert. He loved Schubert and classical music and I encouraged him with his own compositions and we became closer. So I have not asked him for money—oh, just one small amount and then I never went through with it because I found the money elsewhere to support some people going to a conference. But I know that he has given—he has continued to support BGC, but we started out talking about Paul Renne.
I made him director when we were still with Institute of Human Origins and he continued on as director-president when we became BGC again. Then we developed our own bylaws and so on separate from Institute of Human Origins. But we began to— I was on his thesis committee, went out in the field with him. Was getting along fine with him as a graduate student, but he became, after taking over BGC from IHO, he became more and more obnoxious to me.
For one thing, Sharie was helping me a lot in those days and she was my principal assistant, Sharie Shute. Now, she had been—Al Deino had talked to her when she’d 91
gotten a degree—had taken courses from me, but had gotten a degree in—I think she has two degrees, but one was in librarianship here at Berkeley. But she liked geology and she liked rocks. She was working for George Brimhall over in the—then the Earth Science building. He didn’t need very much, about ten hours a week. She wanted a little bit more—she wanted the pin money a little more than she was getting there. Al Deino asked her, why don’t you come over here. We need somebody to crush rocks and you know how to—and to separate minerals. Well, she jumped at the chance. And she came over here and worked with us for quite a while, separating minerals and so I saw more and more of her. So, at the time of the break up with IHO, we had just—. Well, in 1990, we had been in Australia, at a conference, the International Conference on Geochronology and Isotope Geology. ICOG was the acronym. At that time, I didn’t know very much about the organization, but I asked Ian McDougall at Australia National University, I said, “Well, who directs this thing?” and so on. And he said, “Well, every meeting there’s a business meeting and we—somebody bids to get the next meeting.” And I said, “Well, it’s awfully late. I haven’t put anything in.” He said, “Well, just come to the meeting, and if you want to make a bid on it, do so.” So I did and the people that were there were China and Mexico and UCLA that wanted it. They were all prepared with slide shows and I had nothing. But UCLA had the best slide show and were going to—clearly, they were going to get it. I put up my hand and then I pulled it down and McDougall, who was chairing the session, said, “What—?” Well, the guy who was chairing it, maybe it wasn’t McDougall, said, “Well, Garniss, you put your hand up. What did you want to say?” And I said, “No—” He said, “Go ahead, say it.” “Well,” I said, “of all those slides that UCLA showed, the only one I recognized was that picture that they said was the moon over the building.” And I said, “I recognized it as the sun through the smog over the building.” The audience roared and when the vote came up, first we tied and China took away some of the votes, so that we were neck and neck with UCLA, but when China dropped out and we took another vote, we got the high vote from there. So we got the next meeting, which was to be 1994, every four years. Anyhow—
Swent: In San Francisco?
Curtis: No, right here. It was on campus that we were going to—. And Sharie was with us and Clem came down with her. They visited New Zealand afterwards, after the meeting. She was there, of course, going through all of this. She said, “I’ll take over organizing this conference. That’s what I like to do and I’ve done this before.” So she took over. And, of course, then she worked very closely with me and she just was so good. She knew just who to go to and she knew enough people on campus. She knew the Dean of Engineering, Electrical Engineering, who is now the provost, Paul Gray. She got space for talks and symposia. Got them all over the campus and tied up the big auditorium down there a—not—?
Swent: Bechtel? The Bechtel Laboratory, maybe?
Curtis: No.
Swent: Wheeler? Wheeler? There’s a—
Curtis: We had Wheeler. 92
Swent: There’s a laboratory in there.
Curtis: That was where the—what do you call it? Talks of each major session has a something—. Anyhow—
Swent: Plenary?
Curtis: Plenary talks were given at Wheeler. You’ll have exhibits of different people have different things to sell, electronics, plumbing and all that sort of stuff for isotope work. So we got the student union auditorium and Zellerbach for that. So she handled all of this. She stayed with me because we had lots of work to do. Well, that was when she used that desk to—. But we were kicked out of here altogether to begin with and we had to move everything. All our offices were closed by then, the day after this meeting. And we had to get permission to come back and get all of our stuff out of here in one single day. We leased some more space across the hall from the Church Divinity School and moved into that while the whole case was being fought and lost by IHO.
Swent: It sounds as if things are in good shape now, then.
Curtis: There in pretty good shape now, yes. Ken’s doing a wonderful job.
Swent: Well, I think perhaps we should stop, don’t you.
Curtis: Oh, has that been going?
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: Oh, my God. Okay. Well, I don’t know that I want that in there. I thought I was giving you some post—
Swent: Well, you can change it later. [Let me see?]—
[End of Interview] 93
Session 4: August 22, 2002
[Begin Tape 8, Side A.]
Swent: I think we’re in business. Let me just check one more thing. I believe we’re all set. Now, I had one question: we have not talked about, and I don’t even know how it’s pronounced, the Laetoli?
Curtis: Oh, Laetoli.
Swent: Did you actually see those footprints?
Curtis: Oh yes, sure.
Swent: You did? That must have been a thrill.
Curtis: But I wasn’t the first to see them. Do you know, the interesting thing there was, I went there before the footprints were found. There are footprints of all kinds of animals all over the place. There are tracks that indicate that they were walking from one side of a shallow lake, sort of a mud flat, to the other side. They followed. There are others that were antelope and small-footed things, I couldn’t tell what they were, probably large rodents, wandering around in other directions, just covered with them. It covers the exposure of this hard, which was volcanic ash deposited under water in a lake, flat lying. It must cover something like half an acre. The stream coming down had removed other sediments above it that were softer, so that they were stripped off uniformly across the top leaving this big, maybe half acre of material, which was wet and probably seasonally inundated. So the animals would cross it as it began to dry up. I didn’t go up this little stream canyon very far, under the trees, and that was my mistake or I would have seen those footprints. I looked all over but I didn’t look carefully enough.
I was there with a graduate student, Mark Monahan. He was an interesting character. He did a Ph.D. with me. That wasn’t the work he was doing at that time, however, we collected samples together. I’ll just go on with Mark. Mark had been in Africa before— let’s see, what was the reason he was in Africa? With somebody doing some kind of research on the, I think more of an anthropological research than— At that time he wasn’t interested in the geology that he became later interested in. He had learned, he is very good with languages, he had learned Swahili. He had picked up, well that was principally what he needed, but he had picked up a little from the different tribes that he was associated with, about two years before he worked with me.
At that time we were in Masai country and I recall he spoke Swahili well enough that he could crack jokes in it with people. There was a Masai standing up there watching his cattle as they do, spear in hand and just standing there. Mark goes up to him, cattle were all over the place, and Mark goes up to him and in Swahili starts talking. Well pretty soon they were both laughing together and, typical Monahan, he’s cracking jokes and they’re talking away. I come up and to Mark’s surprise the man turns to me and in perfect English says, “How do you do, Bwana? What brings you here?” He had studied at Cambridge. A lot of them do this. Now his father was a tribal chief and they owned those cattle. Of course the tribe uses the blood. They cut them in the neck and take out the blood, and they mix it with some kind of flour or ground up, whatever they do, as 94
one of their principal staples. In talking with him for about an hour we found out that each of these cows here that he has are worth close to $1,000 American, and he had several hundred cows. But they are not interested in selling those to the British or to the other tribes Well, their big enemy is the tribe that’s in power. Not Arap Moi, the President-Dictator but someone else. He came from a different tribe and I’ll say something about him later.
Swent: You were in Kenya and also in Tanzania.
Curtis: Yes. There are two ways to get to both Laetoli, this is called the Laetolil Beds but Laetoli is this area, where the Masai have big headquarters. There are different parts of that tribe. It’s about forty kilometers from Olduvai Gorge.
Swent: Which is actually in Tanzania, isn’t it?
Curtis: Yes. Wait, this is in Tanzania too. You’re right close to the boarder. You drive south to the border and pass through the border to Arusha. Then you come westward up over the Ngorongoro crater rim and down into the faulted south end of the Serengeti Plain. Laetolil is, or Laetoli as they now call it; it used to be called Laetolil and they renamed the stratigraphy based on the old names. We call them the Laetolil Beds because that’s published. The Laetoli is a little south and west of Olduvai. It’s a very rough road to get to.
Swent: I was there about 1994, I think.
Curtis: You were there?
Swent: Yes, on a trip.
Curtis: Oh wonderful. And you went out to Laetoli, well, to the area?
Swent: Olduvai. I don’t think we got to Laetoli but we were in the Masai Mara and Olduvai, Ngorongoro and those places.
Curtis: You probably didn’t. There’s not much to attract you there. After the footprints were found they— I didn’t go back for a couple of years after that but I sent Bob Drake, who I haven’t spoken to you about—
Swent: Right. We need to talk more about him.
Curtis: Yes. He went back. We had dated the beds in which the tuff, it’s called the Footprint Tuff now, there was a sequence of things that we— Well, I’ll go into that a little later.
Swent: I’m just thinking that there was no question where the footprints were as they were with some of these bones.
Curtis: No question where they were and no question about—
Swent: They were in the ash. 95
Curtis: There are questions about my dates and I’ll tell you those. We got a nice sequence of dates. They all fell in the right order: younger above footprint tuff, older below. But I’ll tell you, there’s a technical problem here that I want to try and resolve. So with Monahan, one of my graduate students, he went on to get a Ph.D. here. He went to the University of Chicago and he stayed there a couple of years. There were some people who didn’t like him, so he didn’t get— He’s very outspoken, he’s jovial, he can be sarcastic and he’s completely independent. He won’t do what you— They wanted him to publish something some way and he said, “That is not my interest,” so he didn’t get tenure. He went to a boys’ school first, no. He moved on to Purdue—in isotope work. They were happy with what he was doing but he wasn’t happy with what he was doing. He just felt that he needed to move on. He wanted to teach younger people so he got a job in a private boys’ school. I just talked to him last year and he said, “I’m getting bored Garniss. I’ve got to move on. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve had a lot of fun here but I’ve just got to find something else.”
Well, he was married to a very nice woman named Pat. Mark was a big tall handsome guy, six-four or five and women were greatly attracted to him. He loved his wife but that marriage finally broke up and I’m awfully sorry about that. He said, “Garniss, I really shouldn’t have married.” But he has two fine boys, Brendan and Scott, I think is the other one. It just didn’t work out. Brendan now, he’s finished college. Anyway, that’s Mark Monahan and I love him, very much. He was a great help to me in the lab, in the field, and always, always in good spirits with me. That’s one of the nice things about—
Swent: That’s very important when you’re out in places like that. Personalities are very important.
Curtis: Yes. Oh, camping, you can make a mistake and get somebody that just ruins the whole situation, because it’s not comfortable, a lot of it. You may have a tent or you may not sometimes. Most of the time we always had tents and we put them up when we were camping out of the car in Africa, or we were going to some place where there were tents. I remember, I guess it was the first time I went to Laetolil, I rented a car in Nairobi and drove south toward Arusha. This was the time that Tanzania and Kenya were not getting along at all. On the way I picked up, there were two girls and they were just outside Nairobi and it was quite clear they were heading south. Well, that’s a couple hundred miles, so I gave them a ride. They had been traveling. The two of them had spent a year in the back woods of India, way out in a little village, living with the—
Swent: These were not Kenyan?
Curtis: No, no, these were Caucasians. I should have said. These were Americans. They had somehow found a tribe that they were going to spend a year with just near the border. I forget whether it was over the border or— No, no, they got out before I got to the border. I had problems at the border, which is part of the story I’m about to tell. They knew where they were going and I said, “Aren’t you worried about—?” “No. We get along very well. We know how to meet these people.” They were going out in the hill country all by themselves to a tribe and God knows what— Anyhow, there they were. Then after that they were going to come back to America. But they said, “We love this thing, what we’re doing, and we may end up doing this the rest of our lives.” 96
So I got to the border and because of the enmity at that time I had to, and I had a rental car, I had to answer all these questions about the car. Well I couldn’t find the serial number on the motor any place or in the car, and I worked on that for over an hour. It has to be there, this is the law, but there was no serial number. Finally it hit me. In places like this nobody is ever going to check that number. If I couldn’t find it, they couldn’t find it. They would ask me where it was and I’d pretend ignorance that I got it back at the— So I just wrote out a number and I went through. This got me to in the vicinity of Laetoli. Now, there’s no village there. The main Masai village is on the slopes of a mountain called Sadaman and that’s way away from where the excavations that had started way back— I think the Leakeys had been there before the war. I had even seen some material, in Louis’ office (some biotite that they showed me but not enough to date and didn’t know where it came from) in their lab back at the Coryndon Museum, which was headed at that time by Louis.
I had a verbal description of how to get to the camp, which was to go to the top of a hill, which was the road there and then turn left. Down about a mile or so off of this hill, I would find the camp. Well, there were all kinds of roads because they had been driving all over the place with their Land Rovers. I took what I thought to be the one that they described and went down to the end. Nothing in sight whatsoever and it was getting dark. There was no more time to check out anymore roads so I went back to the top of the hill and said, “I’ll look for it in the morning.”
So I slept in the car and pretty soon I heard noises. I looked out with my flashlight and I was surrounded by zebra and wildebeest. Well, fine. A little later, more noises. I looked out and there was an elephant, not twenty feet away from me. There was grass up there and they were eating grass. I heard lions in the night not very far from me. They rumble sometimes. So my sleep, alternately, I was awake and I’d flash my light and I saw these— It was a wonderful experience. A pack of hyena went by one time and that got all of the animals out of there. Finally in the early morning I got some sleep and when the sun came up I realized now, I would go back down where I almost was certain Mary Leakey and her group would be, and look around. Well, now there was light. I went down to right where I was and if I had looked back up under some trees I would have seen them. There they were, so I found them.
That was my first visit there. Then after the footprints, a couple days after that, I went back. Mark had been working with Richard Hay. Have you heard of Richard Hay?
Swent: Yes, you had mentioned him.
Curtis: I’ll get to him in just a minute.
Swent: Was he another of your graduate students?
Curtis: No, he was not. He was a colleague at Olduvai and he was there studying the stratigraphy with Mark. He had to leave; I forget what happened. He was going to wait until I came but he had to leave. So Mark was there and we immediately, since Mark had been working with Richard Hay, knew all the stratigraphy, we collected samples for dating right away. 97
I’ll just tell you one more anecdote about Mark. During that particular trip— First I have to explain to you— I told you about the dates that were in nice sequence. These were a type of biotite that’s called phlogopite. It’s high in magnesium and has potassium in it. What I observed when looking at these, that in the coarser pieces of fragments of—see, the strata are not just volcanic ashes, there were volcanic mud flows bringing down big blocks from the volcano Sadaman. These blocks were very coarsely crystalline, big crystals. Some of the phlogopite, which is a form of biotite, are two inches or more in diameter, but all the other crystals are large also. Now that tells you that these rocks cooled slowly before being extruded, at a constant temperature so that the crystals could grow very large before they were ejected or broken up when there were eruptions of something else, from the sides of the conduit. So this worried me. You’ve had geologic background, so you’d recognize this.
Swent: A little.
Curtis: Pegmatites. And the crystals can be, some of the mica crystals, can be several feet in diameter, and the feldspars can be fifty feet long. The beryl crystals can be huge, where they get beryllium. But we had done enough work to know that in this final phase of crystallization where all the last residue from the crystallization of the magma, particularly the volatile materials, had collected to allow in this high—either vapor or water out of which they were growing—this last residue that, the crystals that we had dated from pegmatites gave us ages that were much too old. They had excess argon in them, argon that during the crystallization had collected in this last residue in which pegmatites—
So I was suspicious of these large crystals that were like small pegmatite things, much larger than, say, what you normally see in granite, much, much larger, and this isn’t granite. This was a magnesium rich magma. So I wanted to see the source and decided to go with Mark up the slopes of Sadaman, and see if we could see some outcrops of the rocks that hadn’t been blown out, but where lava flows. It’s not a very high mountain and we would park at the base and hike up three or four miles toward the summit. So we parked outside of Masai Village, one of the important villages. These are mud huts, you’ve seen them, and you can’t imagine anybody living in them. If you ever stuck your head in one and took a breath you would just—
There was a man tending to a couple of goats, or something. Anyway he was standing so Mark told him what we were going to do and we started up the hill. We got up there about a half a mile—we left the car down at the bottom—and Mark said, “You know, I have a funny feeling. That man didn’t like me, I know that, didn’t like us, didn’t want us there that close to the village. He didn’t say so but they never will. I think we better go back.” It’s fortunate that we did because he had started a fire in the grass around the outside of the village, which is something that they often do, and that fire was coming right to the car and was about twenty feet from our wheels. He paid no attention to that; he knew exactly what would happen. So we just got into the car and—this was not a huge fire; it was smoldering and coming along—drove through it and off, and waved to him. He didn’t wave back and out we got. When you have somebody that is experienced, and Mark was experienced enough to realize that this was a dangerous thing. We would have come back, miles from any place, no tires left, sitting there on its rims. So that is Mark Monahan. It’s always good to have somebody that’s experienced with you. 98
I did other things with Mark, too. On another trip we went up to Tugan Hills near Lake Barenga, and I collected samples with Kay Behrensmeyer. Do you know of Kay Behensmeyer?
Swent: The KBS Tuff.
Curtis: Oh yes, sure, the KBS Tuff.
Swent: She was there at that time?
Curtis: She was there. I learned a lot from her. She took a Polaroid camera with her and at every outcrop where she collected anything—she was an anthropologist really, but with a good geology background—she would take a picture with the outcrop, and with a ball point pen draw right on the photograph of where she had obtained the sample that she was collecting for whatever reason. That’s a wonderful way of—for a long time I tried doing that until I broke my Polaroid and I haven’t replaced it since. But then I was getting out of that work, so I didn’t. So we did that together. Anyhow, Mark was one of my students, not my first, and I won’t go into all of the students, but one of the more remarkable students.
My first student was an Indian from India named Deb Chandra; Deb is David. His associates here at Berkeley—this would have been ’51 or ‘52— So his associates here at Berkeley always called him Dave and I called him Deb. I put him on a thesis in the Sierra of which he did a great job on the Paleozoic rocks up near Auburn. He did a very fine job but the first draft of his thesis was absolutely terrible. I said, “You know, this is awful. The organization is poor.” I outlined to him this and I told him some things that he could follow the organization, people that had organized things very well, geologically. The master of that would have been Howel Williams, in the department. “Read some of his stuff.” But since this was largely sedimentary and I forget now— whom I referred him to—but somebody who wrote very well, at least I thought they wrote very well. So Deb came back then with a polished thesis, beautiful thesis. He went back to India with the geological Survey, rose up to the top of the Survey, and the last time I saw him, which was at least twenty years ago—he came here to the states— he was high mucky-muck and doing very well, although he was out of the Survey. He was with some organization dealing with natural resources or something, I forget. But anyway, very fine guy.
Well, I’ll go on. I told you about Mark, let’s see, he was outstanding. You wanted me to get to Bob Drake but I think I’d better get—
Swent: And Frank Brown was another one.
Curtis: Frank Brown started with me—he was going to be working up in the Omo area of southern Ethiopia, right near the border, with Clark Howell. It’s the deltaic formations of the Omo River, which go back millions of years. All of this is fault country. This is the Rift Valley and things change, so the lake would expand and contract, the river—the outlet from that lake at one time went all the way back and got into the Nile. The reason they know that is because in the deposits there are Nile perch; these huge fish, and the only place they could come from was out of the Nile. 99
[Tape 8, Side B]
Curtis: Frank Brown was the geologist with Clark Howell and he did a very fine job. Lots of volcanic ashes in the stratigraphy suitable for dating. Unfortunately it was a poor place for finding hominid fossils—oh yes, hominid material was present but usually not in whole or connected bone—these were single or broken bones that had been carried for miles—teeth, parts of skulls, bones and so on. This was the unfortunate thing with Clark’s camp location; he was at the right time but the wrong place. That delta, from the ancient Omo River to the east and south, in Koobi Fora, on the east side of Lake Turkana, is where the big finds were made later by Richard Leakey’s group. Now, I started out being Frank’s thesis advisor but I think I had a project going in Europe. I had a sabbatical leave and I wasn’t going to be able to give him the attention that he needed. I couldn’t get out there with him so I turned it over to a colleague. A petrologist, Ian Carmichel, from England.
Swent: Not Dalrymple?
Curtis: I was very close to Frank and I loved him. One of the things I did with Frank—the Burg Wartenstein under Wenner Gren was a castle that Wenner Gren bought in southern Austria. They had these annual meetings of anthropologists, all kinds of anthropology: social anthropology, physical anthropology, paleoanthropology. One of these two that I went to, Frank was there with Clark Howell. Clark Howell is a very close friend. He was going to spend another summer with Clark. After the meeting at Burg Wartenstein they were going out into the field again so I taped—I knew that Frank liked classical music—so I taped about 100 records for him and put the tape recordings in a big box, most of these being chamber music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms. He loved that. Oh yes, I gave him a tape recorder player so that he could play them, and for years afterwards I got people that were at that camp telling me—I announced what the piece was that they were going to hear because I didn’t make a list of them, and they knew my voice from the tape recordings that Frank played every night. At the end of that summer when he went back to Nairobi to leave, somebody broke into his car and stole the whole kit and caboodle. But anyway, it served its purpose. They had a lot of fun with those.No, I’m getting to Dalrymple. Anyway, while I stayed on Frank Brown’s thesis committee, I gave up being the principal advisor on his thesis.
Frank is a great, great person. He set up a Potassium-Argon lab at Utah where he got a job, and he dated and collected and—then he got into trace elements. Now trace elements are the rare elements in a magma, and they differ from magma to magma. So in a volcanic ash, a stratum, they’re like fingerprints. You may find that ash someplace else in an entirely different context, but the trace elements of, oh of such things as yttrium and samarium and zirconium; there are a bunch that they use—they can identify. You don’t have to date the tuff; you can identify the tuff. This way they were able to identify tuffs from cores out in the Red Sea, identify them and correlate them with some of the volcanic ashes in Ethiopia. They spread that far. So he has done a great job with the stratigraphy at Koobi Fora, which I haven’t talked very much about, and I should get into that. This was post, of course, post thesis. His thesis was on this stratigraphy and he dated all of his rocks in my lab at Berkeley at the time, Potassium- Argon. Those dates, even doing them over again with Argon-40/Argon-39, they’ve held up very, very well. 100
Swent: I wanted to ask something and maybe this is a good time to put it in: I gather that some of these things were possible because of new technology, new knowledge. Why could this be done now and not before?
Curtis: Well, yes. There are various things. At the time we first dated rocks there, Argon-40/ Argon-39 had not—well, Argon/Argon was invented by a crippled man whom I had thought was just very fine, at New York, at Brookehaven National Lab. He got the idea—well, somebody at Yale, who unfortunately died, came up with thinking about trying to do the dating without having to separate potassium and measure it independently from argon. Now those people with solid source spectrometers, like Wasserberg at Cal Tech, would make two separate measurements. This is very inconvenient, and they weren’t doing much better than we were with flame photometry, to measure the potassium. That is a wet chemical system in which you measure the potassium from the intensity of the ionized— remember that if you drop salt in the flame—you get a yellow color. If you drop potassium you get a purplish red flame.
With an electrometer you can measure the intensity and you can set up standards, and so you can measure the potassium to a percent, plus or minus, and even better than that sometimes. Well, it takes a long time to put that all together. [I’ll think of his name, this crippled guy, hunchback- (need to edit name in)] He got the idea of irradiating the samples and converting some of the potassium in the sample to argon, K39, by neutron activation. You have to have a facility for that. At one time we had one on the campus, for neutron activation. It was used widely here. Then the city of Berkeley put up a big howl, that they didn’t want any radioactive material around the city. The university said, “Well this is costing us a lot of money. It’s not paying for itself with research funds. We’re going to remove it.” Of course, I think they did under the pressure but they wouldn’t admit that. That stopped us from getting our sample crystals of whatever had the potassium in it, having them irradiated. We had to find someplace else. Meantime though, this fellow died, at Brookhaven. We knew what he was doing and it looked very promising but the person who took it over, and he was a fellow I first met at Oxford— [Derek York] What’s his name? You gave me his name, at Canada, at Toronto.
Swent: Dalrymple?
Curtis: No. I’ll think of his name and I’ll put it in.
Swent: I have a list of names but I can’t think of one in Canada.
Curtis: No, but he’s at Toronto, I think he’s retired now.
Swent: Ron Clark, but he was South Africa.
Curtis: No, he was South Africa. No, no. I should have thought of this ahead of time.
Swent: No, no, it’s okay. Let’s see, Cerling, Cerling was here? Bassil Cook.
Curtis: No, that’s Africa too. He’s now living up in Canada. A wonderful guy.
Swent: Let’s see. I’m just looking down this list, and I don’t see anyone who looks like him. John Reynolds? 101
Curtis: No, just leave a blank. No, John Reynolds was here on campus.
Swent: Well, we’ll get it later.
Curtis: John Reynolds was one of my mentors here, and my only mentor in Potassium-Argon. Well, Derek York took over this, and he said, “That sounds interesting.” He didn’t have very good equipment up there, but anyway, he tried this and it worked beautifully; converting one of the isotopes of potassium into argon and measuring the argon at the same time you measure the argon mass 40, from the decay of Potassium-40. This was converting Potassium-39 to Argon-39 by neutron activation. The Argon-39 is not a natural isotope; it has a very short half-life. If there were any formed when the earth and the planets were formed, it long since decayed away. So we essentially just have those two isotopes of potassium, 40 and 39, and the natural argon, 36 and 40, to which 40 has been added by decay of 40 in minerals in the earth, and liberated from the minerals when the rocks are metamorphosed, depressed down deeply and melted, and that liberates a lot of argon. So the argon in the atmosphere, mass 40—to begin with the mass 40 was less than 36; the way it is on the sun, the way we find it in some meteorites that don’t have any potassium in them. The Argon-40 now exceeds the Argon-36 by a factor of around 295, which is what we use.
Anyhow, getting back to the Argon/Argon. I’ve almost got his name, who came out with this. One of my former students, Brent Dalrymple—I haven’t talked about him yet, and Marvin Lanphere—immediately got on track of doing the Argon/Argon. We were late to do that. We stayed with K-Ar for a couple of years; we stayed with Potassium-Argon. Well, I was intellectually lazy. I knew I was going to retire and I was going to have to give up the lab, because the space was needed. I haven’t talked about Bob Drake yet. I was going to move the lab over here (to IHO) so it wasn’t until we got over here that we immediately got into argon and argon work. But that was a fabulous—other people got into it long before we did. I went up to Canada and saw—saw his lab and Derek's.
Swent: Where was it?
Curtis: At Toronto. I visited him and I asked if I could send a grad student up and spend—
Swent: Was this at a university there or the government—?
Curtis: Yes, at the university. He was in physics, not geology. He knows nothing about geology at all, which is unfortunate. This again, the nice thing of having the physical background and the geologic, to apply a tool of this kind.
Swent: You really became a physicist along the way, didn’t you?
Curtis: Yes, you had to get into physics and chemistry so, of course, engineering training had me taking physics and chemistry.
So, one, we got over here, but I’ll get on to that later. You wanted my graduate students. Let’s go back to, not Bob Drake, but to Brent Dalrymple, who did a thesis with me. This was in the Sierra Nevada and he was concerned with a lot of things. The Sierra is up there now; it wasn’t always up. It has been rising with the development of the Basin and 102
Range Province, which from the Sierra to the Wasatch Mountains, has been pulling apart as it rises. As the whole area has been rising, it has been pulling apart. When did it start rising? When did the Sierra go from low hilly country? Once it was a series of volcanoes; it was a volcanic arc in Cretaceous time, volcanoes all along the way. The granites that we find now, exposed, were some of the magma chambers for those volcanoes. But it was reduced to a very low surface by Paleocene time; 65,000,000 years ago it was very low.
The gold gravels that first brought the gold rush here in ’48—it was gold out of those gravels that made the news. They hadn’t found the mother load yet, the veins. Well, that was all on a fairly low typography and we traced the old river, the different rivers, winding down the Sierra with the gravels in them. If you’ve gone up to—maybe you’ve seen more than—having come from geological relatives, you’ve seen some of those gravels: different old hydraulic pits, very fascinating things. So those were deposited on a fairly low surface. The weathering was intense because when you look at those gravels, they’re almost all quartzite, or metamorphic rocks of high stability, and the others have all been eroded away. And in fact, during early Eocene time the climate was subtropical. You’ve heard of laterites?
Swent: Yes. In the tropics mostly, aren’t they?
Curtis: They’re tropical, yes. Well, there were big laterites on top of the Eocene surface. There are little pieces, here and there, left of those laterites, and the leaves that are found inter- bedded in some of the gravels in the finer grained layers, are figs and subtropical big- leafed plants. Anyhow, did the Sierra come up slowly and when did it start and so on? We have out in the Basin and Range areas in Miocene time where the fauna was very much like the African fauna, of large animals, and very abundant. There has to have been lots of food out there for them, grasses and other things—and carnivores, and so on—the Miocene. So I put Brent on to seeing if he could do it by dating different volcanic rocks, and he did a very fine job. Now I think I may have told you this, he was the first of my students which—I was tired of these 300 page theses that nobody ever looks at, so I said to Brent— He worked in the lab with me, he was a field assistant in summer camp with me, he worked in the lab with me, and with Jack—Jack and I and Brent.
Swent: Jack Evernden?
Curtis: Jack Evernden. I said to Brent, “I don’t want a big thesis. I want just three publishable papers and if you can show me that they have been accepted for publication, they don’t have to be out when you get finished.” Well he had two finished and the journal arrived just the day before getting his thesis. Anyhow, so he made it. This was so much better. He was a fine student.
Evernden wanted him to set up a lab in Geneva, in Switzerland, where a fellow had come and visited us, and he was impressed and he said, “I’ll get the money. We’ll set up a lab like yours in Geneva.” Brent was going to go over there and set the lab up. Well, Jack said to Brent, “Just get the stuff ordered so you can move quickly,” and Brent said, “What am I going to use for money?” He said, “Just order it. The money will come before the equipment does.” Brent didn’t like that. 103
Meantime, Alan Cox and Dick Dole, former students from Berkeley, wonderful people—they were in paleomagnetism; they were students of Verhoogen. Dick Dole had first taken a job at MIT and he did not get along with the head of the situation there, who is still alive by the way, selling real estate in Florida. [laughter] Dick Dole was a great guy. So he left and came and joined the Survey. Alan Cox went to the Survey. They got together; they both had worked in paleomagnetism with Verhoogen. This was at a time when we didn’t know if these reversals that we saw in rocks—we had spin magnetometers to measure the magnetism and the orientation and everything—well we didn’t know that the reversals that we saw were owing to the chemistry of the rock or were local in some way, or were worldwide. They wanted to collect rocks from around the world, at critical points, and see if they could do this. Well, they needed somebody to date rocks, so they came to me and said, “Can you do these?” I said, “I’ll take the samples but Jack is the one that is giving the priorities. I’ll tell him that we have them.” Well I told Jack that we had these rocks from Alan Cox. He didn’t listen to me; that was typical of Jack. When I’d complain he’d say, “Stay with me Garniss. I know where we’re going.” So Alan said, independently to Brent, “You know, we need somebody to just run our samples.”
They had a dating lab; a national lab by a man named Goldich, who died fairly recently, Goldich I think his name is—a very fine guy, but there were too many people that wanted dates. So finally Cox and Dick Dole were able to push through with the Survey to get money to set up a separate lab independently of the USGS, to do only dates for this vast number of rocks that were going to be collected from around the world. And, of course, Brent said, “If the money comes from Geneva, I have committed myself to go there. But the money isn’t here yet so I’m just going to say that I’ll join you.” So he did and he set up a lab at the USGS. This infuriated Jack Evernden when he heard that Brent had done this. So I said to him, “If you think the money is coming, Brent didn’t think so.” He said, “That SOB, he’s got no guts. Here was an opportunity to go to Europe and set up a lab and this would have given him far more fame for advancement than going to the Survey.” But Brent went ahead and set up the lab, stayed with USGS, and did just a beautiful job. Oh, I said to Evernden, “Well, you go ahead and order the equipment. I can take over the lab and you can go set this up.” He wouldn’t do that and the money never came. So Brent had made the right choice, I think that upset Jack.
Swent: So the Geneva lab never did materialize?
Curtis: Years later by somebody else.
Swent: But not at that time?
Curtis: No. And that was a post-doc that came and worked with me—just a minute and I’ll get to him. No, he worked with Jack and with me both for awhile. I want to stay with Brent anyhow.
Now Jack was brilliant, there’s no question, and a dynamite worker. He wrote more fluently than I wrote, that is, I think I wrote better papers than he but I took longer time. He knew just where he wanted to go, he worked quickly, he got things published. We had agreed that we would alternate papers. Well, we did the first few papers we put out, but finally Jack was doing all of them, even though most of them were my ideas. For instance, Don Savage had come to me and said, “You know, the faunas”—in the Basin 104
and Range country they have all of these—well in the western United States, particularly the West, there are these pockets of fauna from the Paleocene right up to the end of the Pleistocene.
Those were organized into what were called mammalian stage ages. They were correlated. Boundaries were put on those, but they were very rough because some of the animals in this particular mammalian stage age would be above and below into the next one. But a group of those were chosen as typing a mammalian stage age, typifying, and that whole thing could be used to correlate across the western United States. Don said, “You know, there a lot of”—everywhere we collected samples—Don was very good at recognizing volcanic ashes and so on—he said, “There are a lot of volcanic ashes in these. I’ve got my notes on these and I can tell you”—well, he said, “I’ll go out with you.” So we collected and we did the first dating on mammalian stage ages, principally in the Miocene and Oligocene of the Great Basin. Well, along comes Jack. Jack had been doing this when he was setting up a lab in New Zealand with Ian McDougall, who had come from there—I never know whether I’ve told you off camera or on.
Swent: I know, that’s a problem. You have mentioned Ian McDougal.
Curtis: He was a graduate student at Canberra and I gave a lecture there, at ANU [Australia National University]. He had worked on a big series of intrusive rocks in Tasmania, and that was his thesis. But I gave a lecture there, when I went around the world collecting, in 1958.
And J.C. Jager, a physicist, had been at that lecture and realized that they should set up a lab there. So he came up and talked to me. I was working on a field problem at the time. He went out—Jager, knowing nothing about geology but just a super guy—went out in the field with me and we talked about Ian McDougall, what he was doing. I said, “Oh my gosh, bring him here right away.” So McDougall came and spent a year with us and learned Potassium-Argon. Then when he went back—I think this was Evernden’s term for semi-sabbatical, we’ll say—so he went back with Ian and set up the—we had the equipment made here and he set up the lab for Ian.
Swent: What was the equipment?
Curtis: This was the Reynolds type mass-spectrometer and the ancillary equipment needed for separation of gases; of fusing the minerals that have the potassium in to release the argon, and the flame photometer that you need to measure the potassium, and so on. There’s quite a bit of equipment.
Swent: And they couldn’t make it there?
Curtis: Well, we had everybody here that knew how to make it because quite a few instruments were made right here. I guess, later on in the physics department, they must have had glass blowers. But you might as well have somebody who has made one make the next one: who knows all the problems of some of the angles that you have to get in the glass tube or such, that they have to be set in a very precise manner, and you have to have a rack to hold that when you blow the glass, and so on. All of that was here. We had a very fine glass-blower in physics that— 105
[Tape 9, Side A]
Curtis: So he set up his lab there and, by the way, became friends with Brent Dalrymple.
Let’s see, I’ve lost where I was going to take you. Jack Evernden was this driver. I published the first paper with Don Savage on these critical points in the Geologic Time Scale, and gave that paper at a meeting of the New York Academy of Science. I think that was in the early ‘60s, ‘61 or ’62. Anyhow, we continued with that work because there was much more to be done and, of course, Jack took over. We were out collecting the samples and we got a graduate student in paleontology to work with us, and he was dynamite. Gideon James, he had worked for the FBI and could find anything—from fossils to the key to my liquor cabinet, which he found in three minutes while I watched. He was terrific. So we then collected a lot of samples and, of course, Jack was putting his name first on everything. I was just a technician in charge of getting—that whole thing was my idea, together with Don Savage, but to continue with it, was my idea. Now during that time I realized that we were not only dating fauna, we were dating flora, and the flora had been assigned names in the geologic time scale. I haven’t gone into this with you but you know about the geologic column. You must have heard about the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, the Cenozoic, and so on.
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: Well, it subdivides down finally to Epochs. We have the different Epochs: the Paleocene, followed by the Eocene, the Oligocene, the Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and recent. Now within them, there are these Mammalian Stage Ages, and in with those Mammalian Stage Ages, to which now we were giving dates; they had been assigned to things like Barstovian. The Barstovian Mammalian Stage Age was in the Miocene, but just exactly where it was, was not known until we gave it some physical dates. In those stage ages were these floras. Now the paleobotanist, Ralph Cheney—did you ever hear of Ralph Cheney?
Swent: I certainly have, yes. He was from my mother’s era.
Curtis: Yes. Oh he was a wonderful guy. And Mrs. Cheney was delightful. Ralph and his student Axelrod had, based on some circular reasoning— We know this, for instance, that take a given species, such as the red fir—in the Sierra you see this about 8,000 feet, Abies magnifica I think it’s called, about 8,000 feet—if you go over Tioga Pass you’ll go through the white fir and then into the red fir as you get higher and higher. These are all zoned, but those zones go down, for every 200 miles they go down 1,000 feet. So by the time you get up to Oregon and Washington, some of these things are at sea level. Well, not quite. But yes, some are.
So you have both latitude and elevation to consider. Well, somehow or other they got fouled up on this and they were off by our dates. They were off by two Epochs. For instance, they were calling some things Eocene that were Miocene, missing the Oligocene altogether. So I said to Jack Evernden, “We’ve got to do a separate thing on the flora. We must collect flora.” All the flora were not together with animals, so we had to go to their collections. And the same student that worked with us with the—his last name was James—he knew how to use the index to find all the things that we wanted in this cataloging of flora and fauna in the paleontology department. He was very fine. He 106
went out sometimes with me, sometimes alone, and collected all over the Basin and Range Province, wherever there was a flora collected and we could find the volcanic ash.
So I could see what was happening. Again Jack was—he was the one, a dynamo of energy—and took right over the whole project. I was beginning to get very fed up with this. I was having a digestive problem, a pre-ulcer. So I wrote a letter to him and said, “Jack, I’m dropping out of this.” I said, “I just cannot work with you any longer. We had an agreement about papers; you’ve taken over the whole thing. You think that I can’t do anything and most of these, except for one, have been my ideas. The one that you have done was measuring the defusion coefficients in the different minerals; that was fine, you did that. But the dating of the granites in the Sierra, that we did”—well I did get that paper out—oh, on and on—“the time scale around the world, getting the Miller fellowships—,” I said.
You know, if you were to ask Evernden today, he’d say they were all his ideas. Truthfully, that’s how much he distorted these. He’s fine and I like him very much. I think he has no respect for me whatsoever because I didn’t fight with him. Here’s an example, maybe I’ve told you this. We used to have brown bag lunches every day with the faculty and once it came up about, oh, how this came up about—I have no idea. Well, “What is the purpose of fruit on the seed?” and immediately Jack said, “The primary purpose of fruit is to fertilize and feed the seed.” I said, “Jack, it’s not that. It’s to help propagate the species, the genus, in any way that it can. It can disperse seeds that don’t have wings like maple seeds. It can disperse them all over the place.” “The primary purpose is to feed the seed.” He had never read Darwin, I’m sure. Maybe he has since because he was an omnivorous reader. He didn’t have the feel, that these things are not one thing at a time, they’re always evolving because of all of these different factors. The climate changes; the climate can get colder or hotter. There are geologic things that cause this; the continents move. If the animal or plant or flower stays in one place, it either has to adapt to the climate, or whatever is going, or become extinct. The prime example of things that have not moved because they didn’t—is the gingko. Nothing likes the fruit. The fruit is just a thin bitter skin on the seed. Nothing eats it that I know of. It doesn’t get distributed so it has a very limited area in China where it grows. It has moved only by staying in that particular—I think it was in the Pacific northwest in early Miocene or Oligocene time. It moves and if it can’t move, it dies out.
Well, that was Jack. He had a mathematical mind which was brilliant, and he thought of primary, first and second—all of nature is one, two, three: the primary purpose, the secondary purpose and the third.
Swent: Wouldn’t it be nice if it were like that? It would make it much simpler. [laughter]
Curtis: Yes. But it isn’t. So I stopped working with him and he began to see that—he worked with a former student of ours, Ron Kissler, whom I haven’t mentioned to you. Ron, he came from Johns Hopkins and was with Werner Juhle in Alaska. But when Werner disappeared there, Ron had been—who was supposed to be with him, together with another student, suppose to be with Werner all the time—Werner said, “No, we just don’t have time to do all of this so you’re going to map way off over there. You’re going to map by yourself over there,” totally against the rules of the Survey. So there was nobody with him when whatever happened to him happened. 107
Ron then came to Berkeley and did a thesis with me, doing some mapping on the east side of the Sierra and dating of the granites over there. He was one of our people in the lab. He later went to the US Geological Survey. But he stayed with Jack when I left and Jack, then, began to get a little bored with the whole thing, and decided to leave the lab altogether. So I took over the whole thing. It was an interesting thing.
Swent: Now, when you say “the lab”—
Curtis: We had the geochronology lab. We had a big room for the extraction where we had two mass-spectrometers, another room for the potassium analyses by flame photometer, and another room for preparing our samples, the last stages of preparation of the samples. There was, in the department—crushing and grinding was a room that was used by all of the geology department, but we had our specialized—So I was giving up those three rooms when I retired.
Swent: Which building was this in?
Curtis: That was in the Earth Science—we started out in Bacon Hall, that most wonderful of all buildings on the UC campus, which had been made to begin with—a library, Bacon Hall was the first library of the campus, well, of course that was 1884. It was much too small. It was built on a circular plan with a big open space in the middle: four floors, dome ceiling with light coming through, and a bell tower, which was taken down when the Campanile went up in 1913—they didn’t want the competition. That soon, of course, became too small, so it became the geology department, I think early in the century, oh say, 1910 or ’12, it became the geology department: brick building, gorgeous building. You’ve seen that picture on the wall there of it?
Swent: [gets up to look at picture] Oh yes.
Curtis: Ivy covered, beautiful building. We loved it, but it was getting too small for us as geologists so, in 1927, we asked—we got put on the list for a new building. We were first on the list by 1928 for a new building, 1928. We didn’t get that building until 1961. Other people came along with higher priorities. We started in that building. That’s where I did my Ph.D., in that building, and Jack did his Ph.D. in that building. I did before that—Jack was in Mining/Engineering too, but he liked the math and seismology, so he spent a lot of time as an undergraduate there also. By 1960, when the physics deapartment wanted the space of that building, and Birge Hall was the outcome of that, well, in 1960 the Committee on Historic something or other on campus—you ought to know the name of that committee—had declared Bacon Hall to be saved in perpetuity. Perry Byerly was chairman at the time. I was on the staff. I say 1960, but maybe it was a little earlier than that, but by 1960 it was clear that this was going to go. I said to Perry, “But this has been declared to be something on the campus to be saved in perpetuity.” Perry Byerly had this wonderful wit; very cynical, and he had these beady little caraway seed eyes, and he’d blink them, and he said, blinking, “Garniss, how long do you think perpetuity is? It’s only until the next committee meets.” [laughter] So we finally got our building in 1961.
Swent: Now that was McCone, then? 108
Curtis: No! At that time it was just called the Earth Sciences Building. They wanted to call it Lawson Hall but there were several of us that didn’t like Lawson. Did I ever tell you about Lawson?
Swent: Yes, I think you pretty well covered him.
Curtis: What upset me most about him is his greed; money was everything. And here this colleague of mine, John Halsey, who worked on a thesis right next to mine, in the Sierra, who did drafting—he was a very fine draftsman—to help with money—in those days five dollars was quite a bit. So Lawson came up and said to him in his high squeaky voice, “Halsey, I understand you do drafting. How much do you charge?” John said, “Five dollars and hour.” “Well, I have a job for you.” The job didn’t have any drafting whatsoever; it was geological. A friend of his who had a, quote, “iron mine,” up in what is now the Shasta Reservoir, was upset by the governments—the only use of the iron magnetite was for ballasts for the liberty ships during the war, and after the war there was nothing there; there’s no copper or anything else, just iron, and not enough to pay—but he objected and he—the government had given him a dock on the side of the lake where, if he did mine any more iron, he could take it across to the dock, they’d done a good job.
But he sued the government, claiming that Shasta Reservoir had drowned his mine. What Lawson wanted Halsey to do is go up there and study the mine and see if that were the case. Well, John did a very fine job. It’s true that if they did any—they were a long way from the water's edge. They’d have to go down a long way to get iron, but they would have to—where this little sort of peninsula came out—they would have to go below lake level. But as he studied various mines, such as some of those in Alaska— Alaska-Juneau goes, for instance, goes out two miles under the sea—there’s no need to worry about the water.
Well, this went to trial and John told them all this. In fact, John took Lawson up there, which is an interesting thing. Here he was, eighty nine or ninety at this time—the other fellow, his old friend, was in his nineties—and went up there—well, of course they had to spend the night in a motel, and in the morning, going for breakfast, Lawson walked in and sat down. Immediately they poured coffee for John and for Lawson, and Lawson said, “Do you have—” What is another name for mush?
Swent: Porridge?
Curtis: “Do you have porridge?” The lady said, “I don’t know what porridge is. I don’t think we have it.” So then he just leaves the coffee and gets up and walks out. They go to another cafe, “Do you have porridge?” “Yes we do.” So he sits down, coffee is served and he gets his porridge. They come to give him more coffee and he bangs his hand on the table and he says, “I’ve never had a second cup of coffee in my life before and I’m not going to start now!”
So John takes him out to this place; John knew how to run a motor boat because that’s the way he got out there. You can rent them. He took him out there and Lawson had to climb on his hands and knees sometimes but he went up to the outcrops: this is a contact metamorphic deposit in McCloud limestone of Permian Age, with the granitic rock going right into it. It’s all very close to the contact. These are big replacements by 109
magnetite of the limestone. So he looks it all over and John points out that, “Look, we’re a long way from the water and there’s not very much here. He’s mined out some; there are some big blocks and he could get some more.”
Well, the trial was held up in Vacaville, at a federal court up there. Ed Wisser was for the government. Wisser was on the staff in the mining department now. He had been a student of Lawson’s. Lawson gets up and was very good with speaking. I’ll tell you, he was very fine. He impressed the jury. Wisser could not get across any of his points and Lawson lied through his teeth. He said, “They will be drowned out the moment they go below water and that leaves only a little handful of ore that they can mine,” and went on like this. Well the suit was for—they settled for 1.2 million of which Lawson got 40%. That’s pretty close to $500,000. When this was all over—I was there at the very first when he came up and talked to Halsey; we were sharing an office together. He came back up and he says, “Halsey, how many hours did you put in?” Halsey gave him a figure. Then he says, “Let me see,” and he sits down. “Well, that’s $178,” or something like that, and wrote out a check for him.
Swent: Paid him the five dollars an hour?
Curtis: Yes. Here the guy does field work; he hasn’t been asked about it. I said to John, “Why didn’t you refuse it and say, ‘well, look mister, you asked me to do drafting. I did no drafting whatsoever. You didn’t ask me what my fee was for doing fieldwork.’” John just, he thought of it but he didn’t do it. He was overwhelmed so he took the check. That added to things that Howel Williams experienced with him, and I never questioned about that. Chuck Meyer—the experience up at—very similar, different court cases where Lawson lied about at Butte Montana. The three of us agreed that we didn’t want his name on the building, so Lawson’s name was not put on the building.
Now I think I told you of this today realizing that all of us have faults. I think I’m not nearly as bad as Lawson, and I don’t know anybody else as greedy as that. He could have given him a check for $1,000 and that would have been just cheapskate. But he didn’t. And Halsey was there to testify at the trial about this! That in itself—but he wasn’t called upon. Anyhow, when McCone came along and offered $4,000,000 for renovation if they put his name on, and that was just recently, within ten years. That’s why his name is on there. He has nothing to do with geology. I would much rather have had say, Byerly who was quite a character. I liked him better than I liked Taliaferro. But anyway, we now have McCone. I would much rather have Lawson on there than McCone.
Swent: Oh really? [laughs]
Curtis: Oh yes. He did so much for the department, really getting it started. LeConte was the first geologist. LeConte brought Lawson in around 1889 or ’90. LeConte had done some work, very good work in the Basin and Range Province, but had not built a department. There was nobody else. Yes, there was a mineralogist but I forget his name. But Lawson built up the department and got new people.
Swent: Is it true that the reason the San Andreas Fault is called San Andreas is that he named it for Andrew, his name? 110
Curtis: I hear that and I don’t know how true that is.
Swent: I wonder.
Curtis: It could very well be. It’s not beyond him at all to do something like that.
Swent: Fits in with his egotism, doesn’t it?
Curtis: Oh God, yes. His egotism—I could spend a whole day giving you anecdotes about Lawson. I won’t do that. Anyhow. So I broke with Evernden and then when he left he wanted to get back into seismology. I suggested various things to keep him here. I still liked him but I didn’t want to work with him anymore. He wanted to get back into seismology. He felt there was nothing left to do in Potassium-Argon but I had lots of things to do. I was not going to tell him at that time, that there were other things that we should do, and one was to get into Argon/Argon.
So he left and he went back to Washington. Carl Romney had been a student of Byerly’s, when Jack was a student, and Carl had been hired by the government. It was a special project to study earthquakes, to surround Russia with seismographs so that we could detect secret testing of small atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. The thing was that they had to do this because, while you would think it would be very easy to detect an explosion—you would say, “Well, it’s going to be all p-wave,” percussion—the two waves: there is the sound wave, which is a wave that goes along like this, [demonstrates with hand gestures] and there is the oscillatory wave, a sign wave, which is a shear wave that goes along like this [demonstrates].
But a nuclear blast, while they start out with a tremendous p-wave, very shortly secondary waves, s-waves, shear waves, are generated. By the time they get to our seismographs, we can’t tell them from earthquakes. So Romney had about twenty people working with him. They had surrounded Russia, as close as they could get to it, with seismographs, and they were getting these records everyday. They had a huge storehouse of them. Jack, with his brilliance, sat down and started studying the seismograms.
Swent: Was that here?
Curtis: The seismograms, I should say. No, this was back in Washington. He took a two-year leave of absence. Verhoogen was then chairman. He told Verhoogen that he would be back in time to teach at August of year two. So he studied the seismograms there that Carl Romney had, and it took him a while to realize that they were approaching it from the wrong way. They should have been studying, not the energy of the p-wave, but the total energy in both the p- and the s-waves, the shear waves, that were on the seismograms. The p-wave travels faster than the s-wave, and that’s what you measure first, the distance between the p and s waves which gives the distance from the source, the height of the waves is a function of the energy released.
[Tape 9, Side B]
Curtis: —count how deep the waves go. If they come through from Russia they go down to the mantle, and reflect off and so on, or they go right through the earth. Jack solved this 111 problem in one year. At that moment they did not have—he could tell by seismograms in this country, he could separate—and of course some of the big blasts on one of those—Novaya Zemlya, the island up near Spitzbergen where most of the testing the Russians were doing. We had all those seismograms from some of those big explosions. Jack could look at any of these and pick out the nuclear blasts from the energy from the p and s waves on the seismograms. Well, this was a big breakthrough. But Jack was thinking; “Now we can go to the Russians and say, ‘We can tell you if you’ve cheated.’” The army didn’t want that. They wanted inspection. They wanted to be there on the ground because they wanted to look around, you see, and see what was going on. So he had to stay quiet. Carl Romney meantime, had developed this love for rubbing elbows with the elite of Washington, all the way up to the president. Romney speaking to the chief of staff, Romney speaking to all these different people. Jack wanted most of all to stop the testing and not continue to play this, “We need to have inspection. We’ll give inspection, you can come see ours.” That was just stalling. Meantime the weaponry was building up, up, up with both sides. So Jack broke with—Romney wouldn’t push this at all. He just let the military tell him what to do.
Jack was not in too much favor with the military so he left Romney and got another government job for awhile. Well actually, I hear from some that he fought with Carl and Carl fired him. So then he got another job. Then finally he wanted to come back over to this coast. He was fed up with the politics of Washington. Jack was a doer. He wanted things to be done! “It was so clear what you should be doing! You could tell them that you knew exactly what they were doing! Let’s get on with this, let’s talk negotiations, not this pussy footing around!” It was years before somebody came along and found out what Jack found out, and then the cat was out of the bag. Jack is now sort of recognized as—but that was all his doing years before.
Well, anyhow, brilliant, brilliant guy. He wanted to come back to the department. I wanted him back in the department. I fought to have him back. Interestingly, Verhoogen was totally opposed to his coming back. Oh, he didn’t come back on August of the second year. He simply said, well first he said, “I’ll be there,” and something happened that Verhoogen said, “I want this in writing, that you will be here,” and Jack wouldn’t do it, something like that. Then he said, “Then just forget it. You’ve taken this leave of absence. You can stay.” His professorship—his connection with the university was cancelled. Verhoogen didn’t want him. Surprisingly, although he had gotten along very well with Gilbert, Gilbert said, “You know, I question that he’s good for the department. He’s so strong minded and nobody wants to take him on.” Chuck Meyer wanted him, I wanted him, and Frank Turner was more or less in favor, but he was just not given the chance to come back. So I guess he resigned, I guess that’s what he did; they weren’t going to have him back, something messy there, and he took a job with USGS. Again he was in his element there but he made his enemies. I remember when Tom Hanks—he was high on the hierarchy of geophysics there—he said would I write a letter for Evernden’s being advanced to sixteen, GS sixteen, and I wrote a very strong letter. This, I’m told by Tom Hanks, was what got him there, and there are only four people in the United States, GS sixteen. So he retired at a very high salary, and he still keeps his hand in.
He left his first wife—he had married his mother to begin with—Bernice, “Now Jack, you know I won’t have beer in my house. You can go out on the lawn and drink beer with Garniss or with your students, but not in this house. Now Jack, take your coffee 112
cup to the sink and wash it. I want a clean sink.” And if I were there, she would pick it up just as soon as I put it down and wash it and put it away, dry it. She was older than he. One time when I was talking to Jack about remembrances of childhood, he confessed that he had hardly any memories before the age of twelve. He couldn’t remember any teachers. He couldn’t remember any of his friends.
Swent: What a contrast with you. [laughs]
Curtis: So I just wonder about his home life, because he married Bernice and he must have seen this in her. In 1962 Evernden and I were teaching summer camp together and he had decided to divorce her. So everyday, to establish residence in Nevada, we would drive after work all the way over to Nevada to someplace, I don’t know, to establish that he— So he divorced her and then he married what had been the former wife of Ted—what’s his name? I can’t think of it. Had been a graduate student and was with the Survey. His father did that wonderful study of the Grand Canyon, oh classic work. I’ll think of his name later. Anyhow, Ted had been married to—oh, Ted McKee. Do you know the name McKee?
Swent: Yes.
Curtis: She had been married to Ted McKee. We called her H. E. I don’t know what her name was but I didn’t like her. She had been married to McKee. No, I’ve got to get this—this musical chairs is unbelievable. Mark Christianson had been married to H. E., and she left him. Let’s see, Mark Christianson had been married to H. E., and McKee— No, I got this wrong. Mark Christianson had been married to Roberta—I don’t know what went wrong there—but Jack took Roberta on one of his trips to India and came back and she left Mark. Ted had been married to H. E. and Mark married H. E., and Jack married Roberta. So Roberta had been married to Mark, to “Chris,” and Ted to H. E., and when they split Chris married H. E., Jack married Roberta—
Swent: And Ted was left with nobody?
Curtis: Yes. Anyhow, that lasted for quite awhile. H. E. and Chris had two children. They grew up and off to college. I knew that I didn’t like H. E. at all; she was bossy. Meantime Chris had gotten into the politics of the campus. He started off as an assistant dean, then a dean, then a vice chancellor, then a chancellor at Santa Cruz. That only lasted about two years. He just couldn’t handle the faculty there. It seems that this was going to be set up on the Oxford type of system, in which teaching was everything and research was deemphasized—but of course all these people that they got wanted to do research. Their funds were limited; you didn’t need so much for research, so the university was not giving the campus very much money, and that was a big problem for the chancellor there, to divide that money equally. Well there were various people that were stronger than others and it led to big fighting, and they blamed Chris for this and that. He just had to—they got him out of there.
I learned later it was H. E. that really caused the trouble. She was giving him advice and he was just mishandling the whole situation. When the president of the university canned Chris, he said to the next chancellor, he said, “I don’t want anymore of this. What you say goes. You’re not going to change your mind. What you say goes and if there’s anymore—we have contracts with these people—I’m going to start firing 113
people.” He let them know. In the meantime he said, “I’ll try and get more money,” and he did. So they did get to do more research and it’s become much more of a research place than the way it started out. But Chris got the axe and the other guy, with the backing now of the president, was able to calm these very strong people, tone them down.
That’s a thumbnail sketch. The intricacies of this are just unbelievable. The department, again I wanted him back, but Verhoogen and—By the way, Chris had had some good advice, “When you take this chancellorship, you hang on to your professorship on the Berkeley campus.” I had pushed to get him made a full professor; he was an associate professor. Before he left he was made full professor, so he had a guarantee of a job if he left Santa Cruz. He came back; they didn’t want him, but he didn’t even ask to come on back into the department; he chose another department altogether. He wanted to get into something in environment—he was over in one of those temporary buildings for a long time. They’re all gone now. Anyway, Chris, Verhoogen, Turner, Gilbert. Gilbert had been a very close friend of Chris; I can’t understand it. He said, “No, I think we don’t want him back.” Turner was from New Zealand, Verhoogen was from Belgium—they felt he was just too much all American boy. That’s the way they put it to me. Now he’d done some nice work. Anyway, I love Chris and I think he made the right choice. He did some very fine work.
Well, among other things, he went to Greece, about energy: how to set up a more efficient distribution of energy or something, particularly out on some of their islands. He went to Australia and did some consulting there, and he has done very well. So meantime the kids are gone and now it’s time to unload this albatross around his neck. He had met a very, very nice woman whom I had met a couple of times, German descent, or coming from Germany, immigrant I should say; just a superb person. I immediately loved her. So they built a place in Carmel, just on the outskirts toward Carmel Valley and from what I hear, doing very well. I keep getting messages, “Come on down and see us,” from a few friends. So that’s a little thumbnail sketch of the department.
Swent: I’m intrigued by the fact that the people in the department vote. Is this a formal vote that you take on whether someone can come in or not?
Curtis: The chairman polls the people and of course he has a pretty strong—and Verhoogen was the chairman—he has a pretty strong vote himself. There were more people than those that I’ve just given you but I don’t know, for instance, how Adolph Pabst responded, I don’t know how—
Swent: Is this an official procedure or is it sort of ad hoc?
Curtis: Yes. We didn’t have a meeting in which we all talked. Verhoogen came to me independently, and I said I’d like to see Chris back. But I did hear from these others afterward, those that were for him: Byerly, who had been his mentor as an undergraduate and had brought him here, and then had to fight with Evernden—and that Evernden was going to leave and go back to a job with Standard Oil, which he had taken after getting his Ph.D. He took the job because he knew that Byerly was going to take the first opportunity to find a position here in the department, and he waited and then one came, but immediately he started fighting with Byerly. So I don’t know how Byerly 114
voted, but I suspect Byerly by this time realized that this very strong minded person, he didn’t want to see him around the department, not in seismology at least, which is what Jack would have come back to do.
Swent: And the same thing in the case of Christianson; there was kind of a polling.
Curtis: Yes.
Swent: Sort of like joining a club, then, isn’t it?
Curtis: Yes, oh sure. And Chris, the same thing; we were asked and—so I don’t know how everybody voted, again. I only talked to a few of them. Chuck Meyer, I knew, didn’t want Chris back. He wanted Jack back. Gilbert—I was really amazed when he told me, no, he thought it wasn’t the best thing for—but Chris didn’t even ask to come back. He just immediately went—he had friends in this other department, natural resources, in environment. His very close friend, Clyde Wahrhaftig, wanted him back, of course, but Clyde told me he was very happy that Chris had gone to natural resources and environment. He thought this was his best move, in view of the fact that he had so many people of importance in the department to contend with. That’s the way that happened.
I was liked by Verhoogen. I think I wasn’t liked by Turner. Jack was liked by Turner but not by Verhoogen, and I think that’s what kept us out of the national academy. We had five people in the academy and those, too, were very strong. Our seminal work that we were doing in Potassim-Argon was comparable to that of what the people at Cal Tech were doing in other fields, but they were united. They put people in there like Henry, Hank—what’s his name—really second rate. There was another guy that just died—I liked him too—another person working with C14. Maybe that guy should have been in there but certainly Henry, whatever his name is; cranking out papers that were really second rate.
So Jack continued on but you see, you make enemies, and Jack made them. For instance, at the Survey, he was the money bags there for awhile, but he took a trip to China when it first opened after—
Swent: Nixon went there.
Curtis: Nixon—Jack was one of the first people to get over there and loved it, loved the Chinese. He came back to find that they had cut the strings; he was no longer in charge of money, back and doing just research again. But here’s the way he treated people in that position: in seismology we could apply for certain moneys at the Survey because we were working with them; we had our network, they had their big cooperative thing. So Bruce Bolt, from Australia, to take over Byerly’s position when he retired—Jack repeatedly told me—they both were in seismology—that Bruce had not made any really major contributions in seismology at all. He was a great person for making friends all over the place but he wasn’t doing good work. So he applied for some money from the Survey in seismology at the wrong time. What I heard from people who were around Jack when this happened, Jack didn’t accept the proposal of Bruce. So Bruce calls him when he was turned down and, someone who was in the office, at the time who told me this, when Jack picked up the phone and the person, who didn’t identify himself, “Why 115
didn’t I get my money?” Jack said, “Because your proposal was no damn good,” and slammed down the phone. But you know, that’s not being very—
Swent: Not very diplomatic, is it?
Curtis: No. You don’t know when people are going to have—they don’t like things like that. You can be diplomatic and still say, “No,” and say, “Well look, there were other papers, we have a limited amount of funds, Bruce.” Bruce didn’t identify himself because he told Brent right then and there, “I’m guessing that was Bruce Bolt from the sound of his voice and the anger in it.” But he could have said, “Well, we just have so much money. There were some better proposals than yours and we just have to make these decisions. I’m awfully sorry Bruce, I really am.” No way, Jack was too honest for that.
Swent: Very unfeeling.
Curtis: Yes, very unfeeling. So as a result he should have—for the work that he did there, his work with Carl Romney, all of those—should have put him in the National Academy. He’s much better than a lot of people I know. His productivity was high. There is a difference between good work and superior work, and his work was always superior. So I’m just very sorry but both of us should have been—on just the very beginning we should have gotten into the Academy. I have, since then, have done very few really first rate papers; it’s okay, but I won’t go into that. I have no regrets about my career; I have enjoyed all of it. I’ve had a lot of friends, so I’m not unhappy about little things like that. I’ve got various things that I—most recently I was president of the Pacific section of the AAAS: the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Swent: Right, I think perhaps we’ll have to save that for Friday, but we do want to talk about your work with some of these organizations.
Curtis: Okay, we’ll do that next time. I haven’t really told you about Brent Dalrymple, a little about his career, but he made the National Academy, by the way. Oh, I was so pleased with that. Here was the person that Jack could never say a good word for, and so he makes the National Academy. Gee, that was wonderful. And of course, Walter Alvarez.
Swent: No, we’re still on.
Curtis: Then I’ll just give you this very quickly. I’m telling you truthfully, I wanted Jack in the academy but his hate for Brent was such that I was very pleased when Brent made the academy. Jack, when he heard about the very first work at Gubbio, at the Cretaceous- Tertiary boundary where these iridium isotopes were found—Now, when you hear of the iridium anomaly at the boundary, well it’s more than just iridium. All of those platinum metals: iridium, palladium, platinum, osmium; they all hang together. Then, of course, in the crust of the earth and in the evolution of the earth, they got separated from each other, but we find them in meteorites. So this iridium anomaly is a meteoritic anomaly, that you can recognize in other meteorites. Now it’s true that large volcanic eruptions like we’re having in Hawaii, but much larger than that—these great flood basalts: the Columbia River flood basalt, the Siberian flood basalt, the Indian flood basalt, and those in Uruguay—big flood basalts which we recognize also on the other side of the Atlantic, on the west coast of Africa. These have put out a huge amount of sulfur and associated trace elements; iridium is in there too. But it’s not the anomaly 116
found at Gubbio by Walter Alvarez—and his father immediately said, “Well, let’s look at the possibility of an impact.” That was Louis Alvarez, whom I met first as an undergraduate. He was in, not my chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, but another one. A friend of mine, Bob Sherman, who was a senior at the time, and when I came into the fraternity, he and I went over to meet with Louis and with Ernest Lawrence, with their first little tiny cyclotron. Oh, it would just fit on this rug here, just a little tiny thing. I remember that so well. They were so wonderful that some undergraduate students would come and want to see this. And standing in the background was a big tall guy, and I didn’t realize that this was—I told you his name before—
Swent: (Seaborg?)
Curtis: Yes. There he was. He had come as a—I forget now, not a post-doc but something beyond that—but there he was in the background and we were introduced. A very quiet guy and so young looking.
Swent: So there were several Nobel winners in the room at the same time.
Curtis: Yes, all three.
Swent: Amazing.
Curtis: So Louis came up with the idea, but Walter pushed this. Jack said, “You know, this is nonsense, that this is an impact.” The Deccan Traps in India—it’s right at that K-T boundary. This is what caused the demise 65% of all land and sea life, the huge amount of sulfur and other things that were put in the atmosphere. And then Turner came to me and said, “You know, Walter is digging his grave. He’s onto something that’s not going to do anything for him whatsoever.” So you can see where this went.
Walter and I were very close friends. He had been on soft money at Columbia University and I think we invited him out here, and he gave a lecture. We liked that so we invited him to join the staff, and he came. But he found that the whole staff was very unfriendly with him. Just about the time that he was thinking of going, my wife said, “You know, we ought to ask Walter and Millie to dinner. I like them very much.” So we asked them and we had a wonderful dinner—
[Tape 10, Side A]
Curtis: Then a guy at Stanford, Pat, no, not Pat, Max something or other, had also befriended him. When Walter got this very nice encouragement to stay—we didn’t even know he was planning to leave—but right away he decided, “Well, there are at least some human beings around: one at Stanford and one here.” When Turner said to me, “Try and stop him, it’s going to hurt his career.” I didn’t argue with Turner. I knew he was dead wrong and I knew Walter was right. I encouraged Walter very, very much to keep on with this, and made some suggestions. So Walter and I have been very good friends ever since. I’ve got him on the board of BGC, although right now his term is up and he’s got so much to do, he doesn’t want to be on the board anymore; but he has been right up to the present time. And he’s been helpful in so many ways, too. I just love the guy. And he and Rich Muller are just very close friends. I’ve got Rich on the board now. 117
So there we are, a good place to stop.
Swent: I suppose it is, yes. Louis Alvarez was the father?
Curtis: That’s the father. He had divorced his first wife who had moved East, and that’s where Walter really, from a little kid here before the divorce—He moves east and grows up and goes to college, and sees nothing of his father whatsoever. When he comes back, he meets his father again and developed a nice relationship with him. So this led to this collaboration. Louis knew a chemist up there to do the trace element work and so they got a team going immediately on this and, of course, they found out that this anomaly could be found every place where the Tertiary was overlain by Cretaceous—all over the world. Finally somebody remembered that (Shell?) had put some holes down on the northern end of the Yucatan peninsula and had found some strange material down there.
Swent: And that’s, I can’t remember how to spell it, Chicxulub?
Curtis: Yes. I think Walter, or a friend of his—I’m quite sure it was Walter himself—went down to where Shell had drilled these wells and looked for the core—may have been a friend—and found it under the bushes there, the core, or some of it. It was that core that we were able to get a piece of and Carl Swisher dated. Now Carl had been working up in Montana at a place called Hell Creek, and I had been up there with him. Part of his thesis area was there. We went right to the boundary where the—and found a sample that also showed the anomaly, the iridium anomaly, and he found tuffs right at the boundary. These gave precisely the age of the Chicxulub. It just turned out to be—
Swent: It all just fit together.
Curtis: Fit together. I saw something in Time recently that said, “Older than 65,000,000 years.” Well the dates, which are Carl Swisher’s, from this sample, the only sample that—and his tuff dates were 64.98, 64.97, 65.01, just about in there. It’s 65,000,000 until they change the constants. He got the same data from his tuffs in Montana. So Carl is another graduate student that I want to talk about, besides give you a little more about Brent.
Swent: Drake, I don’t think you talked about.
Curtis: Oh yes, Bob Drake, I’ve got to talk about him, because he’s probably my closest friend of those that worked with me in the department. He doesn’t have the—well, he’s very bright—didn’t have the push that Carl has, didn’t have the push that Brent has. He virtually rewrote tertiary geology of the west side of the Andes, up and down Chile, from top to bottom. They had nothing to go on; no fossils to correlate, nothing to go on except just what you can’t do. The type of rock, if it’s red here and it’s red 100 miles away, it’s correlative.
Swent: Okay, I think that’s—
Curtis: Was I still talking on there?
Swent: Yes, but I’ll turn it off now. 118 119
Interview 5: August 23, 2002.
[Tape 11, Side A]
Swent: Okay, now we’re recording again. We’re on the 23rd of August, 2002. This is our fifth interview. I guess let’s just begin where we left off yesterday. You were going to talk about your student Robert Drake.
Curtis: Okay, let’s see, just prefacing that I thought of some names, Dan Krumacher was an earlier student from Switzerland.
Swent: No, I think it’s a new name.
Curtis: Dan came over and worked with Jack and me, went back to Switzerland.
Swent: That’s Jack Evernden.
Curtis: Jack Evernden. And went back to Switzerland, where he—not through any help from us—he had enough information to set up a lab of his own there, to work, or with somebody else. Later, he and his wife, vegetarians—while they were here had joined a very strange sect. I can’t tell you what it was but this group, sort of a religious group that was a big family, and most of that family was here in California—he wanted to come back.
Swent: When was this? Sounds like the ‘60s.
Curtis: Probably in the ‘60s, and I think he came back in the ‘70s. I had money for him. He was looking for a position while he worked with me. I won’t go too much into this. A position opened up at San Diego State, where he applied. Of course I recommended him strongly. They wanted him to set up a lab. Former student from Berkeley, Gordon Gastil, knew that what San Diego State needed was a dating facility, because he was involved in a lot of mapping of the northern part of Baja California. Terrific guy, Gordon Gastil. So he hired Dan. And then there was a very fortuitous and beneficial thing that happened: just as he accepted this position, a former student of ours that was at Columbia, couldn’t get along—he was at Columbia but he was working at Lamont Laboratory up along the Hudson River.
He had set up a Potassium-Argon lab at Lamont and was working there, but he and his wife just did not like the attitude of a lot of the people at Columbia, and particularly those at the lab. For instance, on one of their—not freeways, one of their roads—he passed a car that the guy had parked and was thumbing a ride—the car had broken down—thumbing a ride. I think Ken Lajoy [sp?] is his name, did not pick the fellow up, somebody else did, but he saw the car there. When he got to the lab he told them about it and instantly these people said, “Well, let’s get back there. I need some shocks, I need some break pads,” and he said, “But this belongs to somebody!” They said, “No, anything that’s parked along there, that’s open. Everybody does this! They just strip the car.” That was just too much for him. They all took off right then, three of them, to go strip that car of whatever they needed. He insisted that this was common. 120
So he resigned and came and applied for a job at the USGS in Menlo, and got it. He’s still with them. But his equipment was not needed by anyone there so they put it up at Columbia; they put it up for grabs. I got a note in the mail saying “Do you know anybody that needs this equipment?” Or maybe it was probably a telephone call. Well here was Dan Krumacher working with me, just been accepted at San Diego State; he immediately flew back, rented a truck, went to the lab, got the equipment, and took it directly to San Diego, all within three or four days. Then I started getting phone calls “Well, what are you going to do with the equipment?” Because I’d spoken for Dan I said, “The equipment is at San Diego.” They were all very upset. Everybody needed that equipment.
So Dan worked there until he retired, with his wife. Dorette and I went down to see them once and had a wonderful vegetarian dinner. She was a wonderful cook. So that’s that story. So Gordon Gastil got his dating and produced a lot of very good work on the intrusions and the overburden of these intrusions. That was very rewarding to see Dan—his gumption, his drive and he moved and he got things going. He was wonderful to have around the lab, but I was very pleased to see him get into shape.
Meantime a student, graduate student, who Bob Drake—[phone rings] Bob Drake had come from a family—his father had taught at Claremont, I think in history, and he had gone there to—this is south of Pasadena: Claremont College—and I think he had graduated from there. A family he met—there were two daughters in the family, their name was Marlowe. The father was in real estate and had made a huge amount of money in the development of all of the Los Angeles area. He had met and married the older daughter Pam. Vickie, the younger daughter, I knew her first, she was here in Berkeley for a while. The older daughter Pam, and he got married. They went to Switzerland where he went to school in—let’s see, it wasn’t Geneva. It was either Bern.
Swent: Lausanne, I think is a place where a lot of people go.
Curtis: Yes, I think it was Bern. He was there for a couple of years and then, I don’t know what got him to make up his mind to come back here to go to Berkeley, but he and Pam came back to Berkeley and rented an apartment. I only found this out much later; he took my field course because he had had all the background and he was fine in the field and a good geologist. And of course he had seen alpine geology, so he had that background.
I told you a little about Mark Christianson, who at that time was married to Roberta. This would be in the late ‘60s. Mark was interested in a study of some rocks in the Andes. We did some dates for him in the northern Andes, to the east of the Atacama Desert—this is for Chris, he preferred to be called Chris. I think Mark is a nice name but Chris hated that name. He wanted to be Chris Christianson. I haven’t said very much about him. He did a thesis with me and with Lionel Weiss, who later changed his name to Weiss when he took out American citizenship. A Scotsman. Very fine guy. Mark— Chris had worked on a project in the southern Sierra Nevada, which I was director of and went out in the field there.
Swent: Where was your field course given?
Curtis: The field course was given here in the Berkeley hills. I’ll get back to that. 121
Swent: Oh, all right.
Curtis: I didn’t develop a very close relationship in my field course with Bob, but he was fine. What he was interested in, since he had been in the Alps, was the work that Chris was doing in South America at the time. So Chris found a field area, not where we were doing the dating for him, but in the southern Andes in the Mauli River. This is 300 or 400 miles south of Santiago and to the east and a little south of Los Angeles, the Mauli River, and it goes right on up across the divide into Argentina. About this time Chris came to me—I think I’ve told you a little about him.
Swent: You have spoken about him but not about the Andes work.
Curtis: Yes. So Chris came to me and he said, “You know, they’ve asked me to be”—at this time, I forget whether it was dean or vice chancellor—and he says, “This is taking all of my time and I need somebody to take over supervising Bob Drake in the Andes. Would you do that?” Well I never could say no to—I’d never been down there—never could say no to Chris because he was so helpful to me, so very helpful. I think I told you that he took my classes when I got infectious hepatitis and was out for six weeks one time?
Swent: No, I don’t think you told me about that.
Curtis: My wife and I both. We’d been in Mexico and we’d had dinner—we’d gone down to pick up my daughter who was in summer school there, and had dinner with the people with whom she was staying. The roof leaked; there was a big thunderstorm. Well drops came down on our plates and I didn’t like that, and they said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” But, a few weeks later we both came down, within a few days of each other, with infectious hepatitis, after we got home.
Swent: Where had you been in Mexico?
Curtis: My daughter was in Guadalajara at summer school. This was Penelope. So we went down to get her. You don’t know how enervating that is. We had to sleep next to each other but anytime either of us moved it was torture for the other one. I spent all day in the living room and she had the bed. We were just too weak to do anything for six weeks. Well Chris took my classes, and that was several classes: the field class, petrology—I was teaching three classes and he took all of them including his. That was a tremendous burden. But he was a superb lecturer; I gave him notes, superb lecturer. He was very inspirational to the classes and I think that they would rather that he had stayed on than that I came back.
Swent: I don’t think so. [laughs]
Curtis: He was just wonderful. So when he asked me to take over Bob Drake I said, “Of course!” I loved to and I did. I just had a great time. So that Christmas that I went down to see him was the Christmas of either ’69 or ’70. Dorette and I spent some time—we stopped in Panama for a day. Some of our luggage was lost; we had to spend another day there. Then to the Galapagos Islands, then to Lima environs, then up to Cusco, Machu Picchu, spent a night there, came down, took the railroad to Titicaca and the boat across the lake, and then stayed at La Paz over night—well, we spent a couple of days 122
there, and from there went down to some Inca ruins and so on. Then down to Santiago where we joined up with Bob and Pam.
They were getting support from the Ford Foundation and the Ford Foundation had put up a big complex of apartments, this huge apartment with a guestroom, all for nothing. So we met a lot of students. It was through the University of California and we met a lot of students there. We stayed with Pam for a couple of days. Dorette stayed with me but she had to get back. Her back was hurting her—by this time she had a degree, I haven’t talked to you about that, and was in psychology—and she had her clients that she had to get back to. All of this up to this time had only taken, say a week and a half away for her, maybe two weeks, from her clients, so she had to get back.
I spent, then, the next month with Bob, out in the field in the Mauli River area. He had a wonderful problem. He had done no dating. Of course I said, “Now what we’ve got to do is calibrate what is going on here. You’ve got all these intrusions and extrusions. We have this big granite body,” which clearly looked like it was very promising for copper around it. So we didn’t spend much time with mapping; we spent most of the time collecting, because by this time he had a firm grip on what was going on. There were these huge eruptions that we needed to date, much bigger than Katmai was 17.4 cubic miles, but how old were they? Gorges had been cut down through them. There were a lot of interesting problems.
We could get a handle on how fast the Andes were being incised and how fast they had gone up. This is what we did for the next month. We went from southern Andes all the way up to La Serena, about 200 or 300 miles north of Santiago. We stopped off at Antofagasta—that’s a port city up there—and we had all kinds of adventures. I can’t spend too much time on them but when we were up in the head waters of the Mauli and we went into Argentina without being aware of it. We didn’t see anybody, but when we got back down to a guard station, somebody had reported that we had gone across the border. Somebody had to be there spying because we saw nobody; no cars, no nothing. This is a road over into Argentina and down to Bariloche, which is a very famous resort. If you ever get a chance to go there.
Swent: I’ve been there.
Curtis: You’ve been there. Isn’t that beautiful?
Swent: Lovely.
Curtis: So they kept us all day and checked us, and searched our bags.
Swent: My pen is running out, just a second, I’ve got to get another pen. Okay, sorry.
Curtis: This was the time that the communists—well, they were in power although it was—they were elected into power. Do you remember the name of the—
Swent: Allende?
Curtis: Allende was in power. So they were suspicious of anybody at the border, or crossing the border. We were searched and so on, and we were kept there all day while they traced 123
my—they traced Bob back to Santiago, but they traced mine all the way back to Berkeley. So yes, I was legitimate, and about six that evening they let us go on, going home.
Swent: You must have been a little nervous though.
Curtis: Well, it was very boring. I wasn’t at all really concerned. I think we spent the night at Los Angeles, or some place along there.
Swent: Were they trying to get a bribe; was this part of it?
Curtis: No. You couldn’t tell. But I didn’t have any, really, money to bribe anybody at that time. I had left the main part of my—you know, just because you didn’t know what was going to happen. We got back, but when we got into Santiago this old Continental—it was kind of a Land Rover type thing; the company no longer exists. We could smell gasoline and we stopped right in the heart of Santiago at a big turn around. This was now early in the morning, well, by early Santiago time, is eight or nine o’clock, and nobody is up. I opened the hood and gasoline was pouring out of the carburetor because the screws had come loose on the hot engine. That whole thing could have gone and blown up. Of course the key was off now so there were no sparks. We just got off and walked about four blocks to the university where we got the mechanic, brought him back, nobody had towed this vehicle. It was still sitting there. He fixed it up and we were able to drive off. This is an example of how things were so tight around the border and so loose in Santiago. Bob knew the people at the university there so we had no problem. He had made contacts with a number of fine people, two of them who came up to Berkeley and got graduate degrees from us after that. We’ve had contact with them ever since, as an example.
Swent: I think you said that this was really the first work that had been done in that part of the Andes.
Curtis: This was the first work that had been done; they didn’t have anything like that. Well, to give you an example of how far off they were: we went back out in the field with one of the professors from another trip, back down to Mauli with the professor to show us some of the Cretaceous deposits. Cretaceous, you know, is back before the Chicxulub, the 65,000,000 year old demise of the dinosaurs. This was suppose to be upper Cretaceous, the volcanics were upper Cretaceous. I looked at them and I said, “They don’t look old to me.” Well, just quickly, I collected a tuff, 4,000,000 years when he finally got to dating it. Another group of deposits which were deformed and turned up on end along the fault, which they thought were Cretaceous also, was Miocene, not too early either, 17,000,000 years. They just had no control on things whatsoever. That was all published stuff. So this is what, over the next several years, when Bob came back to Berkeley, was what he did: was just change the geology of the west coast, particularly of Chile, and on up into Peru, of previously held erroneous ideas. There were indeed deposits with Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils in them, and we got dates there too. But just because they looked like the stuff to the south—they had taken Cretaceous looking beds and said these that look like Cretaceous looking beds, that look like they’re Cretaceous with fossils in, they had given them dates, totally wrong. 124
So that was a lot of fun. Various things happened, because of Allende: you had to get in lines. Foods, particularly the meats, were rationed. You could get all the watermelons you wanted and Bob and I would eat a watermelon every day between us. We loved watermelon.
Allende seemed to be an honest person but the communists were very strong. Allende, he sympathized with the communists but he himself was not a communist. But it was quite clear the communists were going to take over. They had—down in the southern central valley, which is like the central valley in California—a produce area. The people had gone in and taken over the ranches of the landed gentry that were running—they sat around expecting—they thought that what this was going to be was just a turn around, and the people that owned the ranches would stay there and work for them. Well those people simply got out of there. These people moved into the ranches, didn’t know how to run them, and the food production just went zoom, downward. This led to the rationing of so much food there. You know the rest of that story, but we were right at that turn around.
Swent: An interesting time to be there.
Curtis: It was an interesting time. Bob Drake’s license had passed the time of when it was to be renewed, which was a very difficult thing to do. So we sat up one night carefully changing one number, the last digit, so it would look like he had one more year. When they checked it at the border—well not at the border, there were checkpoints all along in the Andes—we got by all right. If it had been caught there would have been, really, a lot to pay. We did go once across the border, again into Argentina, because Bob said, “We can get cheap Scotch over there.” He liked Scotch. I liked Bourbon at that time but they didn’t have any Bourbon; they just had whisky, which was Scotch. We went across the border—this is the pass of Jesus; a big statue of Jesus is up in the—anyhow, went across the border and there was no problem getting back in, but we bought a lot of Scotch. Since that was all we had to drink, went back with him, I fell in love with Scotch and I’ve been a Scotch drinker ever since. We finally graduated from Jim Beam and—no, not Jim Beam—Johnny Walker and all of that ilk, to single malts. This is what we have between us.
Swent: Of course now everybody is raving about the Chilean wines.
Curtis: Oh yes, this is something that we loved. We would go out to the Maipu Valley, which is just a half an hour from Santiago, and buy cases of wine of—this now was the late 1960s. 1954 was a great year; it was expensive, fifty cents a bottle [laughter]. We would have a tasting every few nights, bringing in all these other Cal people that were in this big complex of apartments, and have a wine tasting, and have ten bottles of Chilean wine to choose from. They were all good; we’d picked them carefully. Those wines were not getting here, into California.
Swent: Until recently.
Curtis: At that time. Well, some were, but they weren’t the best wines. So that was a great experience. At La Serena—I’ll just tell you one more—we went there to get some important rocks, and we camped out. They have sort of a tick-like bug, which is on these little bushes and around them, that you don’t want to be bitten by because you 125
won't want to come down with this disease for two years. We picked a spot and put our air mattresses down and bags on, and then we looked around and they were crawling all around us. Well, we just simply had to get up and move. It took quite awhile to find a place far enough from any bushes, that we didn’t have these darn things. I didn’t have any bites, Bob didn’t have any bites, but a professor from—I can’t think of his name, just a super guy—he had to leave when Allende was overthrown because he wasn’t a communist but he supported the movement that the communists were—and he had to leave and was out of the country for about ten years before they would let him back in. But that was something else. We were right there near that change, the overthrow of Allende. Bob was going to spend the rest of that winter and then he was going to bring Pam back to Berkeley, and we would set up shop and date his rocks, which we did. Pinochet took over within that next year, I think it was.
We stopped off in Los Angeles, CA. I was alone, by the way, by this time. I had gotten on the plane directly from the field. I was in my field clothes and we came in. I forget, but I think that was coming in from the north of Santiago and there were various things that slowed us down, so I had to go directly to the plane. I was in my field clothes and when I got to Los Angeles, CA, everything was all right, but they looked at me. I had to strip completely and they went through everything. One took out my Brunton compass and said— you know, I had that on my waist here—and he said, “This is a scientific instrument.” I said, “Look, I’ve told you I’m a geologist. I’m just coming back from the field. I’ve told you all this; you don’t believe it. I needed this, the geology pick for breaking rocks.” I said, “I’m at the University of California, which probably makes me a communist, but believe me I’m not—” I no sooner got out of Los Angeles and was flying back, than they had that huge earthquake out there in the San Fernando Valley. If I had known that I would have tried to stop off and see it. Some of the faculty went back down but I couldn’t leave Dorette. She was in agony with her back. She put a couch in her office—
[Tape 10, Side B]
Curtis: Bob then came back and worked with me from 1970 or ‘71, I guess—
Swent: I think that was the San Fernando earthquake.
Curtis: Yes, San Fernando. Not the next one—
Swent: That was in 1971 or ’72.
Curtis: Yes, ’71, I think that earthquake was.
Swent: I think fall of ’71, maybe, I’m trying to think. My son was a freshman in college at Occidental and it rolled him out of bed in the early morning. I remember hearing that.
Curtis: Yes. It was ’70, ’71, that my wife and I went down there. So Bob came back with me. At this time I had a student named Neil Gilbert, a master's student with me who—I forget what Neil did, but he was running the lab, very fine guy.
Swent: There was also a professor Gilbert. 126
Curtis: Oh, no that’s Charles Gilbert. Neil was a student, graduate student, very strange fellow in many ways, so quiet. Let’s see, why was he with me? He was, and did a wonderful job. We were getting now into computers, and Neil would put everything on cards and take them over to the central computer center, I think Evans Hall wasn’t there at this time yet, but anyway, to the computer center. So we started computing. Then we got our own computer to do things in the lab—I don’t remember, just a sequence of things. These early computers were very crude but we set him up to do—Bob Drake was the one that—After Neil got his degree, a masters degree in engineering, but taking a lot of geology courses, he got a job in the east with a big engineering company that did engineering geology, one of the biggest there. I can’t think of the name of that, but he’s gone right up to the top since then.
Swent: That was rather early in the engineering geology field.
Curtis: In that field, yes. He’s dropped by a couple of times, very fine guy. He wasn’t married at the time and he didn’t seem to be going out with girls, but he liked gin. I found that I could like any—whether it be good tequila or good gin or good bourbon—I could like any of them, and I had different students that liked these different things. So we started having taste tests; one time with bourbon, with a student that liked bourbon, and with Bob Drake with scotches.
Swent: Where were you doing this?
Curtis: We would do this either in their apartments or, yes, generally in their apartments. Neil had an apartment down here along Oxford Street and I remember being out on the porch with him. My wife, Dorette, was there and she was brown bagging these things and setting them up. We also had a barbecue. So here were all these gins, and his gin was Tanqueray. I didn’t have a preference. We had ten gins there going down to Old Mr. Boston. We didn’t pick out—well some we did pick out the names, but we put an order of preference. When we got up to the really good gins—we ended up naming the gins: Gilbert, and so on. The two final ones were Bombay and Tanqueray. By this time your taste has been—we weren’t getting very drunk because we were just sipping—and the taste is wrong. He said this Bombay was Tanqueray and I said, “No, that’s Bombay and this is Tanqueray,” the final two, and I won. [laughter] He was very disturbed. We had tied with all of them right up to the last one. We did the same with Bob Drake when he came along, which was right after Neil left, and Bob took over running the lab. And I’ll just simply say, we did it with scotches and we both ended up a tie on that. There’s only one person that I ever—I had a lot of friends, for instance, well, we’ll get to that later— only one person that was ever able to pick out the best scotches in terms of what I considered the good scotches, or the best bourbons. I had a neighbor who was an alcoholic and all he wanted was alcohol. He couldn’t tell one cheap bourbon from the most expensive sour mash things. Anyway, we had a lot of fun over the time with students about this.
On Fridays, Bob and I instituted for the first time in our lab—we worked hard all week—on Fridays we would go down and get cheeses and French bread baguettes, and dips and pates. We would invite everybody in at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, which was a great thing. Well about this time a student of Hal Helgeson’s—I can’t remember—Hal Helgeson was a geo-chemist and he was doing a lot of work, very brilliant guy. I think I mentioned to you his problems with women? 127
Swent: I don’t think so.
Curtis: He had been married several times and, like Ian Carmichael, one after another he discarded them. From a man’s point of view he was just terrific. He had this young woman who very innocently brought in some brownies one afternoon. I like brownies so I ate a couple of these, and I didn’t know that they had been loaded with marijuana. They said, “Come on Garniss. Let’s go down and have something to eat;” this was dinner. Dorette was away and I had planned to do that but I said, “You know, I feel very strange. I don’t know what’s wrong. I think I’d better stay here and go home.” “No, come on, come on.” “No”, I said, and I think at that time I took a nibble of another one, and I didn’t know what was wrong. Well, driving up through the park as I used to do, through Tilden Park, I was going along and a guy honked at me. I thought, “What’s the matter with him? I’m going fast enough, the speed limit.” I looked down and I thought I was whizzing along; I was going twelve miles an hour.
Swent: And you thought you were going faster.
Curtis: I thought I was going thirty-five. So I just had to really focus to get home and I got into bed and went to sleep, and the next day I felt fine. And of course, I figured out then, that it must have been— Now that was my only experience with marijuana. I would never touch the stuff.
Swent: Especially combining it with alcohol.
Curtis: Oh, gee, just awful. So we had these afternoons which were—because you got to meet the graduate students. They loved to come in and Bob was a great host at these things, and always spirited. We got a lot done; we got a lot of papers out with Bob. He got all his South American papers done, which I accepted as a thesis, and I tell you, that was very important work. He was one of the reasons that I joined the Institute of Human Origins, which occupied this place, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) on Ridge Road. This was 1985. The U.C. Geology Department had already hired Don De Paulo. Don needed new space and bigger, but he needed part of our space. We had this small room for doing analyses for flame photometer and heavy mineral separation. I realized that he wasn’t going to use my equipment, and I was going to be retiring in four years; 1989 is when I retired.
Bob, now divorced from Pam, or rather, she divorced him—that was a very sad story. I can see why, knowing Bob and his laissez-faire attitude about things, that that would upset her, because she was a go-getter. She recognized the possibilities, when they were in South America, to pick up arts and artifacts, native work. They traveled through the Andes picking up all kinds of things; rugs and you name it. She set up, first, a wholesale place here in El Cerrito, to bring this stuff in to sell to places in San Francisco, and then finally a sales of her own there. She kept that up for years. Bob would go down with her and collect these things, but he was not the husband that she—when she found that Bob, after he got his degrees, Ph.D., that he wanted to stay here and didn’t want to move away, well, that was to be with his children; they had two children. Kimberly was the first one to come along, then Kirsten.
He wanted to be with the family and Pam wanted him to go out and make money, because her father Marlowe was a moneymaker. By this time he was very interested in 128
research geology and he didn’t want to go out and just take a job to make money, in which you do what your employer wants you to do, “Go study this and see if we can make some money out of it, go study that and see if you can make some money out of it,” so that ruined the marriage.
The crazy thing was this—I met the parents and I liked them, but I did realize that the father was “What is geology for except to make money?” And actually, I told him of a possibility in the Sierra in which an old buried river channel, buried with young volcanics, on land all owned by Diamond Match, now Diamond Match International, had never been explored because of the water problem, which would be easily handled today. They could put in a shaft down the side, and they had about ten miles of virgin gravels buried by volcanics, that they could—Well, Diamond Match wasn’t very interested in this.
Diamond Match had hired me one time, for two summers, to go up and see what was on their several hundred thousand acres near Lassen, to see if they should kick off the prospectors that were on the land. A lot of prospectors were around looking for gold and some finding it—was anything valuable to—because if you didn’t kick them off, they could claim the rights to that property. I looked at what they were doing and there was really nothing— There were two things: there was this channel that nobody was interested in, that had once been explored where the channel comes out, and found this huge water problem, and the other was some perlite deposits, which might have been— I mapped out a huge perlite deposit for them, but they wrote it off. Now perlite is hydrated obsidian.
Swent: It’s used for wallboard, isn’t it?
Curtis: Yes, it’s used for all kinds of sound proof and heatproof things, much better than some things, like asbestos. So they took some of the sample I gave them, which should have been sent to a professional outfit, to do it the way they do to make it pop like popcorn. They didn’t do that, so they wrote it all off. Well, they tried to make it pop in the meeting that they held about this, with my report in hand, by taking some of these little perlitic things and heating them with a blow torch. You don’t do that. You’ve got to get it heated up slowly and then an intense heat, and so on. Well, they gave that up. It’s still a potential up there on their property. But Mr. Marlowe wanted to go up and see about the channel. He talked to them and found out that they weren’t interested, it was going to be expensive, and it was going to make a big mess on their property, and so on. They were in there for timber. In my report I assured them that there was not very much that anybody was going to get from this channel. Yes, they could rework the gravels, unless they wanted to—well, the whole thing.
So that was all I did for two summers and I got a little money from that. But this was Marlowe. And Bob got along with his mother and father-in-law—by the way his former father-in-law is dead but the mother is in her late nineties now; this is Pam’s mother, delightful person.
Swent: Now is Drake still here?
Curtis: Drake has, of course, he’s—I’ll tell you about that, that’s a sad story. But anyway, the marriage broke up because she had to have somebody that would have the drive. She’s 129
had several boyfriends after that. She’s never found the right person since, so she’s still single after twenty years, or more I guess now. Meantime, Bob met a person named Claudia Carr, here on the campus. Claudia was in another environmental group. She had been teaching at Santa Cruz. They had told her that she had not published enough papers and they were not going to raise her to associate professor, that is, she would not get tenure. She applied at Berkeley and got these friends to write one of the letters for her, before this was known, and she knew it was coming up, and got a job here. Then she meets Bob. What she had done with her thesis is work with—all these things tie together—she had worked with Clark Howell in the Omo River, where she had not been at all in anthropology, but interested in botany. She’s very intelligent, very astute in analyzing people. She convinced Bob that she was working night and day turning out papers, which was just total phony. Bob married her.
Now, Don Johanson here—we were by this time—because Bob wanted to stay with his children—we had asked and gotten permission from the dean and from the department to move my stuff over to IHO at CDSP. Don Johanson, who was running IHO thought that was a plum in his pocket. We were here when Bob married Claudia. Now Don had been in the Omo with Clark Howell. Don had got a Ph.D. from Clark Howell when Clark was at Chicago, so Don knew that Claudia was a flake—and a fake. When he heard that Bob had married her he says, “Oh my God, that poor guy.” When we moved over here we brought Tim Becker who did not stay for a degree, but was a person, brilliant as anybody here with a Ph.D. but not interested in academics, broadly read— he’s a sort of an encyclopedia of information.
Swent: Like Garniss Curtis.
Curtis: Oh no, I’m not, not at all. Anyway, he was very good. He worked in our lab before so we just brought him over here to run the instruments. Paul Renne had been a graduate student of mine; he doesn’t like to give me any credit for that. Ian Charmichael, he puts down as being his mentor. Ian had nothing to do with his thesis. I was the one that went out in the field with him, showed him the problems, and so on. Gary Scott, his good friend, actually showed him how to do paleomag and told him the problem, one of the problems in his work up there, which led to the best part of his thesis and his first publication. I’ll tell you that later. So anyhow, I moved—Alan Deino had done a Ph.D. but he hadn’t quite finished, and I brought him over with me. Carl Swisher was a student with Don Savage in paleontology, but the work he was doing involved work that I had done with Don Savage out here in the Basin and Range Province, so I was on his thesis committee but not in charge of it. This was the group I brought with me. But Paul was going to spend two years with Tulles Onstadt at Princeton, in the same work we’re doing.
Now as soon as we decided to move over here with Don, we decided that we needed new instrumentation. So Bob and I and Joan Travis’ husband—Arnold, he sold watches—we all went back and I talked to the people at NSF, and had a very good friend there heading the thing, so we had no problem—a guy that had gotten a degree here in mineralogy but now is running the geological part of NSF. We got approval immediately for a new spectrometer, a metal spectrometer. At that time we decided not to do the Argon/Argon. We were thinking of getting into that in the future, but I had told them that I wanted to send somebody up to Toronto to work with—Derek York—so I wanted to wait. 130
When we got the equipment, at that very moment we thought—we had, of course, our glass mass-spectrometers over here already, two of them. We got rid of one of those to make room to put the new spectrometer and ancillary equipment. About that time we thought—I had brought with me a guy named—no, that’s later, that’s a technician. So we got the idea that maybe this is the time, because Alan Deino said, “Well, I can program the thing,” and Tim Becker said, “There’s enough literature here. We don’t need to go up to Toronto to learn how to do this. We can figure this out ourselves. We can talk around and”—Brent had been into this for some time—“we’ll see what Brent is doing.” So we didn’t go to Toronto but now, if we were going into Argon/Argon we needed an entirely different set of equipment for fusing the samples.
It was at this time that I said, “I’ll go to Gordon and see if he’ll come up with it.” I think I told you how we had added up all the money we needed, which was only $55,000 for an argon laser for the ancillary and the valves and all that we were going to need for things. Gordon said to me, “This sounds very important but Garniss, I don’t like to be nickeled and dimed. Go back and think about this very carefully.” We did and we came up with $70,000. I phoned Gordon and told him, and got a check the next day, so we immediately started in. And in fact, we did all kinds of things. Alan said, “We don’t have to run this the way we’ve been running Potassium-Argon. We can automate all of this so that it all—the heaters, the valves, we can open and close the valves. We can automate this and do it all with a computer.” Nobody had done that. He worked night and day in programming this, which is very tricky programming by the way, and there were many problems to begin with. We finally got the whole thing done and guess who came down to see us? A student from Toronto!
Swent: Then they were learning from you! [laughter]
Curtis: They saw that we had automated things, so they went back and automated theirs, and got out a paper faster than we did. But what he said was, “We are the first ones to automate the whole process of Argon/Argon dating in Canada.” [laughter] But instead of us going up there—This group really had, we had a lot of very fine guys, just really outstanding.
Swent: The race to get published is always there.
Curtis: Always there, yes. But that was all right. Pretty soon, with the motivation of people like Swisher and Alan Deino and Becker, and later we got—I think ’87 was when Paul came aboard. Friction began with IHO. Now Don would have a meeting out here, and he had once a year a meeting in New York, where he invited a lot of rich—see he was depending entirely upon getting money. We were getting a lot of money from NSF but they weren’t turning out enough papers to get very much money from anybody, so they had to beg, borrow and almost steal. Don, while he knew his field very well—he got out of paleoanthropology almost altogether, other than to go to Africa to be with the Blacks who were finding his fossils for him, or whoever it was. Lucy was not found by him and he admits that; it was found by another fellow, I think his name is Wolf, is now a sheriff down in New Mexico some place, but was a student. Don had one other productive person. Don wasn’t turning out papers; he was turning out books, five of them, all on Lucy. We didn’t date Lucy, to begin with we didn’t date Lucy; it was dated by somebody at University of Connecticut, I think. Anyway, he sort of faded out. He never got into Argon/Argon. 131
Swent: You are always given the credit for dating Lucy.
Curtis: Bob Walter was close to Don and Bill Kimbel. We were having our lunches together and he would join them for lunch, and that was a bad division. But when we started getting papers out—by the way, we met Bob Walter, Bob Drake and I, and we offered him a job.Yes. Well, what happened was, Bob Walter was a person that had been in the field with Don and with Kimbel in Ethiopia at the time Lucy was found. He was the geologist doing their geological work. He collected the samples to be dated by this guy, not us, someplace in the east. The samples he collected were the wrong ones. There was a lava flow that had been altered, been chilled in water, and it was a strange composition anyhow. He picked the wrong stuff, so that the dates were wrong to begin with. I forget what he was getting. It needed somebody who had the experience with this, and also to find some volcanic ashes that could be dated; Walter found a couple. But it was a very crude calibration of Lucy and it wasn’t until we sent Paul, with Bill Hart, that really did the mapping there at Hadar—Bob Walter was involved but he wasn’t in a class with these other guys, particularly this other person from a school in the South—University of—I want to say Virginia, it could be that. It doesn’t matter. A very fine geologist and I’d known him years before. So the dates that now do this: 3.3 million years did come out of this lab. That was with Argon/Argon work and getting the right samples, and they were done by Bob Walter after he learned a little bit.
[Tape 12, Side A]
Curtis: Bill Kimbel, brought him here, for a visit. They brought him out to visit us and we liked Bob Walter and so we said, “Well, how would you like to join us?” And he joined us. But we made a big mistake. The thing was, we were going to have him set up—in Colorado he had been working on what is called fission-track dating, I think I’ve told you a little about that.
Swent: I think you have talked quite a little about that.
Curtis: He was going to set up a fission-track lab. Well the moment he got here he got into Argon/Argon dating and never set up the lab, for which he contracted with us to set up. This all led to trouble too; when was he going to do this? The critical meeting, one of the critical things, happened to be a meeting in New York and Sharie was working with me. She prepared a poster show showing the twenty-one papers that we’d done that year, or twenty-two, and what they were related to: “This one relates to the correlation of the dating of fossil mammalian fossils by Carl Swisher in a classic locality in New Mexico,” “This one…” and so on. The two papers that had been published that year by Kimbel, and another book that Don had turned out—we had asked Don if we could do this, by the way, and Don said, “Oh sure, that would be fine,” but he didn’t see what the result was, and Bill Kimbel did. When he looked at it and he said, “You can’t do that. Who gave you permission to do those posters,” I said, “Don did,” and he turned around on his heels and stomped in to talk to Don. Now when that went up it was—
Swent: Visual.
Curtis: It was very visual! I’m quite sure that the people that came to that meeting were impressed that IHO was doing a lot of publication. They weren’t noticing that it was all geochronology. Geochronology was a part of IHO and so—but those two realized that 132
we were stealing the show from them. We were not only dating things that he found there; we were dating things for other people in Africa too. There was this growing jealousy, enmity between us, and I’ve told you the rest of that breakup story.
Swent: Yes. That’s too bad.
Curtis: Before that happened I had been the director of BGC but Tom Hill, who was president of IHO, came to me and he said, “Now you’re going to be involved in this international”—I think I told you about ICOG, the Congress for Geochronology and Isotope Geology, met every four years. We had obtained the venue for the next meeting when we went to Australia, taking it away from UCLA and China and Mexico. I told you about that. It was going to be a lot but Sharie was in charge. The funny thing about Sharie—there she was, with us in Australia, and when we came out of the meeting and I said, “I never even knew that we were going to bid on this,” she said, “Why do you think I came here? I’m going to organize this for you. I knew you were going to do this.” We hadn’t talked about it at all. And she did organize it, what with various friends on the campus. We got space all over the campus. She did all of that; she ran the whole thing.
Swent: Now wasn’t there also an AAAS meeting that you were in charge of?
Curtis: That AAAS meeting was, let’s see, there was a Geological Society meeting that Doris Sloan—Do you know Doris Sloan?
Swent: I do.
Curtis: —that she organized. But the AAAS meeting—
Swent: There was some big meeting in ’84 that I think you were—weren’t you president of the AAAS at that time?
Curtis: No, no. Three years ago I became president of the Pacific Division, or as they call it, the Pacific Rim, which is California—Alaska isn’t in that—Mexico, Japan, and Australia are all part of the Pacific Rim. There are four sections to the AAAS, in which this has the majority of people in it. It doesn’t get the press that the eastern one gets but then there’s the national meeting of the AAAS, which comprises these four subgroups of the Rocky Mountain section, the Pacific section, the Northern and Eastern sections of the AAAS. So I was—not the national, but just this one—and that began three years ago when I was president-elect. Then last year I was president and this year I’m president emeritus, or whatever they call it. But you keep involved; they have two different boards.
Swent: Have you been involved with that for a long time? I should have and I think I do have the dates here. Has that been an important part of your activities?
Curtis: This, in the last three years, has been a very important part. I did have help with Sharie for preparing the meeting in both— The meeting I was elected was in Ashland. Then the next meeting was the national meeting in San Francisco, in which we joined forces with the national to put it on in San Francisco. Sharie helped with that and then with the meeting in—let’s see, what’s north of San Diego and south of— 133
Swent: La Jolla?
Curtis: No.
Swent: Carlsbad?
Curtis: No, it’s in California, one of the campuses of the university.
Swent: Between San Diego and—
Curtis: Los Angeles.
Swent: [?]
Curtis: No. That’s down at San Diego.
Swent: I don’t know.
Curtis: You do know. [laughter] Well I’ll think of it.
Swent: Irvine?
Curtis: Irvine, yes. She helped a lot with that. In fact, she came down with me to that meeting, well, of course she was in San Francisco.
Swent: This was just very recent.
Curtis: Yes, that was a year ago. Then she helped with the Hawaiian meeting this year. She’s been invaluable. She and Clem went over there with me to that one. He played golf of course; he loves golf. I love to watch golf. I wish I had learned to play when I was younger but I didn’t.
Swent: I was thinking that we should mention your professional organization activities. We haven’t really gotten into those.
Curtis: Well that’s very light. I was a member for many years of the Geological Society of America. When I was eligible to become a fellow of that and I found that I was going to have to write the whole thing and sing my own praises, I just couldn’t do it. Then I had a sabbatical leave to work in Rome on the Rome volcanics one year, and when I came back I found that they had—since I didn’t get any mail there—that they had cancelled my membership. A lot of people were cancelled at that time. About a year later they came begging to get me back on but by that time I had packed up all the GSA’s. I didn’t have room for them and I sent them all off to China. I never joined GSA again because I was now heavily involved with the—less in geology and more in isotope and physical geology. So I joined the American Geophysical Union—they put out the JGR Journal of Geophysical Research, but I never got involved in the politics of that at all.
Swent: I had these dates wrong. It was 1994 that you had your ICOG meeting. 134
Curtis: Yes, that was the meeting here that I chaired, but I chaired it with Sharie doing all the work. We both did a lot of work. We had this office here and she got a helper, a fellow named Paul Stockstad, Brilliant young fellow, just going to be graduating and getting into Boalt Hall. He was so fine. He said, “I don’t like the phone.” Now we had to do a lot of calling. People were phoning all the time and we had to have somebody handle that. We said, “Well Paul, you’re going to find when you get into law you’re going to have to do a lot of things that you don’t like.” Well, he handled those phone calls—I listened to him—he handled them so well, and he was so firm. “No, you cannot have an extra half an hour for your talk.” “No, they have to start on time; they have to integrate with everything else.”
And to various people who were going to chair sessions that—a fellow from Scripps, and I won’t mention his name. He has a terrible reputation. He wanted to control the whole thing. I had liked him up to that point but when I began talking to people— We got over 900 people, which is the largest that ICOG ever had, and it’s gone down ever since. It went to China after that and there were only about 300 in China. Then the next one, which was this year in Switzerland—I couldn’t go to that, unfortunately. I wanted to but I forget what, but I was doing something. They decided that there was just too much competition from other organizations so this was the final ICOG, in Switzerland, which is sad.
Swent: Yes it is.
Curtis: There was the Nier conference, which was organized since ICOG, which took a lot. Then there was another one named after another famous—geochemist conference, which moved alternately Europe and the United States. Those two together just— besides the International Geologic Congress, which meets every three to four years. Too much competition. Well, that’s all right, we had a great time.
Swent: We haven’t talked much at all about your family, Garniss, and we do need to do that. Tell me about the name Garniss.
Curtis: Well, let’s see, how’s our time?
Swent: It’s twenty to twelve. Tell me about the name Garniss.
Curtis: The name Garniss. Okay. That’s an old family name that comes from the Danes who moved to England, a group of them, in the twelfth century. That would mean 1100 something. They settled in eastern England and became part of the Hearfield Garniss family, cousins of my grandfather. They married back and forth and I don’t know just how that goes.
Swent: A family name then.
Curtis: My mother wanted to perpetuate the name Garniss. She had been named Elizabeth Garniss Hearfield, middle name taken from that side of the family. She wanted to perpetuate that name so she made it my first name. When she changed the name I had been given first, Chester, I had been— 135
Swent: You talked about all the names except Garniss. That was the one that you didn’t mention.
Curtis: Okay, that was where that came from. She gave it to me as a first name replacing Chester, and I haven’t given it to anybody. This was a curse when I was young. I was Sinrag—anything they could—I was Granite, but usually it was Garn and that was all right. As I’ve gotten older I rather like Garniss; it’s distinctive and when you—my son, with the computer, checked out all Garnisses in the United States. There is no other first name Garniss out of 200,000,000. There are other Garnisses in Florida and some other place where it is the surname.
Swent: And your daughters; you haven’t mentioned them. You’ve mentioned Dorette, but sort of in passing, and your daughters, sort of in passing. Let’s talk a little bit about your family.
Curtis: Okay, well, our first child I’ve talked to you about, about Christmas, Arizona, where I got my first job.
Swent: That was the interview that we didn’t get.
Curtis: While we were on our honeymoon—well let’s go back to where I met Dorette. I met Dorette in some of the classes I took at Cal. She was in general curriculum but she liked paleontology, and so she took some paleontology courses. I liked geology but paleontology is an integral part of geology. The whole geologic time scale, which wasn’t calibrated at that time, was based on the evolution of fossils and the extinction of groups of them at periodic times, so that the whole geologic column could be divided into major Eras: Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, the three Eras, and then subdivided into Periods, and then those subdivided into Epochs, all based on fossils. Most of those fossils were largely invertebrate, i.e. marine, because we have marine beds that go around the world, and some of them traveled around the world, so that beds could be correlated.
I took, then, courses in—and I loved these courses—in invertebrates. In the course I took with Tertiary ones, by this time I had been in two or three courses with Dorette. She was in a sorority, Tri Delta, not very far from the Fiji House, next block up. We started talking, and since we were sometimes going back for lunch we walked together and talked, and that led to romance and so on.
We decided we would get married. By the way, she did some work for one of the professors, Bruce Clark. He had trays of the same fossil but he wanted a description of the variation of these. This meant you had to know all of these little things. So she was drawing them for him, and she was very skilled at drawing, and picking out of hundreds, literally hundreds of these shells, the variations. And this is the way evolution takes place: one variation that fits the changing ecology here and the other one at the other end doesn’t, it becomes extinct. This one multiplies and becomes the dominant one, and so gradually and sometimes very quickly, as we’re beginning to find out in studying things going on in the Galapagos right now, some of these changes take place much faster than we thought before. 136
So we saw quite a bit of each other and that led to romance, as I said. We decided to get married when we graduated. Now I didn’t like mining engineering, I liked the geology, and by changing my major, which I’d finished everything except one course, by changing it to economic geology in the college of mining, I could extend a year to graduate with Dorette, and we would get married then when she graduated. Well, after I had made that decision in the fall of ’41 we had Pearl Harbor on December 7th, while I was enrolled. Of course I could stay on; I could get a deferment to finish. It was after that that they found a heart murmur and I could then apply for a job in a mine, as a mining engineer, because I had finished everything except that one course, which everybody told me was just dullsville. So that’s what we did.
She was a city person. She had grown up in Hollywood; they had first lived in Hollywood. Her father was an architect as was one of her uncles. She had three uncles and one aunt, Aunt Dorothy. Her father was named Walter. His older brother was named Pier. Walter and Pier made a company to do architectural work together. Emmett was an alcoholic. He was very handsome, a lady’s man. Henry was the youngest. He, ultimately, started the rapid blueprint company and made a fortune out of that, but he lost it all when he got Alzheimer’s and they didn’t kick him out. But that’s another story. I loved Uncle Henry, very sharp person. All of these people were very intelligent. It’s just too bad that Emmett got into alcohol because Pier and Walter did fabulous things in the Los Angeles area.
Swent: What was the last name?
Curtis: Davis was the last name, Swindell was the middle name: Walter Swindell Davis, Dorette Davis. By the way, Dor is for Aunt Dorothy and Ett is for Emmett. Walter didn’t like his sister Dorothy and Emmett was the black sheep of the family, and Dorette always felt that this was the worst name that they could have given her. I called her Drettsy, which she preferred. She had grown up there. They had done a lot of work together. They had made several—I think five—what they called villages. The only ones that I can remember were the French village and the Roman village, but there were three others. The French village was just taken to put a freeway in, was bought from them and sold. These were all in the French style and in the Roman style and other styles, and they were very attractive. In fact, she was living in the French village when I first knew her.
She had been brought up in Hollywood in her early years, actually before she went to school, they were there. By the time she was eight, Walter had made enough money that he was going to retire to Europe. She was born in 1922, so eight would be 1930. Well, wait a second, I’ve got things wrong. Her first trip to Europe was in 1927 I guess it was. No, it was ’28 they went first to Europe. He was going to retire and write the All- American novel. Well he wrote all right, but the stuff he wrote was just absolute trash, but a very brilliant person. They were going to live in Europe on the rents that they took. He said, “You don’t sell anything, you lease it, and then you get the money from your leases to live on and pay for all the things that go along with the buildings.” That worked for awhile but then the crash came.
The moment they got to Europe—the first year that they were there, her younger brother—no, there were just two of them. When they first went to Europe there was just Dorette and her older sister Joanne. Carlo was born in Europe, next in line—brother. 137
Esther was born after they came back to the United States. There were just the four kids: Joanne, Dorette, Carlo and Esther. Esther was the horror of the family, like all last children; just got away with murder and they hated her, and so on. She turned out to be pretty good. That year Joanne and Dorette were put first in a boarding school, Catholic school in Belgium; hated that. Then they moved. In France she was put in another boarding school. There were some months when they traveled but largely her mother and father traveled alone. At that time they went to Africa and out into the desert, they saw Morocco, they saw Spain. But then they came back and they took the children out. This was a whole year that they were in—and Dorette hated every moment of it. They did take them down to Spain and they were in a school there for awhile. They took them to the coast of Juan des Pins, south of Nice, where they rented a place and he worked on his novel for a couple of months. She did like that, but on the whole Dorette felt that her parents didn’t love her, this putting her in alone at this early age, totally—and she didn’t make friends with the kids around her easily. It was just torture for her whereas her older sister, two years older, got along fine: difference in personality.
Swent: Then she had to get used to Christmas, Arizona.
Curtis: Yes. So anyway, we end up in Christmas, Arizona and while she had done a lot of traveling, she had not lived this very primitive life in any of these places, which was just very hard. She wanted a child and of course the war was on and I was afraid of Hitler; I didn’t know what was going to happen then.
Swent: It wasn’t clear for awhile who was going to win that war. It’s hard to remember now but—
Curtis: It wasn’t at all. I said, “Let’s wait a little while and see what goes on. This could be terrible to have a child if things go wrong.” But finally she persuaded me and she got pregnant. When the time came, she had a friend, a sorority sister in Phoenix who invited her to come stay with her in the last weeks of the pregnancy, until the baby was born. That’s our first child and we had already picked out, if it were a girl, we picked out the name Penelope. Where that came from I have no idea.
Swent: A nice old name.
Curtis: We both agreed that that was a nice name and that’s what we gave her. Then, of course, I worked in the mine. I did all the engineering and the surveying that’s needed underground: computation of ore reserves, plotting how much had been taken out.
Swent: This you had talked about on the tape. What we didn’t get was a little more about the social life, the fact that there were very few people there.
Curtis: There were very few people there.
Swent: So Dorette was pretty isolated then.
Curtis: Yes, we were isolated. There were the two brothers that ran it, Sam and Frank Knight. Frank was the younger one. I remember celebrating his forty-ninth birthday. Lori was his wife. Sam’s wife was Gladys. 138
Swent: Did you play bridge?
Curtis: We did have some bridge hands, yes. I didn’t like bridge very much but I did learn to play bridge there. Fortunately, Lori and Frank, and Sam and my wife liked bridge, so I often didn’t have to play, but I did learn a little bridge. Here’s the thing: Dorette loved chess. I had never played chess. She taught me the rules; we played two games. I won both of them. She really was much brighter than I, but I had this wonderful—I say “wonderful”, it is in my genes to see things well in two and three dimensions, so I could see where things were going to move, and this is what you have to do, you know. I could see that I could love chess, but I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life spending that much time on chess when there were so many other exciting things to do. Those were the last two games we ever played, and it was very much the same with bridge. I read about bridge; I was given books. I could easily get into that and become proficient in it. I knew I could do that. Again, it wasn’t the kind of social life that I wanted, not at all. But Dorette had played bridge in the sorority house and she was very good at bridge. We continued to have friends that played bridge, so she continued to play bridge with other people. She liked to read, fortunately, too.
Swent: That’s a lifesaver.
Curtis: That was a lifesaver. She was an omnivorous reader. So while I didn’t play bridge, she read, and I was involved in a lot of—mostly science, but I did a lot of reading of other things. I was very fascinated with the archeology of the Near East and of Egypt. Whenever I got books on that, which was during college and after college, I did a lot of reading, and of course, a lot of scientific reading. So anyway, Penelope was born there.
Swent: When was Penelope born?
Curtis: That was December 1st, 1943.
[Tape 12, Side B]
Curtis: I had enough of a heart murmur that the army wouldn’t take me. Well, I’ve told you that story; they didn’t take me. But we just got up and moved all the way back—left the job, and I think I told you about a report that I did for them showing that they had another 700 feet of ore below them, which turned out to be very, very rich.
Swent: Yes you did. Was your second child born in Christmas also?
Curtis: The second one was not. She was born at Palos Verdes. Dorette’s father and some others had developed Palos Verdes. They planned the whole thing, laid it all out. He had property there. He built a small house for them to live in and then gradually began putting buildings in the plaza at Palos Verdes. I just loved his architecture.
Swent: You were at Shell by now and commuting back and forth.
Curtis: I was at Shell and she was down there and we were commuting back and forth; Saturday night, six day week with Shell in the field and I loved that. Then down to see her and that’s where Ani was born—we call her Ani now—Ann was born. That was largely Dorette’s choice and I’m not sure where she got it, but her sister in law was named, 139
strangely, Penelope Ann. That came along when my brother in law married her. I think he knew her at the time but he didn’t marry her until we were back in 1946 at college. He was in pre-med by that time and married to Penelope Ann.
Swent: The cousins all have the same name as them. [laughs]
Curtis: Very strangely. Penelope Ann Davis. She dropped Penelope and goes by the name of Ann, married to Carlo. So Ann was born at that time. Then back to college in the spring of 1946. I think I’ve told you about—did we lose all of my graduate work?
Swent: No, we’ve done that pretty well. We didn’t get Robin.
Curtis: That’s where I’m about to get. We joined what was, now Kaiser, was Permanente. There was a cement plant down near Monterey, just a little to the east of Monterey, where this person, Kaiser, who later got into Kaiser automobiles, set up a health plan there for the workers, which was very far ahead of health plans for anybody else. That quickly spread throughout the state so when it opened up in Oakland we joined it, through the university. That was 1946 and Robin was born in 1950, so we were in that already by that time.
Swent: When was Ann born?
Curtis: Ann was born in 1945 and Robin was 1950. Ann was born June 2nd, 1945, so for years, in fact even now, she’s June Bug. [laughter] I just call her Bug.
Swent: And Robin is still working with you.
Curtis: He, strangely, brilliant guy, I’m just awfully sorry. This was the beginning of the free speech movement and flower girls; there was a spirit that was antithetical to a lot of people in college. He got into smoking pot and having a lot of fun. He got two years of Contra Costa Community College work in where he did well in various subjects, “A’s” in—by the way, in high school he got the highest grade in the physics final. He said, “I was just so relaxed and I had no trouble with it at all, but I could hardly focus.”
So he finished two years at community college and then got a job—very mechanical, always was mechanical. From a little tiny boy he would go into the neighbors house and into their garage, and start playing with the valves on the washing machine, on the different things that they had there, just getting in to trouble all over the place. He had taken apart clocks at home and was very mechanically oriented. He worked in various auto repair shops and motorcycle repair shops.
Then he got a little bit more ambitious and he got a job up on Lawrence Lab, here at Berkeley. He was doing very well there but a physicist named—his wife is the sister of Ralph Nader and his wife is in anthropology here on campus, and has been for years. Milleron was her name. A physicist wanted somebody to work on some inventions of his, and this intrigued Robin so that he dropped out of the lab up there and went to work with Milleron, who had money, and set up a lab out in Kensington, down the hill from Kensington, near where later—well maybe at the same time—Narsai David set up his restaurant. Robin worked with Milleron, I forget his first name, for two or three years. Milleron was very impressed and he said, “Robin, you’ve got to go back and get a 140
degree,” because Robin solved every problem that came up. What Milleron was trying to do was make a metal of some kind. Oh yes, a super-conducting material was what he was after. These super conductors had to be very cold. Well, other people came along and beat him to the punch on getting a little bit higher temperature for the super conducting, which would mean you wouldn’t have to use as much coolant to keep it down there. Finally Milleron had to give up the idea, although he has had other ideas.
Robin went back up to the lab and got a job again. They didn’t want him up on the hill at that time; they had no work, so he went to work in engineering for a group of people. Since it was very close to where I was, I was very close to him, and we would have lunch together and do a lot of things. Again, his bosses said, “You’ve got to take courses.” But by this time Robin had married a German who had jumped ship from a tour ship and was living—Robin fell in love with her and she was doing hairdressing. He thought that marrying her would automatically make a citizen of her but it didn’t.
Swent: Not for awhile.
Curtis: She stopped drinking alcohol, all these things, and that stopped Robin. He had been a smoker; he gave up that altogether. He says, “Once in awhile I’ll take a drag but I don’t do it anymore at all,” and I believe him. We drink beer together and Romy will sometimes have—she will taste wine if we say it’s good at her place; they have wine there. She will taste it but she doesn’t drink it. She is just absolutely clean. She is a very strong willed person. She and my wife did not get along from the very beginning and that was too bad. I won’t go into a whole lot of detail.
Swent: It’s understandable isn’t it?
Curtis: Yes. Romy and Robin planned not to have any children. When she got to thirty-nine— they had been married four years at that time—she thought, “You know, I ought to think this through. It’s going to be too late for me to have children.” So overnight she decided, “Well, if I have a child now and another one when I’m forty-one,”—two years apart—, “we will have two children. She didn’t want just one. Well she got pregnant and she had twins, girls, not identical but they look an awful lot alike. So that was it. Now they are— they’ve been married seventeen years—and they’re fourteenth birthday was just a couple of months ago. Fourteen is a big year and they are very attractive looking. They have all the right shapes in the right places and so on, and the boys are crazy about them. Robin now is terrified that—
Swent: That they’re going to be like him? [laughs]
Curtis: [laughs] “Don’t do as I did, do as I say. I’m wiser now.” I think they’ve been brought up properly. They are very good-looking and very attractive and I think that they can be trusted, more or less, if anybody can. So that’s all happened, of course, this year.
Swent: That’s a happy ending.
Curtis: Well, listen, it’s after twelve. You’ve got to go, and I’ve got to go too.
Swent: Well, we’ve at least gotten your children mentioned. I didn’t want to leave them out. 141
Curtis: Well, I haven’t talked about Dorette and her clientele in psychology. I have a little to say there because friends that she made there I have today. Yesterday I had lunch with them, some of those psychologists, two of them that I’ve now known since 1954. And in the last twenty years this group—we’ve been meeting once a month in restaurants around the Bay. These were friends that Dorette made when she got into psychology.
Swent: When did Dorette die?
Curtis: She died in 1987.
Swent: This is still on incidentally, we’re still recording. I think we should at least just finish that bit.
Curtis: Dorette had had a spot in her lungs—she had had cancer of the breast and had her right breast removed. That was way back in the sixties. After five years you’re pretty free and ten you’re certainly free. Well, nineteen years later there was a spot that showed up in a lung. At first the Kaiser people thought, well, she had had pneumonia and it could have been scar tissue from that and they watched. In the spring of 1986, suddenly it began to grow and they said, “We’ve got to take this out.” I won’t go into all that but she did have it removed. This was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. They thought it was too long to be metastasized breast cancer. They wouldn’t biopsy it. They said if it’s cancer it could be spread. I’ve talked to five doctors since and they said, “This is just terrible.” Biopsy would have been easy and if they had biopsied it they would then have looked at her bones, which we found out later when her hip broke, that she had cancer all through her body, because that’s what happens. They should have looked before they took out the lung; they wouldn’t have taken out the lung. So she died in 1987. [phone rings] She went down hill, it was very very sad.
Swent: Yes. 142