Memorial to Charles George Johnson 1914-1969

FRANK C. WHITMORE, JR. U.S. , E-501 U.S. National Museum, Washington, D.C. 20244

In November 1969, Charley Johnson and two friends and colleagues in the U.S. Geological Survey, Max Gardner and Mel Van Lewen, went elk hunting in the mountains near Denver, where they lived. Travel­ ing in a camper, they made their way into Arapaho National Forest, south of Hot Sulphur Springs. There they died tragically of carbon monoxide poisoning. Charley Johnson was one of the quietest of men, more because of modesty than from shyness. His elegant sense of humor was the low-keyed kind, and in presenting the results of his work he was the oppo­ site of a high-pressure salesman. Yet, often in his life he was in positions where it was imperative that he get across his conclusions concerning proposed engi­ neering activities to nongeologists. He was successful in this because of his integrity. He had a deep determination to pursue what is now called “environmental ” ; this was his life’s work from his first day on Iris first job. And, because of all these traits, it is not surprising that Charley was unflappable-a solid man who was a pleasure to work with and that he had so many friends. Charles George Johnson was born in Moline, Illinois, on September 26, 1914. His father, George N. Johnson, and his mother, Jennie W. Johnson, both natives of Moline, were of Swedish parentage. All of Charles’s grandparents had emigrated from Sweden to the United States. Charley graduated from Moline High School in 1932, during the Great Depression. As his father had little work, college studies were postponed. For a time he earned what income he could as a farmhand, truck driver, and trapper. In July 1934, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and was assigned to a camp in southern Illinois, where soil- control was being introduced. For Charley, as for thousands of other young men caught up in the depression, the CCC provided a wholesome and constructive experience. His supervisors, recent college graduates from whom he took evening studies, recognized his exceptional potential and encouraged him to seek a college education, as had his brother before him. In September 1935, Charley matriculated at Augustana College, Island, Illinois. Rock Island adjoins Moline; Charley lived at home and commuted to the college. Tuition was low, he drew on his savings of $300, and his father was then able to assist him. Nevertheless, he worked every summer from 1936 through 1941 as a pipe fitter for the local utility and also on a part-time basis while in college. At Augustana there is a strong tradition of geologic study fostered by Professor F. M. Fryxell, and the college has a notable record of distinguished graduates in the

102 CHARLES GEORGE JOHNSON 103 field. Charley entered wholeheartedly into the busy life of the young geology depart­ ment which had been established in 1929. A new building, Wallberg Hall, had been completed in the spring of 1935, and Charley lent a willing hand to the tasks of put­ ting the department in good order, conducting field trips, and instructing beginning laboratory courses. His greatest interest, however, was in the geology museum, which had been given a large room in the new building. His most ambitious project was to mount two large Jurassic ichthyosaurs, both acquired in such shattered condition that assembling them was like working jigsaw puzzles. Charley was a superior student and graduated in 1939 near the top o f his class. This record opened the door for admission to the graduate school of the University of Chicago. Financial support came from service scholarships (drafting, and tending the seismograph o f the university). Charley’s ingenuity and manual skill led him to design a stereoscope for viewing aerial photographs, and this instrument was adopted for class use at the university. Charley’s three years at Chicago were spent in a department staffed by professors as stimulating as could be found anywhere at the time: D. Jerome Fisher, J Harlen Bretz, Norman L. Bowen, Rollin T. Chamberlin, Carey Croneis, Francis J. Pettijohn, W. C. Krumbein, and Edson S. Bastin. His training in fieldwork was gained from a summer course in the Black Hills, taught by J. J. Runner of the University of Iowa. Charley’s third year of graduate study, 1941 to 1942, was disrupted by the effects o f World War II. With course requirements for his doctorate fulfilled and only a dis­ sertation to complete, Charley reached a decision, as did many other students, to forego his degree “for the duration.” Accordingly, in March 1942, following winter quarter examinations, he left the University of Chicago to join the Illinois Geological Survey. For two years he carried out field studies of subsurface conditions in north­ eastern Illinois, to determine the extent of ground-water resources and to aid in development of additional supplies for industry. Another effect o f World War II was the founding o f the Military Geology Unit of the U.S. Geological Survey. Its mission was the preparation of terrain intelligence: classification of the ground in terms of its suitability for troop movement, road and airfield siting and construction, location of construction materials, ground- and surface- water supplies, hasty , tunneling and underground construction, and re­ lated subjects. The subject areas were, naturally, those of then present or contemplated military operations. On-the-spot examination being impractical, the did the best he could with geologic literature, geologic and topographic maps, aerial photo­ graphs, and even snapshots by tourists, missionaries, and the National Geographic Society. Such techniques required a great deal of extrapolation from meager data, and the user of the reports, the engineer officer, was a layman. New types of maps and methods of data presentation had to be developed-the maps were based on physical characteristics of rock and soil, not upon geologic age, and the texts were mainly tabular and in telegraphic style, using as few words as possible and keyed directly to the map. Charley joined the Military Geology Unit in early 1944 as a ground-water specialist. The work o f the unit was done against rigid deadlines by teams o f four to six geolo­ gists, soil scientists, and botanists. The end result was a classified folio consisting of 104 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA maps with facing tabular text. Areas, and consequently scales, o f a given folio varied from a subcontinent to a single island. The folios were designed for use by military planning staffs in Washington and at the headquarters o f theaters o f operations overseas. The usefulness o f the Strategic Engineering Studies, as the folios were called, was soon apparent, and the result was a request by the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, that teams be established in the overseas theaters, where they could prepare more detailed studies related to specific targets and be available for consulting on short notice. One o f these, called the Engineer Terrain Intelligence Team, was set up at Central Pacific Headquarters in Oahu, and Charley, to the envy of his contemporaries, was selected as one o f the team, to serve under the direction o f Philip Shenon. He went to Hawaii in November 1944 and, after less than a year there, was assigned as a field consultant to the Engineer, Sixth U.S. Army, in the Philippines. He was posted to an Engineer Construction Battalion in San Fernando la Union in northern Luzon, where he advised in the field in the development of troop water supply and the location of construction materials. It was a tribute to his ability that he was selected, within the space of two years, for work at three widely different levels of intelligence. In recog­ nition o f his wartime service, he was awarded the Medal o f Freedom by the U.S. Army in 1947. At the end of World War II, Charley was assigned to Japan as one o f the initial members of the occupation forces. He was one of about five who organized the Natural Resources Section, General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. This section, in the years from 1945 to 1953, made a natural-resources survey of Japan that was probably the most thorough ever made of a country. Because of the sudden end of the Pacific war, the Japanese occupation was, during its first winter, a jerry-built operation, and the few geologists who, like Charley, happened to be in the Pacific theater when the war ended, found themselves shoulder­ ing great responsibilities for which they were not always fully qualified. By January 1946, competent -resources specialists began to arrive from the United States, and Charley, because o f his terrain-intelligence experience, was assigned to fieldcheck intelligence reports that had been prepared by the Military Geology Unit. This work took him to many parts of Japan and resulted in a series of critiques that were most valuable in evaluating terrain-intelligence methods. Working entirely from secondary sources, the members of the Military Geology Unit were well aware o f the areas in the Pacific theater that were poorly known geologi­ cally. Among these, the Pacific Islands were conspicuous. Harry S. Ladd, Assistant Chief Geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, had mapped the geology of the Fiji Islands and ever since had had a great interest in Pacific geology. He drew up and pre­ sented to the Corps o f Engineers a plan for geologic mapping of the major islands of the western Pacific Ocean area, and the Engineers agreed to finance it by transferring funds to the Geological Survey. Accordingly, a new section was established within what was now called the Military Geology Branch. It was the Pacific Geologic Surveys Section, with headquarters in Tokyo, and with Sherman K. Neuschel as chief. Ladd’s plan had given high priority to the Yap Islands because they are unique in possessing outcrops o f basement rocks of the West Caroline geanticline—metamorphic rocks of CHARLES GEORGE JOHNSON 105 the amphibolite and greenschist , with intrusive ultramafic rocks. It was decided that the Yap Islands would be one of the first island groups to be mapped under the new program, which was scheduled to take 10 years to complete. The program started with simultaneous mapping o f three areas: Okinawa, the Palau Islands, and the Yap Islands. Okinawa is large and complex, so most of the limited personnel were put there. A smaller party was assigned to Palau; Charley was sent there to get them started. This done, he took off for Yap as a one-man field party, bound for one of the happiest periods of his geologic career. Charley arrived on Yap in July 1947 and completed geologic mapping, for a publi­ cation scale of 1:25,000, in July 1948. He worked along with native laborers and guides, among whom, in the introduction to his final report, he singled out Falan o f the village o f Onean as a “tireless assistant and delightful companion.” On Yap, as everywhere, Charley made friends, and he loved the village life o f the islands. Besides the geologic map, the Yap report included maps (at the same scale) of soils, vegetation, construction materials, and construction sites; accompanying tables pre­ sented the results of engineering tests of the rock and soil types of the islands. In the accompanying text was a standard geologic description and structural analysis, geologic history, and a summary of the mineral deposits of the islands. The completion o f the Yap fieldwork brought Charley to a major decision in his life. Six years before,he had left graduate school with his Ph.D. work almost complete. He considered returning to school but decided to stay on in the Pacific. He was ap­ pointed Assistant Chief of the Pacific Geologic Surveys Section and for the next five years was busy with the exciting task of helping to administer that widespread opera­ tion with its complicated logistics. Another difficult job was seeing to it that a self- imposed task o f the Military Geology Branch was fulfilled-the publication o f papers on the basic geology of the islands, in addition to the applied geology reports prepared for the Corps o f Engineers. When Charley returned to Tokyo, he met Mazie Mills, who had been assigned by the Survey to work in the Pacific office. They were married in October 1949, and two sons were born: Stephen N., on May 28, 1953, and Christopher M., on September 1, 1955. In 1950, the disrupted the Pacific mapping program. The Tokyo office was almost entirely converted to preparation of terrain intelligence studies and to con­ sultation on operational problems in the field. Even when Charley was in an administrative job, he managed to get to the field, and this he did again and again during his career. After the Korean crisis was over, the Corps o f Engineers sent out a small vessel with a survey crew to establish triangulation stations in the northern Marshalls. There was room for a party from the Military Ge­ ology Branch, and Charley went along with F. Raymond Fosberg, a botanist, and F. Stearns MacNeil, a paleontologist. Although their visits ashore were brief, they visited many islands where few, if any, scientific observations had ever been made, and they were able to record valuable data. In 1953 Charley succeeded Neuschel as Chief of the Pacific Geologic Surveys Section. In addition to planning, staffing, and supervising the continuing field-mapping program, 106 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA a demanding part o f this assignment was supervising the design and quality control in the drafting and printing stages, both o f which were carried out by Japanese tech­ nicians employed by the U.S. Army. At this stage of the Pacific mapping program, the emphasis shifted from complex field logistics to equally complex report publishing. In 1956, Charley was brought back to Washington as Assistant Chief o f the Military Geology Branch. From December 1958 to February 1959 he was aboard the U.S. Navy icebreaker Glacier, which sailed along the edge of the ice in the Ross Sea and partially circum­ navigated the Antarctic continent. Charley published no reports on his Antarctic work, but he obtained field data and samples and was rewarded with an unusual distinction for a living person: a terrain feature, Johnson Nunatak, was named after him. The nunatak is at 74°52' S., 74°02' W., inland from the Robert English Coast at the base o f the Antarctic Peninsula. Subsequently this land feature’s name was given to the Johnson Nunatak Sandstone (Laudon, T. S., Behrendt, J. C., and Christenson, N. J., of rocks collected on the Antarctic Peninsula traverse: Jour. Sed. Petrology, v. 34, p. 360-364, 1964). In defining the formation, the authors stated (p. 360): “Perhaps the most significant geologic discovery o f the traverse is the occurrence of sandstones bearing a marine fauna o f Cretaceous age at this locality.” In 1970 Charley was posthumously awarded a Congressional Antarctic Medal and the Department o f Interior Antarctic Service Certificate. In June 1959, Charley received a welcome opportunity to return to his beloved Pacific islands. The Chief of Engineers asked that a consultant be assigned by the Geological Survey to the Office of the Engineer, U.S. Army, Pacific, with headquarters in Honolulu. The assignment was to be a one-man version of the old terrain-intelligence teams, with emphasis on consulting on engineering problems associated with the grow­ ing United States commitment in southeast Asia. Charley’s area of responsibility reached from Indochina to Hawaii, and north and south to the polar areas. The Johnsons settled happily in Honolulu. It is a real crossroads for Pacific scien­ tists, and Charley knew many of them. An added enrichment was his appointment, in 1963, as an affiliate faculty member o f the graduate school in the department o f geology o f the University of Hawaii. In this capacity he served as a member of Ph.D. committees for theses dealing with Hawaii and American Samoa. In 1964, the Survey’s commitment to military geology was waning, but there was an increasing need for similar skills in the field o f civilian . Charley was transferred to Denver and assigned to the Engineering Geology Branch, where he spent the rest of his career. One of his first jobs, on detail to the Special Projects Branch, was to study the feasibility of compiling engineering geology studies of the Nevada Test Site and to compile an engineering geology map o f the Rainier Mesa quadrangle as a pilot sheet. Charley’s principal assignment in the Engineering Geology Branch was to plan and direct a project entitled “Research on Geology Applied to Urban Planning and De­ velopment.” This was an outgrowth o f a suggestion made 20 years before by Edwin B. Eckel, who had been Assistant Chief of the Military Geology Unit at the end of CHARLES GEORGE JOHNSON 107

World War II. Charley had spent his whole career preparing himself for work in environ­ mental geology, and the effectiveness of this preparation is evident in the amount of work that he accomplished in the last years of his life. His first effort in the new project was in response to a request from the City-County Planning Commission of Lexington and Fayette County, Kentucky, and the Kentucky Geological Survey to compile engineering geology maps of Fayette County. This work, begun in July 1965, was finished in the spring o f 1966 and was promptly released at the map scale o f 1:24,000, a scale well suited for immediate use by urban planners. In 1966, Charley’s experience was drawn upon when he was asked to prepare a program issue paper on a proposed engineering geology investigations program for the metropolitan United States. His recommendations in this and other media were instrumental in the development of the Survey’s growing commitment to urban ge­ ology. While he was drawing up plans for application on a national scale, Charley was simultaneously involved in down-to-earth geology, always more to his liking than generalization. With Maxwell Gardner, who was later to die in the same tragic accident, Charley initiated a cooperative engineering geology mapping project for the Denver- Boulder area with the Inter-County Regional Planning Commission, which later be­ came the Denver Regional Council of Governments. This work was an example of how the urban geologist must spend his time not only with the rocks, but with the responsible officials of a city. Charley’s last paper, published posthumously in 1971, was written jointly with Max Gardner. Entitled “Engineering Geologic Maps for Regional Planning,” it out­ lines methods of presentation of data, use of the maps by nongeologists, and the obligation o f the geologist to maintain personal contact with regional planners. In short, the paper is both a distillation of Charley’s years of experience and a statement o f the part that geologists must play in our future civilization-a part that Charley played in a pioneering way. He played it so well that his life will be an example to those who follow him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF C. G. JOHNSON

1941 Use o f stereoscope with aerial photos in elementary geology: Illinois Acad. Sci. Trans., v. 34, no. 2, p. 169-170. 1944 (anonymous with others) Bonin and Volcano Islands: U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 38 p. ------(anonymous with others) Marianas (except Guam): U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 47 p. ------(anonymous with others) Mindoro, Philippine Islands: U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 34 p. ------(anonymous with others) Palau, Caroline Islands: U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 35 p. ------(anonymous with others) Ryukyu Islands: U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 35 p. ------(anonymous with others) Talaud and Sangihe Islands: U.S. Army, Office, Chief Engineers, Strategic Eng. Study, 31 p. 108 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

1945 (and others) and structure of northeastern Illinois [abs.] : Geol. Soc. America Bull., v. 56, no. 12, pt. 2, p. 1146-1147. 1946 Field checking of terrain intelligence reports [abs.] : Geol. Soc. America Bull., v. 57, no. 12, pt. 2, p. 1209-1210. 1956 (and others) Military geography of the northern Marshalls: U.S. Army, Chief Eng., Intel­ ligence Div., Hq. U.S. Army Forces Far East [T okyo], 320 p. ------(and others) Military geology of Palau Islands, Caroline Islands: U.S. Army, Chief Eng., Intelligence Div., Hq. U.S. Army Forces Far East [T okyo], 285 p. 1960 (anonymous) Water resources, southeast Asia: Multicolor map, scale 1:2,500,000, with tabular text: Engineer, U.S. Army, Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii. ------(anonymous) Construction materials, southeast Asia: Multicolor map, scale 1:2,500,000, with tabular text: Engineer, U.S. Army, Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii. ------(and Alvis, R. J., and Hetzler, R. L.) Military geology of Yap Islands, Caroline Islands: U.S. Army, Chief Eng., Intelligence Div., Hq. U.S. Army Pacific [T okyo], 164 p. ------(and Cole, W. Storrs, and Todd, Ruth) Conflicting age determinations suggested by Fora- minifera on Yap, Caroline Islands: Bulls. Am. Paleontology, v. 41, no. 186, p. 73-107. 1961 (and Blumenstock, D. I., and Fosberg, F. R.) The resurvey of typhoon effects on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands: Nature, v. 189, no. 4765, p. 618-620. 1963 Water supplies in the vicinity o f Khorat, Thailand: Engineer Hq., U.S. Army, Pacific, 3 p. ------Water reconnaissance, Khon Kaen, Roi Et, Kalasin, Sakon Nakon, Udon: U.S. Army, Engineer Hq., Pacific, 15 p. ------Status of geological and geophysical study o f the islands of the western North Pacific: Pacific Sci. Cong., 10th, Repts., Standing Committee Geology and Solid Earth Geophysics Pacific Basin, p. 155-160. 1964 Water resources of the Khorat Plateau, Thailand: G-2, Hq., U.S. Army, Pacific, 6 p.; 17 maps, scale 1:250,000, 80 p. 1966 Engineering geology of Lexington and Fayette County, Kentucky: U.S. Geol. Survey Open-File Rept., 19 p. 1967 (and Krivoy, H. L., and Koyanagi, R. V.) An unusual example of pseudoseisms resulting from military exercises: Pacific Sci., v. 21, no. 1, p. 119-128. 1969 (and Gardner, M. E.) Engineering geologic maps for regional planning [abs.]: Assoc. Eng. Geologists (Program, Natl. Mtg., San Francisco), p. 23. 1971 (and Gardner, M. E.) Engineering geologic maps for regional planning, in Nichols, D. R., and Campbell, C. C., eds., Environmental planning and geology: U.S. Dept. Interior and U.S. Dept. Housing and Urban Devel., Proc., Symposium on Eng. Geol. in the Urban En­ vironment, Assoc. Eng. Geologists, October 1969, p. 154-169.