Memorial to Fred M. Bullard 1901-1994 ERNEST L. LUNDELIUS, JR., WILLIAM FISHER, AND CLARK WILSON Austin, Texas

Fred Mason Bullard passed away quietly at his home in Austin, Texas, on Friday, July 29, 1994. Bullard was bom July 20, 1901, on Kikapoo Indian lands, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where his father had homesteaded. He obtained the B.S. and M.S. degrees in at the University of Oklahoma, where he also played the saxophone in the university band. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He worked for a few years as field for the Oklahoma Geological Survey. In 1924 he joined the faculty of the Department of Geology at the University of Texas, where he had a profes­ sional career in teaching and research for 70 years. He was actively working in his office on the last day of his life. Professor Bullard was known as an outstanding teacher, and he taught thousands of students. Many of these students made careers in geology, and many became pioneers in the petroleum industry. He was greatly admired and loved by his students, colleagues, and friends, and he kept in touch with many of them over the many decades of his professional life. The span of his career offered him the chance to teach the children and grandchildren of his early students, and during his travels he constantly met people who came up to him to say, “Dr. Bullard, I was a student in your class in 19__!” Bullard served as chairman of the geology department from 1929 to 1937, during which time the state of Texas implemented the building program for the central core of UT buildings sur­ rounding the main building. Fred Bullard played a large part in the planning and design of the first geology building. He investigated the design of geology buildings at other universities, helped draw the plans, and personally selected the furnishings. He designed the fossil and mineral friezes that decorate the building’s exterior, indelibly signifying its dedication to geology. Fred Bullard served as a visiting professor at a number of schools through the years, includ­ ing the University of Michigan, , the National University of Mexico in Mex­ ico City, Vassar College, and Northern Arizona University. He also served as distinguished lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum in 1945 and 1954, and in the Visiting Sci­ entists Program of the American Geophysical Union in 1966 and 1968-1969. Other assignments included appointments as a Fulbright Research Scholar in Italy, 1952-1953; Fulbright Lecturer in Peru, 1959; and Chief of Party of the University of Texas contract group at the University of Bagh­ dad, Iraq, 1962-1964. This group was sent under a U.S. Agency for International Development program to provide “technical assistance in improving education in the sciences and engineering” to the University of Baghdad. Nine professors and their families were in the group under his care, four in the sciences and five in engineering. Fred Bullard’s interest in volcanoes was piqued while on a U.S. Geological Survey expedition, in 1929, to Alaska, where he observed an active for the first time. This led to his appointment in 1939 as an assistant at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, where he worked under the famous volcanologist, T. A. Jaggar. This provided him with the background to do the seminal geological research on the volcano Paricutin when it erupted out of a cornfield in Mexico in 1943. According to his own account, “When Paricutin was bom, I was teaching a course on vol­ canoes at the National University of Mexico. I used it as a laboratory for my students, and for the Geological Society of America Memorials, v. 27, June 1996 47 48 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

next seven years I spent a part of each year at Paricutin studying the life history of this volcano.” He studied the volcanoes of the Central American countries from 1945 to 1957, and in 1959, he extended his work to South America. In the summer of 1960, he participated in the International Geological Congress field trip to study the volcanoes of Iceland. In 1962 he was a member of the International Symposium on in a study of the volcanoes of Japan. During the summer of 1963 Bullard studied the volcanoes of central Turkey and the Greek Islands. In summer 1964 he visited the volcanic areas of Africa, the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. During the summers of 1965 and 1967 he taught volcanology in a National Science Foundation Institute for High School Science Teachers. In 1965-1966 he studied the volcanoes of the South Pacific region (Philippines, New Guinea, New Britain, etc.) and attended the Interna­ tional Symposium on Volcanology in New Zealand. In 1968 he went on an International Geological Congress field trip studying volcanics in the Carpathian Mountains of Slovakia. During the summers of 1969 and 1970 he studied the Great Rift at Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho. Bullard’s research findings led to an original work on volcanoes entitled Volcanoes in Theory, in History, in Eruption, published by the University of Texas Press; a revised and enlarged edition, including information on the eruption of Mount St. Helens, was published under the title Volca­ noes o f the Earth. These books were best-sellers among the UT Press offerings. One of the prod­ ucts of his studies of Paricutin was a film on that volcano which he showed once a year to a stand­ ing-room-only crowd in the geology building auditorium. In his early days at the University of Texas, Fred Bullard helped organize and participated in the activities of professional geological organizations, including Sigma Gamma Epsilon and Sigma Xi. He helped organize the Institute for Latin American Studies during the Roosevelt “Good Neighbor Policy” days. He enjoyed lifelong membership in the Kiwanis Club of Austin and, after retirement, the Retired Faculty Association. He was a Mason, a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and a member of the Mineralogical Society of America, the American Associ­ ation of Petroleum Geologists, and Phi Beta Kappa. Fred Bullard’s immediate family includes his wife Evelyn Hereford, of Austin; his daughter Thais, of Austin and Taos; his daughter Peggy and son-in-law John Marshall of Westlake Village, California; his grandchildren Cindy Livermore, Lynn Marshall, and Scott Marshall of San Diego; two greatgranddaughters, children of Cindy and Jeff Livermore; and his step-children Lynn Here­ ford, Carl Hereford, Jr., and David Hereford, of Austin. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF F. M. BULLARD 1942 Source of beach and river sands on the Gulf Coast of Texas: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 53, p. 1021-1043. 1947 Studies on Paricutin Volcano, Michoacan, Mexico: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 58, p. 433-449. 1954 A volcanic cycle as exhibited by Italian volcanoes: Tulsa Geological Society Digest, v. 22, p. 101-109. 1956 Volcanic activity in Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 1954: Transactions, American Geophysical Union, v. 37, no. 1, p. 75-82. 1957 Active volcanoes of Central America (Vulcanologia del Cenozoico, t. 2): International Geo­ logical Congress, 20th, Mexico, D.F. 1956, Trabajos, sec. 1, p. 351-371. 1962 Volcanoes in history, in theory, in eruption: Austin, University of Texas Press, 441 p. 1984 Volcanoes of the Earth (second edition): Austin, University of Texas Press, 629 p. The (geologicalSociety ofoAmerica

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