chemist.
Bernie showed a map of an area in west Texas. It displayed the organic content of soil samples and presumably the high organic content was correlated to possible oil seeps. When Nat looked at the map, he smiled and said, “Oh, I remember that ranch. All the highs are around the water troughs for cattle. Their anomalies correlate with bull shit.” We recommended the proposal be declined.
In April, Apache, a small independent in 1961, made a major gas discovery in the Arkoma basin. Other companies leased offset acreage. Sinclair requested me to assess their opportunities with a report due in two weeks. I completed some field work, scoured all reports I could find, made an assessment, and wrote a report. Basically, Apache’s discovery was a stratigraphic play exploiting a strandplain/barrier island system. I mapped the extent of this play and made my presentation. When Sinclair’s exploration management looked at my maps, the landman at the meeting reported that all the good acreage in the play was leased by competitors.
The chief geologist asked me, “George, while you were assessing data, did you see any new opportunities that hadn’t been leased or discovered?”
I explained that on the north side of the Arkoma basin, I observed Atoka outcrops which looked identical to the Oriskanie Sandstone (Devonian) of the Appalachians, a well-known gas reservoir. I interpreted them as fluvial channel sands.
He looked at me and said “Don’t people at the research lab know that oil and gas only occur in marine rocks?” The meeting ended.
Eight months later, Apache found natural gas exactly where I told Sinclair to look for it. By then, I had left the company.
Gerry Freidman decided to stay at Pan Am’s research lab and declined Pitt’s offer. I wrote Frederickson applying for the job. He called two weeks later and invited me for an interview. He wanted a reference from Bernie so I called and explained the situation. Bernie gave a good reference. The interview went well, although I only met with Frederickson. Two weeks later, I accepted an offer to start teaching at Pitt that fall.
I gave Bernie my resignation letter and the first thing he said was “George, we invested a lot in you. Where’s your company loyalty?” I replied, “Bernie, remember when you, Chuck Tenney, and I rode in the car going from Beulah, WY, to Casper back in November and you said that company loyalty was a bunch of crap?” He looked at me and said, “You’re right. Good luck with it. But I hate to see you go to work for Frederickson”
A week later, Jimmy Johnson called me into his office. Bernie Rolfe was there as was the Vice President of the lab. They asked why I would leave. I explained I wanted freedom to pick my own research, that the inability to complete research with all the fire drills slowed me down, and there was a particular project in the UK on the Jurassic Great Oolite Series I wanted to undertake. They made a counter offer. They offered three months off during the summer during the next two summers to do field work in the UK, and they would pay me to do the lab work at Sinclair. I turned it down knowing they could reverse their offer any time.
I completed my reports, turned them in and said my good-byes at the end of July, 1961. I spent two extra days in Tulsa to visit the Carter Oil Research Lab and the Pan American Research lab representing the University of Pittsburgh which meant they could show me more of their work. I then packed everything I owned into my car and headed east.
LESSONS LEARNED:
1. When working as an employee of an oil company, one is an “at will” employee, meaning that the company can fire you any time. Therefore, it is best to build up and keep a cash reserve.
2. Risk adverse companies ultimately will fail or are merged into a more aggressive company. Sinclair Oil was merged with ARCO for their assets in Alaska.
3. When employed in a less-than-desirable location, use weekends to go out of town for R&R. While in Tulsa, I should have travelled on weekends to Dallas to counter the negatives of the Tulsa region. I learned later to do so when living in east-central Illinois.
Chapter 10
University of Pittsburgh (1961-1963)
The University of Pittsburgh was chartered in 1819 to serve the higher education needs of western Pennsylvania. It struggled because of lack of funds. During the 1920’s, the campus moved to its present site near the old Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. It was mostly a commuter school.
As a candidate the only thing I knew about Pitt was the discovery of the polio vaccine by Dr. Jonas Salk at Pitt’s medical school. Salk was an immediate university icon because of the fame he brought them, including the royalty income from the patent.
In 1955 the Pitt Board of Trustees appointed Edward Litchfield to be president with a mandate to upgrade the university. He was Dean of the Business School at Cornell and negotiated with a member of the Scaife Family who was president of Pitts’s board. The Scaife family owned Mellon Bank and Gulf Oil. Litchfield negotiated a side deal with Scaife which was never approved by the Board, and before he arrived, that Scaife family member died. Litchfield always believed he had resources to transform Pitt into the ‘Harvard of the Alleghenies.” Later events proved he didn’t.
I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in latest July, 1961. A. F. Frederickson let me stay at his home until I found an apartment. He lived in a large house with a very nice wife who was half Caucasian and half Native American. They had five daughters ranging in age from 6 to 17.
After unloading my rocks and books into my office, I found a furnished one-bedroom apartment in two days and moved in. I then drove east to visit my parents and made a brief visit to Yale. Sanders told me that Clark Burchfiel, who accepted a faculty appointment at Rice University, and I, were appointed to the two best geology academic positions in the USA that year.
John Sanders also told me he was chairing the 1963 SEPM (Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists; renamed Society of Sedimentary Research in 1993) Research Symposium on cyclic sedimentation and asked if I had any recommendations. I nominated Glenn Visher to talk about vertical sequences and explained what Glenn had developed. I also said that Glenn learned some of this at Shell so John needed to be careful how this was handled. Eventually, John invited Glenn to that symposium.
I also visited the headquarters of the Geological Society of America in New York City. I submitted my thesis to them as a possible Memoir, but it was returned in February with reviewer’s suggestions to break it up into several papers. I resubmitted one paper and wanted to know what happened. I met with the editor, Agnes Creagh who reviewed everything with me because two reviewers recommended further breakup and publication. A general paper on environments and sandstone petrology appeared in the GSA Bulletin in September, 1962, and one on sandstone classification in May, 1963. My paper on the Keuper Marl, submitted from Tulsa, was also accepted and appeared in March 1962 in Geology Magazine, a journal published by Cambridge University.
I owe Agnes Creagh an eternal debt of gratitude for spending three hours showing me how to put a manuscript in good order. When I thanked her as I left, she said “George, you will be training many PhD’s. I spent the time with you so you can show them what they must do to save me and my successor’s lots of time.” She was exactly right and if I did nothing else for my PhD students, it was to help them turn their standard theses into publishable prose which appeared in major geological journals.
The department of geology at Pitt, like the university, was undergoing massive change. The geology department had been at best, average. It was headed during the 1950’s by Chip Prouty who left in 1958 to head the department of geology at Michigan State. Norm Flint (BS, Univ. of New Hampshire, PhD, Ohio State) a Carboniferous coal stratigrapher, served as acting head until Frederickson arrived in 1960. Frederickson was an international authority on clay mineralogy, and I recalled reading his widely-cited paper on weathering at Yale.
Frederickson’s goal was to get rid of so-called ‘deadwood’ and rebuild the department with new people. He brought in Takesi Nagata (PhD Tokyo, paleomagnetics; Univ. of Tokyo) as a permanent visitor to spear-head a program in geomagnetism,