Harry Hess Centennial

The Smilodon, a Web Supplement July 1, 20061

Harry Hess in the early 1960’s.

Harry Hess Centennial WebEdition Supplement, July, 2006

From the Spring 2006 issue of The Smilodon

Introduction to this WebEdition Supplement to the Spring 2006 issue of The Smilodon The authors of the original letters were asked to provide about 250-300 words. However, very few could keep to that amount. So it was necessary with limited publication space to edit the letters to fit the space available. A word count of the published, but edited, letters that appeared in The Smilodon is 6,092, whereas the word count of the complete letters (not including the late arrivals) amounts to 13,427. So only about 45% made the printed edition. Since many held to the smaller word limit, the big cuts were made in only a few very long letters. However, it was felt that so many interesting comments were made that the entire original texts as submitted should be made available. So here they are! We have made few changes, principally putting in the class numeral, and other information for identification purposes. In addition five letters arrived too late to meet the deadline. Their comments are included at the end. In addition, more photos were submitted than we could use, so we have included here all of those submitted, including a repeat of the original ones in the Spring 2006 Smilodon.

W. E. Bonini, EditorLaurie Wanat, Production Editor

The Smilodon, July 1, 2006


Harry Hess Talk By Dick Holland ’47, Faculty 1950-1972 In the spring of 1950 I was asked to come to Princeton to be interviewed for a job in the Geology Department. I had graduated from Princeton in Chemistry, and was then in my third year as a graduate student at Columbia. Harry Hess, the incoming Chair-man in Geology, asked me what 1 planned to do in my research. I outlined some of my ideas. Harry was pleased, and it became obvious that he was going to offer me a job. I demurred somewhat: “You know, I’m not quite 23 yet, and I don’t think I’m ready to teach anybody anything, especially not at Princeton”. Harry’s response was perfect: “You know, Dick; if we didn’t think that your lectures ten years from now would be better than the ones you are apt to give in the fall, I wouldn’t offer you the job.” Of course, my reaction was: “My God, they’re going to keep me for ten years!” As it turned out, I stayed for twenty-two. January 5, 2006 <[email protected]>

Atholl Sutherland Brown *54 on Harry Hess’ thinking 16 Jan 2006. A Note on Harry Hess and his thoughts leading toward conceptualizing the Mohole, deep drilling and the theory of Plate Tectonics. The facts of the following note may be well left to others in more elaborate form. In 1951 Harry gave a course supposedly for senior undergradu-ates that he called Advanced General Geology. It was attended by all the resident graduate students because not only was he thinking out loud but he welcomed discussion. With guys like Gene Shoe-maker present there was no shortage of this. During these sessions he started describing the dearth of sediments and sedimentary rocks in the deep ocean basins and gave figures for the amount that was missing. He felt there had to be a method of recycling them. I believe this soon led him towards concepts of possible solutions and methods of testing. 17 Jan 2006. A further brief note on Harry Hess and his global thinking that might be of interest. “In 1952, when I committed

myself to join the BC Geological Survey (then the BC Dept. of Mines, Mineralogical Branch), Harry said that I should try to start mapping the Queen Charlotte Islands. His thought was that its west coast dropped sharply from alpine elevations to deep oceanic depths and that there must be a reason. At the time the Queen Charlotte Fault was not known and the islands were virtually terra nova. As chance had it, six years later the BC Government was trying to encourage iron mining in the Province but at the same time was cutting funds for geological surveys. I, with the help of my boss Stuart Holland (Princeton *33), proposed that we start a mapping project to outline favourable areas for magnetite skarn deposit that industry could then fly. The government could hardly refuse. Consequently, I did map the whole of the Charlottes. The very large QC earthquake on the fault was the year before I started and I showed the small number of old soundings along the west coast were contoured wrongly and, when corrected, displayed a trench tracing the fault. Harry always thought globally and guided students to critical projects. Incidentally, we also found magnetite deposits.” <[email protected]>

Dave MacKenzie *54 In the early 1950s, the attention of many petrologists was on the granitization controversy. But Hess saw that the keys to understand-ing earth’s features lay at the other end of the petrologic spectrum, the ultramafic rocks, and in island arcs and ocean basins. Yet his breakthrough hypothesis of sea-floor spreading in the early 1960s was preceded by concepts that later turned out to be discredited byways. One invoked a primary peridotite magma as the source of alpine-type peridotites. Even in the face of contrary experimental data, he was reluctant to abandon the idea. Another concept he championed was the tectogene, a down-buckling of the earth’s crust to explain the strong negative gravity anomalies associated with many island arcs. Here is Jacques Béland’s *53 take on the tecto-

Hess the typist, 1932, at Princeton.

Remembering Harry Hess One hundred years ago, on May 27, 1906, Harry Hammond Hess *32, faculty 1934-69, was born in New York City. Although his life was shortened by a heart attack at the age of 63 in 1969, he had a profound influence on geologic thought in the 20th Century. Arthur F. Buddington *16, faculty1917-59, wrote an obituary in which he recounted the five lives of Hess’ remarkable life, “(1) as a family man, (2) a member of the family of Princeton University, (3) a mineralogist, geologist, geological geophysicist and oceanographer, (4) an officer in the U. S. Naval Reserve and a statesman-scientist, and (5) the organizer, fund-raiser, and administrator of the Princeton Caribbean Geological Research Project.” Hess’ intellectual accomplishments are well recorded in the literature, so here we look at Hess as a person and his influence on a generation of students - especially, on a group of students graduat-ing Princeton in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Graduate students of that era gathered in Calgary, Alberta, last September to celebrate the beauty and geology of the Canadian Rockies at the Third Princ-eton GeoGrads Reunion. One evening at the Buffalo Mountain Lodge in Banff was set aside to remember Harry Hess. Here are some of the thoughts and memories of him.

Acknowledgements: Roger Macqueen *65 was most helpful in putting everything together, including supplying some photos; Rosemary Barker recorded and transcribed some presentations; Ted Konigsmark *58, Peter Mattson *57, and Dave MacKenzie *54 sent photographs; and Don Wise *57 took over 200 photos during the Reunion, many of which are in the printed edition. We owe special thanks to Harry’s son, George B. Hess, Professor of Physics, University of Virginia, for family photos that appear in this issue. For space reasons, many essays were shortened, but the complete series of contributions will be appear on the Departmental website in early July. http://geoweb.princeton.edu/. Please note that the contents of this document may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without permission. For more information on reprinting, please contact us at [email protected].


Maracay, Venezuela, 1951. Left to right: Marge and Jim MacLachlan *52; John Maxwell, faculty; Raymond Smith *51; Harry Hess, faculty; in front of the Yellow Monster. Photo by Dave MacKenzie *54.

gene or tecto-Jean. I am sending the figure and Jacques’ approval by mail. (see figure). So even with his extraordinary intuition, the path to sea-floor spreading and plate tectonics led to some dead-ends. Note: Jacques has given me written approval to include his figure. <[email protected]>

Memories of Harry By Les Coleman *55, 3 January 2006 I first met Harry nearly a month after arriving in Princeton in August, 1952. I was in the office collecting my mail when Miss Law said, “Coleman, you should meet Dr. Hess”. I turned around expecting to see the distinguished looking gentleman I had visual-ized when I applied to Princeton - an image resulting from reading several of his well-ordered and elegantly reasoned papers and from his Germanic surname. Instead I saw an almost scruffy, far from clean-shaven character in khaki slacks and an open-necked shirt with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth After the academic formality then prevailing at Canadian uni-versities, the easy going camaraderie between faculty and graduate students at Princeton was a revelation. For me, it was epitomized by my associations with Harry. Among my most vivid memories of those years, is working evenings in his lab alongside him and Bob Smith*54, then his other research assistant. All of us (then) smoked and Bob and I learned that if you were sitting next to Harry at the microscope bench, you didn’t put your cigarette down on the edge of the bench next to him or soon he would unwittingly be smoking it. We also learned that if we were out of cigarettes, we could help ourselves to the Chesterfields, of which there was always a carton, in one of the left hand drawers of his desk in the office next door. Conversations those evenings covered a wide range of topics which, among others, included the persuasive evidence being presented for continental drift and that, on the basis of what we then believed about the physical properties of the crust and mantle, it wasn’t possible. This, of course, was only a year or so before Harry came up with the solution to the problem, i.e. seafloor spreading. While sartorial and housekeeping neatness might not have been among his obvious traits, Harry’s mind was brilliant and orderly; he was endowed with a wonderful sense of humor; and was one of the most considerate and generous persons that I have been privileged to know. <[email protected]>

Tectogene, or tecto-Jean drawing by Jacques Béland *53.

Memories of Harry Hess by Reg Shagam *56, December 20, 2005 To understand this let me remind you of a problem in the Coast Ranges of Venezuela which puzzled about 6 graduate members of Harry’s Caribbean crew. An E-W belt of quartzo-feldspathic metamorphics (Caracas Group) along the coast is in fault contact with an E-W belt of basic volcanics (Villa de Cura Group) to the south. The paucity of fossils and lack of radiometric age data stymied all efforts to establish the age relationships of the two belts. If the volcanic belt was the younger how come one never found the volcanics intrusive into the quartzo-feldspathic belt? If the reverse how come one never found pebbles of the volcanics in the Caracas Group, moreover what happened to the thick pile of sediment which presumably once overlay the volcanics in the latter situation? Harry solved the problem by proposing obduction of marine volcanics onto the continental margin. Keep in mind this was mid- to late-fifties...BPT (Before Plate Tectonics !). Harry’s idea when told now draws yawns; at the time it was mind-boggling science. Years later I asked him: “Harry, what gave you the idea for the obduction of the Villa de Cura?” “You did” I looked at him open-mouthed; “Huh?” “Yes. You mapped that fossiliferous limestone near the top of the sediments and showed its constant spatial re-lationship to the volcanics. Then Ron Oxburgh *60 and Alfredo Menedez *62 showed how the relationship persisted around the sharp ‘elbow’ of that contact as it was traced to the west. Clearly the steep fault separating the two belts must once have been sub-horizontal and then subsequently rotated. There was no possible continental source for the volcanics; they must have slid in from the Caribbean!” Once explained it was pretty obvious (and especially to me). The message was: “Trust your eyes and link them to your mind”! Harry had done such a thing many times before. Another instance of same was when he suggested that the beveled edges of guyots represented drowned wave-cut benches. How many would have thought of the idea that a short gently sloping surface under 1-2 km of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was a wave-cut terrace?! To a degree Harry’s mind operated on the Holmesian principle: “Eliminate the impossible; what remains, however, implausible


must be the truth”. It sounds simple but very few have been able to match Harry at that game. Me either.<[email protected]>

Stories about Harry Hess from Bill Poole*56, January 25, 2006 Your call for stories about Harry Hess brought out of my fading and not altogether trustworthy memory, this one about Harry’s smoking. Harry Hess (‘Triple H’ or ‘H cubed’ as some of us called him, to ourselves) in the early 1950s was a smoker, a great smoker, a nearly constant smoker it seems.

I can still picture those nicotine-painted finger tips. On one oc-casion, he was invited to lecture to geology staff and students at Columbia University and several Princeton grads accompanied him. Schermerhorn Hall it seemed to me was a modern building characterized by cleanliness and clanging doors, quite different from the venerable, well-worn Guyot Hall. Harry stepped up to the front of the room full of people, pulled out a cigarette despite many signs forbidding smoking, and lit it with a match while his eyes searched the room for an ashtray. Not finding one, he casually tossed the match to the floor in front of the audience and proceeded to lecture. It was hard for us from Princeton to suppress a giggle while seeing the look of astonishment on some of the faces of the Columbians. Harry was a smoker! <[email protected]>

Contribution from Manny Bass, January 18, 2006 Of all the class notes I ever took in any class, and school, I’ve referred to those from Hess’ Advanced Mineralogy, Saturday morn-ing, Fall, 1951, more than any others. His topics were thematic and the theses sounded repeatedly throughout my geologic experiences. But I learned almost as much just watching him work. Late one morning after Advanced Mineralogy, Shagam *56 and I talked to Hess about something or other standing around his x-ray machine. As we talked he powdered a sample in an agate mortar, smeared an aliquot on a slide with water or alcohol, let it dry, mounted the side on the holder, set the diffractometer, at 25o , I think, started the machine, and, about 0 seconds later, the stylus went off-scale, to return about 215 seconds later to baseline. Hess said, “Andalusite.” Elapsed time, about 12 minutes. I recovered from a gaping jaw enough to ask what he’ just done. A few years later the x-ray diffractometer was my standard tool for unknown minerals, and it plus the petrographic microscope for fine-grained rocks. A 40o whole-rock diffraction pattern, about 40 minutes on the machine, of an aphanititic volcanic rock or mudstone completes a “90%” description, including structural state of most feldspars, of an oceanic basalt, or a rhyolite or ignimbrite from the basement of the Central US about as fast as any other set of tools I know of.

Even the microprobe can’t beat that. But, for me, there’s much more to Harry Hess. He seemed to respect my observational abilities and always gave me serious responses to question I posed from problems that arose in my re-search , even very esoteric problems. And he listened and responded carefully to hypotheses. He didn’t challenge. He was collegial to us all from the day we entered grad school. Five minutes with him at a GSA or AGU meeting recharged my intellectual batteries more than anything or anybody else ever did. I can’t say that he and I were close buddies, but close enough. I miss him to this day. I’ll close with something more general, but still revealing. Hess told me that, as Captain of the USS Cape Johnson, he never returned stateside with any alcoholic beverages aboard. Any such stores left were always donated at his last port of call, and always to enlisted personnel.

Harry Hess by Peter Mattson *57, December 2005 Leila and Peter Mattson *57 spent about ten months in south-western Puerto Rico in 1954-56, Peter doing thesis research and Leila coping with everything else. Harry visited from time to time, exercising loose direction and giving encouragement. I mostly re-member his dropping cigarette ashes everywhere, but advising me to keep my geologic map up-to-the-minute, outlining and coloring to make it understandable to him and others. Leila remembers burning the toast at an early breakfast (I remember this as our honeymoon; Leila humpfs), and Harry calmly scraping off the burned parts and eating the rest. As a holdover from less healthy tropical locales, Harry ate no salads and consumed beer and rum, but little water. We rinsed all our fresh vegetables in weak Clorox solutions. He did, however, get me successfully through the thesis and de-fense, and even did most of the preparation of the thesis for GSA publication while I was in the Army. As I remember, it included the last large colored geologic map published in the GSA Bulletin, part of a 1960 special issue devoted to Hess student Caribbean theses. Largely due to Harry’s inspiration, the map showed that south-western Puerto Rico had a basement of serpentinized peridotite, possibly still part of the mantle or at least a very thick thrust slice coming from the mantle. Later work by fellow Hess student Emile

Hess on a field trip at the 2nd Carib-bean Geological Congress, Rosario, Puerto Rico, January 1959. Photo by Peter Mattson *57

Gathering at the end Caribbean Geological Congress, Rosario, Puerto Rico, Janu-ary 1959. Left to right: Emile Pessagno *60 and spouse (name thought to be Betty), Annette Hess, two ;unknowns, and Harry Hess, standing. Photo by Peter Mattson *57


Pessagno *60 and myself showed Jurassic and early Cretaceous radiolarian cherts resting on the peridotite, thus limiting the age of the mantle in the northeastern Caribbean. <[email protected]>

Professor Harry Hess by Finley Campbell, January 20, 2006 His broad philosophic overview of the place of Earth Sciences in the intellectual evolution of mankind was apparent in all of his remarks. The tools to study the earth ranged from all of the basic sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany and biology employed within the social and humanistic constraints of accepted logic. I can recall when our student group plotted to seek intellectual clarification of various aspects of continental drift and plate tec-tonics by seeking Harry’s advanced views on these topics in the mineralogy laboratory. There we could get him to draw relation-ships on the blackboard and elaborate on his theories instead of having us measure 2V’s on pyroxenes from the Stillwater Complex. The mineralogy eventually was completed but the pre-universal stage discussions became a very important part of the laboratory sessions. At the personal level I will never forget the day he came up to me in a corridor of Guyot with a letter in his hand and said it was from a department head in a university asking for suggestions of a candidate to teach mineralogy and crystallography and suggested that I should apply. I did not think of myself as a mineralogist or crystallographer or of having a university career. Harry thought otherwise, and here I am almost 50 years later. <[email protected]>

Comments on Harry Hess By Ted Konigsmark *58, October 19, 2005 Fifty years ago, as a new graduate student in the Geology Depart-ment at Princeton, I found myself in an unused classroom near the mineralogy laboratory participating in an impromptu discus-sion with several other graduate students - the sort of discussion that just “happens.” The topic of our discussion was mountain

building. Dr. Hess (it was not until later that he would become “Harry”) shortly wandered into the room and was soon involved in the discussion. To bolster his argument, one of the older gradu-ate students triumphantly referred to something that Harry had published in a paper some years before. I shall never forget Harry’s reaction. Harry cocked his head, gave his little smile and chuckle, and with a twinkle in his eye said “Oh – I don’t believe that any more! Here’s what I think now.” And with that, Harry went on to enthusiastically describe his new idea. At that moment I knew I really liked Harry. Although the discussion was about mountain building, Harry taught several other valuable lessons. The first, and most obvious lesson, was to always look at a problem with the newest and best information available. Quickly discard old ideas that no longer fit – even if your name is on them. The second lesson is to always seek the scientific truth. The truth may be difficult to see, and there may be digressions and U-turns in getting there, but the important objective is to get to the truth. The third lesson is that, with a smile and chuckle, you can enjoy, and help others enjoy, the trip toward scientific truth. During my subsequent career in oil exploration, there were many times when new data and new decisions came rapidly. At those times, I often recalled the lessons learned that afternoon and tried to use them as a guide toward making the right decision. It was comforting to know that Harry was there, at least in spirit. <[email protected]>

Comments by Ray Price *58, January 3, 2006 I didn’t have the privilege of being a research student work-ing under Harry’s supervision. However, I did take some of his graduate courses, and was deeply influenced by the example that he set. I will describe a few my memories about his style and his influence. The first day in his graduate course in mineralogy was truly memorable. We were a diverse group of new grad students with dissimilar backgrounds in the subject. Some of us had completed undergraduate courses in optical mineralogy, but at least one had never looked down a microscope. Harry wasted no time. After an hour or two of lecturing he assigned us the task of determining feld-spar compositions using a universal stage and the mineral samples

1959, field trip, 2nd Caribbean Geological Conference, Rosario, Puerto Rico. Left to right: Verners Zans, Jamaican Geological Survey; Harry Hess; Bill Benson, NSF. Photo by W. E. Monroe, USGS, courtesy of Peter Mattson *57

Hess in the San Juan de los Morros area, Venezuela, 1957. Photo by Ted Ko-nigsmark *58.


that he provided. This was a daunting chal-lenge for all of us, but his message was clear --- “you can all learn the techniques on your own if you have some guid-ance and are focused on meeting the chal-lenge”. Another mem-orable occasion was the appearance of an unusual invited speaker in the Department. Im-manuel Velikovsky had published some truly outrageous scientific

hypotheses in his attempts to explain some of the prevalent myths of the ancient world by revising contemporary understanding of archeology, geology, and astronomy. The grad students were ready to ridicule Velikovsky and his ideas, but Harry introduced him graciously, listened to him politely, and treated him courteously in the ensuing discussion. Harry’s humility and respect for human dignity set an example for all of us. As with many of the other speakers, one the most important influences Harry Hess had on my career was an appreciation of the importance of integrating different scientific perspectives in the quest to solve the fundamental problems of how the earth works. I was privileged to have known him. <[email protected]>

Al Fischer, faculty 1956-84, comments on Harry Hess, September 14, 2005 Harry basically loved mystery stories, and he liked to be something of a mystery man. Many of you may recall some of his conversations. He liked to tell stories. A story would start out very straightforward; he would say: “You’re going to learn some things here”, and then things would become slightly funny and peculiar and, after awhile, they’d be perfectly preposterous, and you would realize that he had been pulling your leg all along, and the big challenge was where did he switch from fact to fancy? This was impossible to tell, as he had rendered them so wonderfully. There are many stories about Harry that are funny, peculiar, and undocumented, and I wonder how many he invented, and how many other people invented. There is the story that he did not graduate from Geology at Yale, but from Electrical Engineering. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but you could easily check up on that, so that we would know the truth. Anyway, he came to Princeton, having done a year’s fieldwork in Africa. They had no base maps, they had nothing to work on, they were supposed to sample an area for copper ore, but there were no outcrops in the area. What they did, they had to determine true North, and then lay out a grid for pace and compass traverses, and sample the soil. Mostly they sampled ant heaps or termite heaps to get stuff. Meanwhile Harry had applied to Princeton. The story goes, and I have no way of checking on this, that the admissions committee had sat down, and they had nine people, they had room for nine and they had chosen eight, and number nine came along, and there

was a Canadian and there was Harry Hess, and the question was, who was going to make it? Miss Law was sitting there taking notes, and they had this discussion. When unanimity was reached, Bud shouted to Miss Law “It’s Harry!” Indeed, in the fall, Harry came, but it wasn’t the Harry that they had thought. They had voted for the Canadian, but the man who showed up was Harry Hess. Bud (Arthur Buddington) smiled gracefully and welcomed him; he never batted an eye, and that’s where things are a mystery! Whether this is true or not I don’t know. If this story was invented, I wouldn’t wonder if Harry invented it! It was like him, you know. I’ve often wondered about that picture that hung in Harry’s house, the little admiral, do you remember? It was a little boy, dreamy-eyed, looking through a window at the sea and a sailing ship out there, and this was passed off as having been a painting of Harry when he was a little boy. I would not be at all surprised if that was a much later gift or whether Harry himself found it and took a shine to it. He wasn’t yet an admiral, but he had become deeply ingrained in the navy, but anyway of course, he wound up an admiral. Well, you know the rest of his wonderful experiences, but mysteries remain, and I think it makes him all the more fasci-nating. There is one little other thing I’d like to say. He was very receptive to student brilliance, and there is a man here, with us tonight, who wrote a thesis. Harry read it, and after the guy had defended it, Harry looked at it, and said, “That man has courage - he’s got what it takes”. That from Harry was the most tremen-dous compliment, and I’m still just wowed by the man. Thanks. Transcribed by Rosemary Barker.

Comments by Hugh Greenwood*60, faculty 1960-67, January 13, 2006 It is a privilege to offer a few comments on how Harry Hess deeply affected my science and my life. After finishing a Master’s degree at the University of British Columbia and working for a year and a half as a mining geologist in Noranda, Quebec, I finally decided I should look around for a graduate school. Like many young graduates I applied to several schools, wondering if I would ever be accepted, and to my surprise was apparently acceptable to all. But the men I most wanted to work with were Harry Hess and Arthur Buddington, so in the event the decision was easy.

What I didn’t know when I arrived was that he was an admiral in the U.S. navy and was often away. It was hard to get his attention even when he was at Guyot probably because he had a lot more on his mind than the hopeful concerns of a new grad student. Eventu-ally after a couple of months I was able to show him what I had brought with me. I spread out my maps and specimens, filling the entire laboratory with material that I thought would be my Ph.D. thesis. There were some 300 carefully collected specimens, and several large maps of the volcanic rocks of Lake Dufault Mines. I was going to do the definitive study on volcanogenic ore deposits of the shield. Finally, Professor Hess came to look at it. He stood there and looked around smoking continuously for a good half-hour, and said “Very good, Greenwood,” a remark that puffed me up considerably for a moment. But then he said, “But you can’t do this for a thesis.” “Well, why not?” I asked. “You’ve done too

Hess in Washington, ~1967.


much (already). Do something else.” Whereupon he wandered, smoking, out of the lab. The thing is, the man was right - he changed my life in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated. He knew more about me than I knew about myself, and he hardly knew me at that time. I should bring this up too. There should be declared a new physical law. There is a thermodynamic physical law called Hess’s Law, but there is a more important Hess’s Law that I think we all understand, and that is that all horizontal surfaces shall be covered with paper to the angle of repose. Astonishingly Harry could al-ways approach that pile, pause a moment, and dig into it to find whichever journal article or letter that was needed. He must have been maddening for secretaries but he was fascinating to the rest of us. In another way for me he was life-changing. At the point when I had barely finished my thesis, and was employed, if you can believe it, as a physical chemist at the Carnegie Geophysical Lab he called up one day, and said “Let’s have dinner at the Cosmos Club.” “But Harry, I’m not a member of the Cosmos Club, that’s only for the elite.” Harry said, “Well, I’m a member, come and have dinner and we can have a talk”. Well, we had dinner, and we had quite a few glasses of this and that, and talked long into the night. I went home, and said, “Sylvia, let’s start planning to pack up; I’m going to be on the faculty at Princeton and I’ve got to go”. Harry made good changes in many lives. He sized people up, and made suggestions that seriously and beneficially affected the way they conducted their lives. To me, he will always be a great man. <[email protected]>

Some memories of Harry by Ron Oxburgh *60, Feb 26. 2006 There are three kind of Harry story – stories that Harry him-self told about his past, stories about Harry, told first hand, and stories that have been passed by word of mouth from generation to generation of students becoming embellished on the way! I will limit myself to the first two. Harry would tell his stories either late in the evening over a Cuba Libre or during the inter-minable waits – they could be for almost anything - that tended to be an inescapable feature of work in the Caribbean in the late fifties. I think that earliest chronologically was Harry’s account of how he got into the navy. In the thirties he had become very interested in the work of the Dutch geophysicist, Vening Meinesz who had devised a way of making gravity measurements at sea. Harry con-vinced him of the value of making gravity measurements at sea around deep ocean trenches and island arcs – both of which were poorly known at the time. Accuracy was, however, poor and they had the idea of improving the measurements by using a subma-

rine to get below the near surface zone disturbed by waves. They convinced the US Navy of the value of this work and an ancient First World War submarine was assigned to the project. The only problem was that it was not possible for a civilian to give a subma-rine captain the orders that would be necessary for maneuvering the vessel to make the measurements. The solution was for Harry to join the navy. In those days it was the prerogative of senior US admirals to simply create several commissioned officers by decree each year. No previous experience necessary! An admiral was found who had not used up his quota for the year and Harry instantly became a junior officer in the navy. The final step was to find a junior submarine commander with whom Harry would have equal rank. During the marine gravity work Harry could then consult with his civilian adviser and give navigation orders to the submarine captain! I cannot vouch for the veracity of the tale but that is how Harry told it. Many of Harry’s stories related to his time in the Navy during the Second World War. After the gravity work he had continued in the naval reserve and undergone some formal training. After Pearl Harbor (I think) he was called to full time duty. At one stage he was in charge of an office that coordinated intelligence on the movements of hostile submarines in the At-lantic. The information available was normally imprecise and incomplete. Ideally it consisted of a location, a direction of travel, and a speed. The aim was to judge what the enemy submarines were up to and to warn allied convoys accordingly. He began by choosing teams of applied mathematicians and physicists but that was not a success because they felt that it was impossible to draw any conclusions from such poor data and regarded the problems as insoluble. After several experiments he ended up with a team that was largely geologists who as he commented were “the only group that was comfortable with making confident predictions on the basis of terrible data”. If I remember rightly both Franklyn Van Houten *41 and John Maxwell *46 were at various times in that team. Harry used to smile wryly and comment on how highly his unit was regarded by the Navy. He explained that if the convoys encountered no submarines where predicted, it was assumed that they were submerged, and if they did the prediction was accurate! He also had comments on the relative effectiveness of German and Italian submarines. He believed that because the Germans were very efficient, once he had obtained a speed and a direction he knew where they were going, and to that extent they were predictable. The Italians, however, were by nature unpredictable and he claimed that where they went depended on the weather and the inclination of the captain, and he could never predict where they would turn up and they were consequently more effective. When he got a ship of his own he was able to interpret naval orders and procedures in his own way. During the latter part of

Rabbit doodles by Harry Hess.


the Pacific war he normally cruised with his acoustic depth sounder continu-ously pinging the sea floor. The rationale was that no military vessel would be crazy enough to announce its presence by doing this and that everyone would think that he was a non-combatant survey vessel. This allowed him to accu-mulate a many thousands of miles of surveyed tracks that ultimately saw the light of day in his seminal paper on the bathymetry of the

Pacific that was published in Bulletin of the GSA in 1948. The captain’s eccentricities became well known on the ship and all understood that he was interested in rocks. His crew did indeed bring him rocks even to the extent of grabbing rocks from the beaches of Pacific islands where they had been landing forces under fire! At some stage his ship’s crew had acquired a jeep, which made life on shore a lot easier. Ultimately this jeep reached the end of its serviceable existence and was more trouble than it was worth. The problem was that it was logged as part of the ship’s equipment and they could find no way of disposing of it in any way that would satisfy the bureaucrats. Finally Harry had it pushed over the side of the ship. It was then recorded as sunk, an acceptable way of ending the life of a piece of naval equipment! He used to horrify the captains of fuelling tenders while refuel-ing at sea. The conventional technique was apparently for both vessels to sail on nearly parallel converging courses and then to cruise at speed, close together, while the fuelling bowsers were con-nected and to remain that way until the operation was complete. Collisions were common. The captain of the ship being refueled always directed the operation and Harry’s approach was to order the tender to come to a dead stop while he did the same with his ship along side but several hundred feet away. He then sent bow and stern lines across to the tender and winched his ship sideways until the two ships were alongside and the fuel lines connected. Not very elegant, he admitted, but he never had a mishap. Scientifically, he said that his greatest excitement arose from an idea and some calculations that were totally wrong. After his discovery of guyots he did a calculation that suggested (in a pre-sea floor spreading era) that the different heights of the erosional guyot tops reflected the progressive filling of the ocean basins with land-derived sediment; the deepest were oldest and had been eroded at a time when the oceans were less full of sediment and sea-level was lower. I don’t know whether this was ever published. As a salutary tale about not paying enough attention to detail, he described how for years he had been aware of certain discrepan-cies in the x-ray data that he was accumulating on pyroxenes, and had simply chosen to ignore it as experimental error, improbably large though it was. Much too late, in his view, he recognized that he had been seeing the difference between othopyroxenes and clinopyroxenes.

For the earlier years of the Caribbean project in Venezuela, the country was under a fairly unpleasant military dictatorship and it was very easy to be thrown in jail for the most trivial act. Harry was put in jail by the police - I think only overnight - for walking across the Plaza Bolivar without wearing a jacket. This was showing disrespect to Simon Bolivar, the Liberator. When he pointed out that others were not wearing jackets he was told that they did not own jackets but would wear them if they had them. These were trying times and the approach that Harry found was most effec-tive for coping with officialdom was not to be able to speak any Spanish at all but to be endlessly patient, smiling and seeming to have no other wish in the world other than to oblige, if only he could understand. On at least one occasion when stopped by the traffic police and asked for his papers, he immediately responded by opening the hood of the car and with gestures demonstrated the motor. When they made it clear that they were not interested in the motor he operated the lights and showed them that they all worked; then the trunk. Then he opened his suitcase and started taking out his possessions. When they made it clear that they were not interested, he took them round to the front of the car and opened the hood once more. At that point they threw their hands in the air and gave him up as a harmless lunatic and went to look for bribes elsewhere. My first encounter with Harry was in 1957. I traveled from the UK to Trinidad by banana boat and thence to Venezuela. After I’d been a few weeks in the field with Gordie Taylor *60 in Margarita, Harry arrived in the course of his annual Caribbean tour. We met up in Caracas and then headed for the Araya peninsula, which was a potential thesis area for me. There was no land access to the pen-insula, an arid desert, and the only approach was by sea. For us this meant a trip of several hours in small and stinking wooden fishing boat. The outward trip was calm and easy and gave us a very hot and thirsty day in the field. In the evening, however, a storm blew up and the return trip was memorable. The problem was that it was necessary to carry a number of large rocks in the bottom of the boat for ballast. The boat rose to the crest of each large wave and then crashed down into the next trough followed a moment later by the rocks which showed every sign of going straight through the rotting planks of the bottom. Harry simply sat in the stern, chain smoking and watching the rocks with philosophical calm. Subsequently he confided that he too had thought that we would not make it to land. One winter in the early sixties (?1961/62) Harry was invited to come to the UK to speak at the annual British Geology Students’ meeting—sadly it no longer happens. It was being held in Cam-bridge that year and I traveled from Oxford to hear what he had to say. It was breath-taking—one of the first, if not the first, public expositions of sea-floor spreading, complete with the seams on the baseball analogy to explain the topology of ridges and trenches. Sir Edward Bullard who was Professor of Geophysics in Cambridge at the time had been invited to give the vote of thanks. He had not liked the talk. He was of the Harold Jeffrey’s school and was absolutely clear that if the Earth had the elastic properties necessary to explain its seismic structure, it had to be too strong to admit of the kind of motions Hess was suggesting. In his speech he thanked Professor Hess for his most interesting talk but confessed to being unsure whether it owed more to the science of Physics or Metaphysics! Only a few years later Bullard had Alan Smith *63

Hess, circa 1945, in the Navy.


working on fits of the continental margins! In the UK at that time central heating was not common and that winter was exceptionally cold. Harry was staying at the home of the Cambridge Professor of Geology, Bulman, the graptolite specialist. I asked him whether he was comfortable. He hesitated and then said that his bedroom was on the cool side—“you know if you touch the walls your fingers stick.” At the end of my second field season in Venezuela I returned to Princeton in the Fall and Ursula came out from the UK and we got married in the Princeton Chapel. It was a great departmental wedding but that is another story. Of course Harry was there and was due to propose the health of the bride and groom. The only problem was that in the chapel Annette spotted that he was wear-ing the jacket from a blue suit and the pants from a brown one so he was sent home to change before the reception at the Dick Holland ‘47’s house! In 1959 some Shell geologists organised a field trip in the Ven-ezuelan Coast Ranges. They had been working in a region adjacent to that which I was mapping and Harry and I were invited to join them. It had been an interesting but long day and, unusually, we had encountered a number of barbed wire fences. There were several very polite Swiss in the party and a ritual developed according to which one of the party would rush forward to hold the strands apart so that the rest of the party could crouch through. One member of the party, H, stood out; he was a man totally devoid of any sense of humour but invaluable before the days of data bases because he simply knew everything that had been written about South Ameri-can geology. Right at the end of the day we came across a fence that we could walk across because it had fallen down on its side where the posts had rotted at the bottom. On this occasion Harry, who had not previously participated in the ritual, ran forward grabbed the fence and picking it up held the strands apart for H who was at the front of the party. H duly started to step through the fence but half way through he stopped dead and then looked up at Harry and said, ‘But Professor we could have walked over this one.’ The rest of the party was incapable with mirth for about ten minutes. Harry’s mineralogy lectures were probably the worst classes that I ever attended. They consisted of Harry’s writing semi-legibly on the black board and muttering incomprehensibly with his back to the class and a cigarette in his mouth. In a curious way they were extremely effective because what became clear from those mutter-ings that we could interpret, and the words on the board that we could read, was that there were various topics that we were sup-posed to understand but of which we had no comprehension. As consequence we all went away and studied furiously and ended up quite competent mineralogists. Harry’s smoking was legendary. One wrinkle that I learned very early—from Gordie Taylor I think—was that Harry could only think when he was smoking. This meant that if you were taking him to a really complex outcrop where you needed his help, it was essential to make sure that you had matches and a carton of Chesterfields in your pack. You knew that if you ran out of either, Harry would first lapse into silence and shortly afterwards suggest that it was time to go back! He loved maps whether in the office or in the field and loved to gaze at them and ponder their significance. This was a highly tobacco-intensive activity. He would normally have one cigarette alight. He would then need to put this down to open up the map. He would then find something to hold the

map flat to free his hands to light another cigarette. He would then need to point something out and put the second cigarette down etc. etc.—it was not uncommon to see him surrounded by four cigarettes alight at one time. I was at the time, and continue to be, astonished by the way in which Harry could carry in his head the details of so much Ca-ribbean stratigraphy. His summer Caribbean trips lasted four or five weeks as he visited his various students distributed around the islands or on the mainland of Venezuela. Astonishingly he seemed to be able to shift overnight from one geological scenario to another and instantly recall and then discuss the excruciating details of stratigraphy to which his graduate students exposed him. Although some of his students were accompanied in the field by their wives others were not. After his visiting his students Harry always made a point of somehow coming across the wives who were back in Princeton for the summer and giving them first hand news of their husbands’ progress, It was much appreciated. Equally at the tenser time of thesis writing, he would from time to time have a word with the wives who as often as not were doing the typing. My wife Ursula recalls one such occasion when she was suffering from my waxing lyrical about the amazing colours of the rocks which all looked grey to her. She asked him whether the rocks were really like that. The reply was “Don’t worry, I never read the colours in their theses!” <[email protected]>

Reminiscences of Harry Hess by Eldridge Moores *63, De-cember 28, 2005 Harry Hess was one of the most influential and memorable individuals I have ever met. His personal invitation was perhaps the single most important factor tipping the scales in favor of my attending Princeton. My first encounter with him occurred when I first arrived. Miss Law escorted me into his office, and I was non-plussed. There was the famous man surrounded by stacks of paper and clouds of cigarette smoke, looking up of sleepily, and saying something like “Oh, hullo Moores.” I said something like “Thanks for all you have done for me”. And his response was something akin to “Well, we hope to do a lot more”. It was an unusual and warming experience for someone fresh out of the super pressure cooker of Caltech. Hess was a quiet lecturer. He was not particularly dy-namic or even well organized. But one soon learned to listen carefully. Similarly, in a conversational situation, when Harry started to speak, one learned to stop and listen carefully, because he would invariably say something fresh and worth listening to. My field experiences with Hess began with an adven-turous summer in Haiti fol-lowed by a month in Jamaica. Three students—Martand

Hess trimming a specimen, Magne-tigorsk, USSR, 1937. Photo by A. F. Buddington.


Joshi *63, Bill MacDonald *65, and I went to Haiti together, spent about 6 weeks, and then picked up Harry in Port-au-Prince and toured the areas in which we had done reconnaissance—mainly in the north. Arriving back in Port-au-Prince with a day to spare, we decided to drive to the south coast. Many hours later (one could average about 10 mph on Haitian roads), we came late in the afternoon to a critical point—a bulldozer parked on a tight curve with a soft shoulder high up on a hill, and luckily, the first other vehicle we had seen that afternoon—a Haitian Army Jeep with an officer negotiating his own vehicle past the barrier using the locals (about 50-100 of which would appear out of the bush whenever you stopped). We did the same thing. But we were “blancs”, and “Papa Doc” had recently made an anti-American speech. As we got back into the vehicle, Hess quietly said between puffs of his cigarette, “I think you’d better get going (puff ). These fellows have machetes (puff ) and it looks like they are going to use them”. We got out of there pronto. Reaching the local town, we forded the mouth of the river (with Hess directing us to disconnect the fan belt first), found a gas station, and had dinner at the local hotel. At 8 PM, we started back for Port-au-Prince so Harry could catch his plane the next day. It took us over 6 hours to make the 60 miles back to our hotel. This involved some 50-75 fords of a Bilharzias-containing stream, during two of which we drowned the engine. After the first drowning (I was driving), for a moment there was dead silence in the vehicle. The only lights were from lightning in the mountains ahead, and the tip of Harry’s cigarette. I climbed out, dried off the spark plugs with my handkerchief, the Jeep started right up, and off we went. Arriving back about 2:30 AM at the hotel’s self-service outdoor bar, Harry said, “I think we’d better have a drink” “And make it a strong one.” He took a long draft, put it down, and said, “I don’t think you should work in the Southern Peninsula.” As we were driving Harry to the airport, past one of the most horrible seaside slums anyone can imagine, Harry suddenly brightly announced “I know just what these people need—a brassiere factory. It would give them something to do, and it would give every woman a lift!” We spent a few days more in northern Haiti, while Harry wrote a hand-written penciled letter to the head of the Geological Survey in Jamaica, informing him he was sending two students to work there. Martand Johsi and I went to Jamaica, while Bill MacDon-ald went to the Dominican Republic as a field assistant for Curry Palmer *63. I would have continued working in Jamaica except for family problems—and I always regretted it, once telling Harry so. I think that he forgave me.

As I was finishing my thesis in Nevada, I heard from John Max-well about a project on a northern Greek ophiolite. I convinced John and Harry to let me have a crack at it, although Hess at the time took a dim view of the interpretation of a close relation-ship between the peridotites and extrusive rocks of the ophiolitic suite—thinking instead that they were independent. I traveled to Greece in Summer, 1963, returning to the US in October, 1964. Hess and Maxwell paid me a visit in Summer 1964, along with Don Wise *57 and Ron Oxburgh *60. Maxwell, Hess and I subsequently visited several Italian ophiolite exposures. We received a letter from Hess after the trip, thanking us, in his usual humble way, for the trip, and saying that he now believed the ophiolite story. The following year he published an article in the Colston Research volume relating ophiolites to ocean crust formed by spreading. Harry took a liking to the local wine of northern Greece, so when I left, I bought him a bottle from the restaurant—it was 75¢ for 1 1/2 liters, with a rag in the top, but with a 50¢ deposit on the bottle. I found a cork, but I expect that by the time my trunk returned to Princeton, it was well converted to vinegar. As I was writing up the Greek work, I ran onto the Memoirs of the Cyprus Geological Survey. The Troodos complex, Cyprus, looked like a possibility for ocean crust formed by sea floor spread-ing. After a two-day reconnaissance with John Dickey *69 in Summer, 1966, I wrote a report to Hess and Maxwell about it. Apparently the report convinced Fred Vine, faculty 1965-69, that it was a place worth looking into. He approached Hess and asked to take a look at it, but Harry apparently thought that it wasn’t worth his effort. Vine came to me and suggested that we look at it together. We went to Hess with this proposition, and he gave his blessing. With a year’s delay because of political difficulties, Fred and I went to Cyprus in Summer 1968. My wife Judy and 14-month-old daughter Geneva accompanied me. On the way back from Cyprus, Judy and I (and Geneva) stopped off in Princeton. I went to see Hess. When he learned that my family was with me, he told me firmly to bring them around to his house late that afternoon. As we walked in the door, Harry barely looked at Judy and me; he focused solely on our toddler, saying “Hello, let’s go get some toys.” The two of them disappeared while Annette entertained Judy and me for over an hour. Harry and Geneva eventually emerged with her calmly munching a cookie. We all have our Hess stories, and mine are just as numerous, funny, and fun to relate as others. But despite the terrible over-commitment that Hess experienced, I was impressed that he on several times showed a sensitivity and concern for graduate students who were not his own. For example, one point in Haiti, he asked me about Alan Smith *63, who had met his future wife Judy, and whether it was the right thing for him to do. I assured him that Judy was a fine person, and he seemed relieved. Harry was not always tuned into the “real world.” On one of our visits to the Hess home, Annette told us that on the way home from Europe, she had realized that Harry’s smallpox vaccination was out of date. So she made a point of looking for someone who might be forgiving. She spotted a burly fellow at one immigration counter who sported a big anchor tattoo on his arm. So she steered Harry to his line. The man said, “Well, Admiral, you have a little irregularity here, but we’ll keep it in the Navy family,” and waved them through. We all thought at the time that Hess was perhaps the one geolo-

Hess in his office circa 1960.


gist who had mastered the entire field of geology. In addition, he was humorous, compassionate, unassuming, and humble. A truly inspiring person. <[email protected]>

Bill Barnes *63 Remembers, January 30, 2006 I used to walk to Guyot with Harry in the evening sometimes, as we were both Owls rather than Larks at the time. I can’t remember much of our conversations and indeed there was very little of that, anyway. I do remember something about his not being able to digest milk as a baby and having beer in his bottle instead! I’m not sure if I got that directly from Harry or if it was just a story floating around about him at the time. It does sound apocryphal! What I most remember from the mineralogy course I took from Harry when I first arrived at Princeton is that he always had a lighted cigarette going in both ash trays at the ends of the demonstration bench in the lecture room, plus another between his lips. I remember the bemused look on his face when he would pick up one from an ash tray and try to put it into his mouth, only to realize there was already one there. As grad students we were used to him being a few minutes late for lectures, but when, as was often the case, he didn’t show up after 10 minutes or so, one of us would go and ask Miss Law where he was, only to find out that he was in Caracas or Washington or wherever! <[email protected]>

Reminiscences of Harry Hess by Sebastian Bell *67, December 5, 2005 I think I was the only soft rock geologist who had Harry Hess as his supervisor at Princeton. This was not my original intention and certainly not his! My entry into Princeton’s graduate program was smoothed by Ron Oxburgh *60, who inspired me to apply from Oxford, introduced me to Al Fischer (who was to nurture my growing interest in paleontology) and must have written enough to Harry for me to find myself on the “short list.” Harry sent me a brief air letter containing an offer of a Teaching Assistantship and asked me to let him know my decision quickly as there were others waiting in the wings. Naturally, I wrote back affirmatively as soon as I had informed Ron Oxburgh and Professor Wager (who performed a happy pirouette at the news—his wife was a former ballet dancer). In September 1963, Miss Law steered me into Harry’s office. He was standing behind mounds of unshelved books, some open, some on his desk but many on the floor around it, and was wear-ing tan canvass trousers and an open necked shirt. I was somewhat taken aback. On field trips, at lectures, and even when pirouetting, Professor Wager had always worn a three-piece suit and tie. “Have you got any problems?” Harry asked and I didn’t know what to say. Did he mean physical disabilities, or perhaps psychological shortcomings? But he was reassured when I told him I was living in the Graduate College. “I’ve put you in my old office, 505, in the Tower. You’ll be with two Canadians (Roger Macqueen *65 and Pete Temple *65)—they’ll look after you.” I acquired a bi-cycle a few days later and passed Harry on a corner along Prospect Avenue. He waved to me and said “Hi there, Sebastian.” I must have responded in some manner, but certainly not spontaneously. English professors didn’t wave at their students and would never have said “Hi”. Roger and Pete introduced me to the Geology Department at Princeton and told me about the course that Harry taught for the new graduate students. It was fantastic and they would be

taking it again. This was the Fall of 1963 and all the evidence and concepts supporting sea-floor spreading were presented to us with chalkboard, grubby slides and the ever-present cigarette. Harry Hess didn’t appear to prepare his lectures fastidiously. He knew what he wanted to tell us and came armed with enough slides to get the ideas across. He wasn’t dogmatic or strongly assertive, but he was powerfully persuasive. In fact, he did not introduce the term ‘sea-floor spreading” into the literature. Bob Dietz did, in 1961, in a short and sketchily documented paper in Nature that he wrote after having some discussions with Harry. According to graduate student scuttlebutt, Harry’s colleagues were incensed and wanted an editorial showdown immediately, but Harry apparently responded, no doubt in his quiet drawl: “Don’t bother, it’s probably all wrong anyway.” True or not, his reported response has remained with me to this day and has been a huge source of inspiration. He bore Bob Dietz no ill will, indeed they were good friends, and he was always aware that a hypothesis was just that. It was no more or less than the best explanation that you could envisage to account for the available data at the time, and new data, or better insights, could rapidly displace your “good idea.” Fred Nagle *67 knew him far better than I did and said that, when faced with a problem, he would often ask himself: “What would Harry do?” Fred also dared tease him, something I was too shy to attempt. Fred told me of one evening in the Dominican Republic, when Harry had been enjoying Cuba Libres and became quite boastful about his time in the Navy during the War. He was particularly proud of the speed at which he could leap out of his bunk and get his clothes on when the order to report to “General Quarters” was blasted over the cabin loud speakers. Fred decided to verify this claim. The following morning, while Harry was still asleep, Fred entered his bedroom with a saucepan and a geological hammer, and while he beat the one with the other, he screamed: “General Quarters, General Quarters” as loud as he could. Harry apparently leapt from his bed and was about to throw off his pajamas, when he realised Fred was standing in front of him. He was not amused. “Don’t you ever do that again, Fred.” But the visit was a success. Harry did not engage in much fieldwork dur-ing his lifetime, but he had an instinctive feel for it. It was more than a three-dimensional sense of rock relationships; rather it was an intuitive understanding of what was most likely. Fred is no longer with us. If he were, he would tell of how Harry sorted out his field studies after a day of visiting apparent-ly unrelated outcrops. “When are you going to show me a rock that

Annette, George, and Harry. October 1939. Photo courtesy of George Hess.


is in place, Fred?” Fred was mapping an olistostrome! My original thesis intentions evaporated as 1963 and 1964 unfolded at Princeton. The lure of paleontology lessened as I became more enamored of structural geology and sedi-mentology. There was the possibility of a thesis in the foothills of the Venezuelan Coast Ranges. “It’s south of Robin Harvey *64’s area, “ Harry told me. “There’s turbidites there.” However, Ron Flemal *67 had first claim on it. But then he

switched and went to California to study red beds with Van Houten, and the Camatagua Area was mine. Well, it was not quite mine! Harry realised that I couldn’t manage on my own with no Spanish, so he lined up Billy Otalora as my field assistant. Billy was Colonel Otalora’s son and therein lies another story of Harry’s sensitive philanthropy. Guillermo Otalora *61 had quit the Colombian army and come to Princeton in middle age at Harry’s invitation, and there he had completed first an un-dergraduate degree and then a Ph.D in Geology. Otalora brought his family with him plus, I suspect, some Colombian funds, but not enough to sustain them all reasonably. He was effectively in exile due to his being at bitter odds with the Government of the day. Harry provided him with support, a home and a new purpose in life. After finishing his doctorate, and with no change in the regime in Bogota, the Colonel stayed on at Princeton x-raying rocks that were likely to be found on the Moon. Harry acquired an NSF grant for this work and he assigned it to the Colonel. Apart from Billy Otalora, Harry provided me with a cheque for 1000 bolivars written on a Caracas bank that he said contained Caribbean Project funds. I didn’t need it, which was fortunate, because all the ink on it dissolved one afternoon when I and my wallet fell into the Rio Guarico! Before the summer of 1964 was over, Harry was in Venezuela visiting me and Billy, as well as Ben Morgan *67 and Judy Morgan. Initially, we traveled to other parts of the Coast Ranges. Harry had arranged for Alfredo Menendez *62 to take us to see the Tiramuto Volcanics that he was now interpreting as a klippe of Villa de Cura. The Villa de Cura Group was a widespread volcanic terrain that was suspected by then to be allochthonous. When Harry visited my field area, I was keen to show him that I was not floundering. We progressed along the main road examining tropically weath-ered sediments that I thought must be metamorphosed and which displayed a disappointing lack of sedimentary structures. Harry did not comment on my approach or my interpretations. He was more concerned that our Jeep be replaced by a better one and wanted to make sure that the area was mappable. “You should talk to Jake Pierson,” he said and took me back to Caracas to meet him. Jake worked for Creole, Esso’s affliliate, and had undertaken

reconnaissance mapping of the much of the Coast Range foothills several years previously. I learned from Jake that road cuts were a waste of time and that mapping freshly eroded rocks along the streams and rivers was the only way to go. Moreover, as Harry no doubt knew, Creole had the best base maps of my area and I was soon supplied with them. By the end of the summer, Billy and I had mapped a 5 kilometre wide cross section through the Camatagua area, aided in no small part by a much more reliable Jeep. Harry encouraged us to discuss our theses with others, and being part of the Caribbean Project meant that there were several fellow graduate students grappling with geologically related problems. Visiting speakers were hoisted on us as well. He urged Bill Mac-Donald *65 to invite Warren Carey to dine with us at the Graduate College one evening saying that he and Annette needed a night off! Realising that my Spanish was still even worse than my early attempts to map the Coast Range Foothills, Harry arranged for one of Princeton’s geology undergraduates, Mike Robinson ’66, to assist me in the field in 1965. Mike was from Texas and Spanish was his second language. He also suggested that we should consider living in San Juan de los Morros. The town had better facilities than San Sebastian, where Billy Otalora had (unknowingly at the time) arranged for us to rent the former village brothel as our field camp. Harry was right. We ate better in San Juan and found an English-speaking Trinidadian mechanic to service our Jeep. Harry came down that summer and I drove into Caracas to meet him. As always, he stayed at the Hotel El Conde and the next morning we walked down to the Centro Simon Bolivar and took the lift to the 19th floor of the Torre Norte, where the Direc-cion de Geologia of the Ministerio de Minas e Hidrocarburos was housed. Alberto Vivas was Director and Alirio Bellizzia the Head of the Geological Survey. Both men held Harry in the highest regard and it was touching to see with what great delight and effusive friend-liness they greeted him. They hung on his words, as did Alirio’s geologist wife Cecilia. After he had left, they would repeat what he had said and reverentially restate his opinions. Everybody respected him and loved him too. During those days we also visited Victor Lopez, former Director of the Servicio Technico, forerunner of the Direccion de Geologia. He was then a Professor in the Geology Department of the University of Caracas. Victor received us in a huge boardroom with a long table down the middle. This was ap-parently his desk for he sat at its head with a secretary on his left hand. Victor had, in a past life, amassed millions taking options on property in Caracas and then reselling them to the Perez Jimenez administration for freeway construction. A bid to overthrow the next Government landed him in jail and he was now making a comeback. Victor Lopez spoke with a complete lack of deference and most pompously to Harry, who let it all slide off his back and treated him as graciously as he did everyone else. As we left, Harry shook his head. “Victor once offered to make me Minister of Mines here. He was going to be President in a week or two he said, but I told him it wouldn’t work – I had classes to teach back in Princeton.” Harry took me with him to Shell where I heard him explain paleomagnetism to their Chief Geologist. In a few sentences he told him what it was, what it had achieved, what it might do and why Shell probably didn’t need it. This was not Harry Hess, the

Harry, Annette, Ontario, 1956 Photo courtesy of George Hess.


often ponderous lecturer of Guyot Hall, this was a quietly brilliant man who was comfortably astride a field that was not his own. He enjoyed these visits to oil companies. but they were a necessary duty because, in this way, he reported to the companies who supported the Caribbean Project and collected their annual contributions. He made sure that they all received copies of the Princeton theses and had opportunities to meet their authors. There was also part of an afternoon spent in the company of Guillermo Zuloaga, then in the twilight of his career, but who had known Harry since the nineteen thirties. Guillermo mentioned contracting bilharzia (liver flukes) and how it had made him incred-ibly sleepy. But he’d been cured, although the treatment wasn’t nice. There was little discussion of the Coast Ranges, which Zuloaga had been one of the first geologists to interpret seriously; instead he and Harry talked about the climate of the Caracas Valley which he was now studying. In San Juan de los Morros, we booked Harry into the best hotel and it was there that he told me he was resigning the Chairmanship of the Geology Department and that John Maxwell would be tak-ing over. Without thinking, I said: “Oh Harry. I am so glad,” and immediately wondered how he would take that, and if I should explain that I meant I was happy that he would no longer have to bear the strain of running the department. There was no need; he knew what I meant. He nodded and said: “Me too.” I cannot recall exactly what we looked at in the field that summer. Probably, we visited the serpentinites along the northern border of the map area. Harry made it clear that he thought all was going well. In January 1966, I went into Caracas to deliver my final monthly report to Alirio Bellizzia and to get my map drafted. I learned to my surprise that Harry was there. I’ve no idea why he had flown down and he didn’t tell me. Maybe he felt he needed a break and wanted to sit again in the calm shade of the Plaza Bolivar. I shared with him my fear that I had contracted bilharzia. I was often very sleepy. Both he and Alirio Bellizzia agreed that I probably had ingested liver flukes and they arranged for me to take tests at the Hospital in the University of Caracas. I would be back in the States before the results would be known, but would be informed of them. Harry promised that he’d arrange for me to get all the treatment I needed. Shortly after I returned to Princeton, he called me into his office and showed me a cable stating that I had no symptoms whatever! Before leaving Venezuela, I encountered Victor Lopez in a cor-ridor in the Direccion de Geologia. “Tell Hess,” he said, “that I will be in Princeton next week.” I did and Harry replied. “I hope he doesn’t come. He’s such an old windbag these days.” Victor didn’t show up. Harry never hassled his students. He left us to get on with our research and with writing up our work, but he was always ready to discuss an idea, or proffer advice if asked. He was anxious for us to be successful and insisted that Mike Piburn *67 return to Venezuela for three weeks to tie up some loose ends before finalising his thesis. He knew I would need a job and encouraged me to go to the GSA meeting in San Francisco in the Fall of 1966 to present myself to potential employers. He gave me a cheque for $300 for the trip and I’m sure it was written on his own account. I defended my thesis on a Friday afternoon in May 1967 at the end of a week when Mike Piburn and Walter Alvarez *67 had also presented their research. I had the easiest time because Harry

terminated the proceedings early, saying that he had to get over to the Registrar’s office before it closed to “make sure these people get their degrees”. In May of 1969, Harry wrote and asked me to introduce two new graduate students to the Venezuelan Coast Ranges that sum-mer. Support was, of course, provided and I did it with pleasure. Then, in August, I learned of his death. Ben Morgan *67 sent me a beautiful letter describing the memorial service and a visit he made to Harry’s office to say his own farewell. The next year my wife Jill and I were in Princeton on our way to Venezuela. We visited Annette Hess in the new house that they had recently moved into. The living room carpet was somewhat worn and had been with them for many years. Annette told us that Harry had walked up and down it pondering the implications of seafloor spreading. To have been one of Harry Hess’s graduate students was a co-lossal privilege and an honour that I cherish to this day. He was the most caring of men, often horribly overworked and over-com-mitted, yet always concerned for our welfare, and he was a person of genuine humility. I am sure this is what made him the great scientist that he was. There was no space in his life for ego-tripping, but as much room as he could make for amassing information and attempting to place it in a logical context. He lived in an age that did not demand constant publication and so what he wrote was timely, relevant and not repetitive. What he did not write often came out in conversation and, as he would have wished, frequently took flight in the publications of others. In this way he is still with us and, hopefully, with some of our students and collaborators. <[email protected]>

Further from Sebastian Bell *67, regarding Hess, January 21, 2006 Thanks for doing a Readers Digest job on my text. I’m looking forward to seeing the Smilodon issue. I hope someone has described Harry arriving at Maiquetia Airport with a suitcase full of baby things for Jess Bushman *58’s wife and their newborn child. Her mother had asked Harry to take them down and he told her to put them in a safety deposit box at Grand Central station and send him the key (which in that era was considered a perfectly reason-able thing to do!). So Harry didn’t know what was in the bag and no doubt was as surprised as the Customs Officer who lifted out diapers and nursing bras-sieres. As he did so, he enquired of Harry: “Por la senora?” As you know, Harry had little small talk, so he just shook his head and said “No.” The Customs Officer looked Harry over and a gleam came into his eye. He slapped him on the back and offered him the ulti-mate compliment: “Che hombre!” I cannot re-member who it was who

Harry Hess, Northern Rhode-sia, 1928-29. Photo courtesy of George Hess.


came to meet Harry and witnessed this event! I think Ben Morgan told me the story first, but I heard it repeated several times. Of course, it is possible no one from Princeton saw this happen and Har-ry himself was the source!

Some Harry Hess tales by Don Wise *57, January 19, 2006

Harry’s lectures were rarely well organized. Commonly they were a smorgasbord of miscellaneous data and ideas delivered in a quietly humorous monotone, punctuated with cigarette lightings and occasional absent-minded attempts to light the chalk. Rumor has it that he once put a cigarette into his pocket instead of the chalk resulting in a minor coat fire. Nevertheless, the superb content of those lectures periodically included some of the most brilliant observations and ideas of our time and more than compensated for his sleep-inducing style of delivery. One memorable “lecture” occurred in his graduate mineralogy course when Harry “taught” us how to use the universal stage to get feldspar composition. It went something like this, as delivered with a slight mumble across a cigarette drooping from his lower lip., “Well, we’re gonna do the universal stage today; we’ve got the microscope here; if you look in the top here, you can focus the eyepiece; it’s a long tube made out of brass; the light comes in the bottom here with a mirror so you can adjust it, and you have this universal stage here; it’s got five axes; you can rotate it here and here, and so on, this way, that way”. This went on for about half an hour, and then: “Once you have the thin section mounted, bring a feldspar crystal to extinction; then use this axis to get a second extinction. Read off those two angles and then use the Emmons Universal Stage Memoir to get the composition of the feldspar. Do that for these slides for lab when I get back next week. Uh, does anyone have a car here. I have to catch a train at the Princeton sta-tion in ten minutes?” And he was gone—that was it ! We all spent the next week sweating blood, trying to read Emmons and learn how the whole U-stage procedure worked. When Harry got back the next week, a very tired group of grad students had mastered basic use of the U-stage and turned in their results. About ten years later, Harry, John Maxwell, and I were visiting Eldridge Moores *63 to look over his thesis area in Greece. We were having a relaxed dinner after dark on a rooftop Greek restau-rant when I finally got up enough courage to ask, “Harry, what in the heck was going on with that lecture you gave us about the U-Stage. It seemed to be absolute nonsense?” He laughed, and said “You know, if I had described it in detail, you would have thought I taught you how to use the stage. What you really learned was that

given Emmons’s Memoir and a couple of hours you can use the U-stage anytime you want”. Sure enough, in later years when I had to do some petrofabric work, I picked up Emmons and after a couple of hours did just that. Later, when teaching my students how to use the U-stage, I would tell them this Harry story without going through his song and dance. That was type-locality of Harry’s lab teaching, a low key way of showing how to do it yourself, all with a twinkle in his eye. The other set of examples involves the last of Harry’s many sci-entific endeavors, namely the space science program and plans for exploration of the moon. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he chaired the Space Science Board, an advisory commit-tee to NASA and Congress on scientific aspects of the overall lunar program. A National Academy administrative secretary took care of the details but Harry chaired and “ran” all the meetings. His basic problem was riding herd on a group of strong-minded engineers, politicians, physicists, chemists and the like, none of whom knew a thing about field work in general and certainly not how to apply such concepts to geologic exploration of another planetary body. He needed some additional committee voices with a bit of field experience. During the early 60’s, Harry had encouraged and sup-ported me in fighting through to publication of a paper proposing origin of the moon by fission from the earth. Probably because of this and through Harry’s intervention I ended up as a field geolo-gist sitting on that board as Harry tried to keep some semblance of sanity and balance between science and engineering. Through much of the later part of the 1960’s I was privileged to watch and occasionally help as Harry chaired these critical meetings. A typical meeting would go something like this. About nine o’clock we would convene around a huge table and Harry would say “Well, we’ve got a problem here. Uh, Smith from NASA will tell you all about it.” With that Harry slumped down in his chair, while Smith started to go through a big stack of view graphs. At the table Harry sat with eyes mostly closed, stirring periodically to light another cigarette. After Smith, we were treated to additional view graphs and complexities from Jones from JPL, and so on. About noon Harry said, “Well, I guess we better break for lunch. We’ll meet back here at one.” The afternoon was spent discussing and arguing about the problems raised by Smith and Jones. Typically these involved selecting instruments to go on spacecraft, evaluat-ing proposals and investigators, picking target sites on the moon and the like. The basic problem in those days was that NASA had grandiose exploration plans, most of which were ill conceived from an exploration viewpoint or far beyond the practical limits of dollars or time. On the scientific side, many were determined that their particular discipline or instrument had to be at the heart of the exploration. Harry’s function was to maintain some common sense in the middle of a dream world of engineering possibilities and unrealistic demands of some famous but lab-only scientists. All this took place as Harry would sit there apparently half asleep. By about 4 o’clock it was obvious that we were at a complete im-passe. Then Harry’s quiet voice would break in. “Look-it. These are the facts: this, this, and this. What you really want to do are this and this. The different groups will react in these ways with this timetable. A recommendation probably should be such and such.” There would be dead silence for about a minute while reality sank in and it became obvious that this was exactly what should be done. There would be a 15-minute discussion of how the of-

Harry Hess and Annette Burns, wedding picture, 1934. Photo courtesy of George Hess.


ficial recommendation should be worded, a vote was taken and the meeting adjourned. In most of these meetings, Harry would have said the fewest words of anyone in the room but exercised the greatest influence on what was ultimately decided. Working through the Space Science Board, Harry had a major scientific influence on the Ranger, Orbiter, and Surveyor series of spacecraft missions and their triumphal culmination in the Apollo 11 landing in June, 1969. In August of that year, the space science community convened in Woods Hole to plan for the next Apollo missions. Harry opened and chaired that meeting which included three of his former students: Noel Hinners *63, Chuck Helsley *60 and me. After the morning coffee break, Bill Ruby took over the chair per Harry’s request. A bit later as we were having an outdoor lunch, word was quietly passed that Harry had gone to a doctor’s office, had a heart attack and died in the waiting room. It was a far more somber group that met that afternoon, but at least Harry had lived to see the successful end of his contribution to the most ambitious geologic expedition ever mounted. Chairing a session to build on that achievement seemed a fitting stage on which to end his brilliant career. <[email protected]>

Added after the Deadline:A Harry Hess story from Alan Smith *63, March 8, 2006 The one I like best, which like most stories may be embellished, concerns a graduate student, a senior professor, and Harry. As you may remember, one graduate student was dirt poor. He used to sleep in the Department (I believe) and cook his breakfast over a Bunsen burner (so it is said) at the crack of dawn, or earlier in winter, so that when people came in the smell had dissipated. One day, a senior professor came in early, caught him at it and finished a dressing down with the threat to tell ‘Professor Hess’ what had been going on. The student was very worried and hung around on the ground floor until Harry entered—probably at about 10 o’clock or so—smoking his proverbial cigarette. The student fol-lowed Harry up the stairs, explaining what had happened, apolo-gizing for it. Harry never said a word until he reached his office when he turned to him, took the cigarette out of his mouth with the words: “Didn’t hear you,” and went into his office. Now this is a story that brings out each professor’s character. But you may not want to use it. Besides which, there may be other and better versions around. <[email protected]>

Response from Bill Brown *57 on the HHH Centennial Issue, April 28, 2006 Dear Bill (Bonini ’48, faculty 1953-96) I am at a loss for words to express my feelings of joy and gratitude to you and Laurie (Wanat) for the “Harry Hess Centennial” issue of The Smilodon. I hope it’s not too late to share a few of my recollections of Harry, perhaps to be incorporated in the Departmental website in early July. Through the good graces of Cottie Seager (Aramco Exploration, Manager) and Bill Furnish (Chair, Iowa Dept.) I was introduced to and made application to Princeton in 1954. To illustrate how Harry sometimes “did business,” one morning in the winter of early 1954, I was told by Dhahran radio (without explanation) to meet the weekly DC-3 that serviced the exploration camps. When the plane landed, a very distinguished gentleman stepped out, came over to me, extended his hand and said, “Bill, I am Ed-ward Sampson (’14 *20, faculty 1925-59).” As we rode together

around the Rub al Khali on the way back to Dhahran, he explained that he was returning to the States from a consulting trip in SE Asia. More to the point, he asked me a lot of personal ques-tions in the course of what I felt was a very comfortable conversation. One thing really impressed him; as he looked down on the vast sea of sand, he exclaimed, “Now I can see how the Navajo sandstone was formed!!” In retrospect, that was my ini-tial interview by the Geology faculty. Finishing up four years of exploration in the Arabian desert, I anxiously awaited word from Princeton. Suddenly, we received a large packet from Housing with applications for family housing - but not a word from the Geology Department. Then, out of the blue, I received a personal telegram that simply said, “Dear Bill, Veni, Vidi, Vici ..... H. H. Hess.” That was it!! When I came back down to earth, I was able to complete my annual field report and set sail for home. Based at my parents’ home in Plainfield, I made my way down to Princeton one day, found Guyot Hall and met Dr. Bud (Arthur Buddington *16, faculty 1920-59) in his lab. After some warm pleasantries, he broached the subject of my qualifications in Ger-man and handed me Edvard Suess’ monster volume Das Antlitz der Erde saying, “Here, take this and translate it! Professor Hess will be back here in a couple of weeks.” When all hands were back at Guyot, I met Miss Law and she introduced me to The Man himself..!! Harry was happy to learn that we were settled in the Harrison Street housing project. Then, he asked me what I had in mind for a thesis. I confidently replied, “I want to ‘do’ the Miocene of the Persian Gulf Basin.” “Oh!” he said. “You’ve seen enough of that. I suggest you look at something new.By the way, have you ever met Erling Dorf...?” Within minutes, it seemed, I was face-to-face with Erling, who promptly asked, “Do you know anything about Yellowstone Park?” And the rest is history! Like all my “brothers,” I still stand in awe of Harry and the privilege he accorded me to study under the most terrific group of men I have ever known. Thanks again, Bill—and to all the guys who paid tribute to Harry. <[email protected]>

A Note from Bela Csejtey, Jr. *63, May 19, 2006 As a 1963 graduate of the Department, I read with great inter-est in the latest issue of The Smilodon the reminiscences about Dr. Hess, but was deeply saddened of learning the passing of Dr. John Maxwell, my thesis adviser in Montana. I was planning to attend the geol grads reunion in Canada last September, but some health problems prevented me from doing so.

Hess at Asbestus, Siberia, 1937. Photo by A. F. Buddington


While reading The Smilodon, a number of my own experiences with Dr. Hess came to mind, but would like to share with you just one. In the fall of 1956 I was a 4th year geology student in Hun-gary, but escaped to Austria after Soviet troops brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution. Escaping from Hungary I could not bring with me any personal papers or school documents. Neither did I know anybody who could vouch for me in the West or in the USA where I emigrated to in early 1957. Needless to say, none of this was planned but dictated by unforeseen events. In the US I wanted to continue my geologic studies, although my English was practically nonexistent at the time. While I was searching for possibilities to continue my studies, one day in the spring of 1957 I showed up at the Geology Depart-ment of Princeton, wanting to talk to somebody. To my surprise, Dr. Hess graciously granted me an interview. First he asked me to make a list of all my geology subjects I studied in Hungary, then he talked to me and asked a number of questions. I realized the importance of this interview, and I was understandably a little nervous. Finally Dr. Hess took me to the classroom next to his office, pulled a number of rock specimens from the cabinets along the wall, and handing them to me said: “Can you tell me what this is?” or “What can you tell about this one?” I did my best in my broken English, when finally he handed me a very odd-looking rock, a kind I never saw before. I looked long and hard at it trying to come up with a plausible answer, but I just could not. Finally, realizing that this might nix my chances to continue my studies, with a heavy heart I said, “Sir, I don’t know.” In a split second he came back, “I don’t know either.” At this I was not only pleasantly surprised and relieved, but felt instant admiration for the greatness of the man. In addition, I was flabbergasted, because in the rigid European university system a remark like this from a professor to a lowly student was simply unheard of. Later in the year I was informed that Princeton accepted me. In the first few months, I was slated to join Dr. Hess’s Caribbean project, but my special status in the US as a political refugee per-mitted only a single entry into the country. In other words, if I left the US for the Caribbean, even as a student, I might not have been readmitted. So Dr. Hess arranged for me to join Dr. Maxwell’s project in the Montana Rockies instead. Looking back, my fieldwork in the Rockies and my association with Dr. Maxwell was one of the happiest if not the happiest pe-riod of my life. Since leaving Princeton, nowhere did I ever meet such a group of brilliant scientists and decent human beings, both faculty and fellow students, as at Princeton. I feel privileged and am grateful for the opportunity to have been associated with such an outstanding Department and people.<[email protected]>

Harry Hess --- A Wonderful Human Being and FriendNotes from Jack Lockwood *66, Marrakech, Morocco, June 14, 2006 I first met Harry in 1961, the day I arrived in Princeton, when he sauntered by my new office, dressed in non-descript clothes, puffing an always present cigarette. I had no idea what the famous man looked like. He never introduced himself, nor asked my name, and I assumed from his demeanor that he was a janitor. I asked him a number of trivial questions about the weather, where to park my car, where I could dispose of packing boxes, how to obtain keys, etc. He answered in a methodical, janitor-like manner, then

shuffled off down the hall, pausing to casually say as he left, “Oh, I’m Hess.” When it was time that Fall to talk with Harry about a future thesis topic, I thought he would be delighted to learn that the USGS had offered me full thesis support to map a quad in the Sierra Nevada. I brought in maps, showing what was known about the area, and thought he would be impressed to know that there was a small serpentinite body amongst the metamorphic and granitic rocks. Instead he told me that “there was very little to be learned about serpentinites anymore”, and that what I needed to broaden my experience was “familiarity with stratigraphy and paleontology”. He offered me a chance to map an area in northern Colombia as one of his Caribbean students, and I accepted with joy, despite a lack of enthusiasm for a soft rock thesis. So far as I know, Harry could not possibly have known that there indeed were serpentinites in this unstudied part of the remote Guajira Peninsula, but indeed there were, and the “sedimentary” origin of these rocks became a major focus of my thesis and subsequent early papers. Marti and I had (unexpectedly) gotten married while I was on a post-General Exam winter trip to California in 1963. After re-turning to Princeton (where Walt Alvarez *67 and others kindly staged a memorable “Post-Marital Batchelor’s Party” at the Grad College), we had little time for adjustments to married life before I headed back to Colombia for final fieldwork. Marti stayed behind to earn enough money for her airline tickets. Harry planned to visit Walt Alvarez and me in the field in the spring of 1963, but the rainy season had begun early in the Guajira Peninsula, and it wasn’t possible to drive to Maicao to meet him for his field visit. Instead, he managed to charter a Cessna 195 to fly out to a dry area of the Alta Guajira, where Walt and I met him. We spent several superb days looking at field discoveries and problem areas by day, and sleeping in hammocks wherever we could at night. For all of Harry’s Caribbean students, his field visits were the highlights of our existence, and the one time we would ever be able to casually discuss field problems and thesis foci, as we knew he had more important problems to deal with in Princeton. I had been hoarding questions for Harry all spring, and kept asking his opinions about mapping problems and regional correlations within the broader Caribbean context. He never answered my questions in any serious way, however, and I lost hope of ever learning his thoughts. Harry had an “important NAS meeting” to attend in California after his field visit (critical decisions about lunar astronaut qualifica-tions needed to be made), and when no airplane arrived to take him back to civilization on the appointed day, we had to figure some means to transport Hess back to Maicao and its airport. There was no room in the Land Rover for Walt, so Hess and I headed off alone for the long drive to Maicao (normally 6 hours or so). An endless sea of mud now covered the area to be traversed, however, and mud was incredibly deep in the truck tracks we had to follow. We frequently became near-hopelessly bogged down in deep mud wallows under a blazing sun. Sometimes we were able to recruit a few dozen Guajiro Indians to pull us out of mud holes, but in other places no help was to be found, and we relied on the Rover’s capistan winch and a long manila rope. This required anchoring one end of the rope to a tree, with Harry pulling the other end to maintain tension around the winch. Once the Rover started to move, Hess had to keep the rope tight as he backed away from the road. Mud holes and prickly pear cactus were frequently en-


countered, and more than once poor Harry backed into vicious “pringamosa” (a stinging nettle that instantly raised painful welts). Miraculously, we eventually reached Maicao very late at night, completely exhausted, and managed to find two DDT-greasy rooms in a small hotel. There were no showers, and Hess was still mud-covered for his flights to attend the forthcoming meeting at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, but he seemed in no mood to sleep after our harrowing journey. We would have enjoyed several Cuba libres, but the bars were closed, and all I had to offer was a bottle of cheap scotch and a maid could only find some warm bottles of orange soda. Harry said “better than nothing”, so we poured scotch into the soda bottles, and stayed up for a few hours to relax and reminisce about the day’s adventures. Harry had some delight-fully randy comments to make about the buxom maid that night, but said nothing of more import, until about 2 or 3 in the morn-ing, when he announced he was tired and needed to sleep a little before his early morning flight to Cartagena. “But, first—about your questions”, and he proceeded to answer every single geologic question that I had asked him over the past week—wonderfully detailed answers that integrated my Guajira findings with the grand scheme of Caribbean history and tectonics. He had obviously been formulating his answers over the past several days! I helped Harry carry his luggage up the steep aisle of the DC-3 the next morning, bade him adieu, and thought this was the end of Harry’s input for this visit. I headed off on my own 3-day driv-ing adventure through deep mud to Cartagena, where I was to meet my new bride, Marti, who had finally earned enough money for her airline ticket to join me. When I arrived in Cartagena, I checked the “Princeton Apartado Aereo,” and found an envelope containing a long letter Harry had written to me while flying to Bogota a few days earlier. I expected more thoughts about my map problems, but instead found a warm personal letter about married life. He wrote that adjusting to a primitive field life in the Guajira would not be easy for Marti, and that I would need to be gentle and understanding. He wrote about the critical need for me to focus on Marti’s problems, and to realize that her concerns would be far more important than mine. It was a wonderful “fatherly” letter—a window into the deep concern that Harry felt for all his students. <[email protected]>

Harry Hess from Ralph Moberly *56, Hawaii, June 23, 2006 Acknowledgment of Harry’s influence on my decision to enter undergraduate geology was in my Hess Volume paper on the ad-vancement of arcs as the lithosphere sinks away before them (GSA Memoir 132, 1972). This story is about graduate-student support, and cutting red tape. I was offered a teaching assistantship for the first two years in graduate school, and my tuition was paid through the GI Bill. My first year was the first year the new NSF offered one-year fellowships, and I applied for one. Successful fellowship news, however, came with further rules than were in the original announcement. The fellowship was for instruction and research, disallowing teaching or other service, so I could not hold both fellowship and assistantship. I could not receive funds from two federal sources at the same time, so I had to choose between the TA and NSF. I went through some calculations that included tuition and all, and saw that I would receive a few hundred dollars more from an assistantship plus the GI Bill than from NSF alone. I went in to tell Harry that I had won the fellowship, but explained why I

would decline it and continue the assistantship. He listened, asked what the exact difference was (not even glancing at my figures), told me not to send my answer to NSF that day, put on his hat and coat, and left. Less than an hour later Miss Law phoned that he wanted to see me. Harry gave me a check for the amount, told me to endorse it to the university, and to take the fellowship; the assistantship could go to another. Years later I heard from two dif-ferent faculty sources that Harry’s creative financing used to send the Nassau Hall Vice President for Administration up the wall. This story is about graduate-student times outside the class-room. Glenn Poulter *57 and I were in the Naval Reserve. Harry convinced us to join the Princeton-area Naval Reserve Research Company, which met once a month somewhere at a military base or research lab in central New Jersey or northeastern Pennsylvania. Glenn or I would drive. Although we had security clearances, the offerings were pretty tame, and so the conversation going and com-ing was rarely naval research. Much was about geology, but also included such current-events topics as the cold war, public educa-tion, and national support for science (Harry had a great imitation of Admiral Byrd’s broadcasts from Little America, complete with the hisses, crackles, and fading of short wave, touting Quaker Oats or whatever sponsor was contributing to the expedition). Invariably we would be invited into 150 FitzRandolph Road (Harry’s home) to continue for another hour over room-temperature beer. Many times in the past 50 years I’ve thought to myself how remarkable that Harry could predict what so many future contentious points would be. <[email protected]>

Harry Hess by Carl Bowin *60, Woods Hole, MA, June 25, 2006 Harry’s easy-going yet attentive persona was infectious, and all his ‘Caribbean Project’ students shared a bond with him, that we all cherish. When I first met him in his Guyot office, (which of course looked just like the photo in The Smilodon, Spring 2006, p. 3), I was struck that his office was quite different than those of the geological giants I had known at CalTech (BS) and Northwestern (MS). I must have very much liked its carefree style, for my own office at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), commonly imitates his. He soon explained that I would be doing my thesis study in the Dominican Republic (not Venezuela or Puerto Rico as I believed I had expected). It wasn’t until many years later that I’ve been able to piece together much of the story behind that surprise change. Seems a man, William D. Pawley, of-fered Harry financial and logistic support, if he could have his next “Caribbean Project” student study a large serpentinized periodtite body in central Dominican Republic (DR). And, I was that next student. That man, I’ve later learned, happened to have been the one who in 1941 started the Flying Tigers under Commander Claire L. Chennault, which was a way for the US Government to help the Chinese fight the invading Japanese, while staying behind the scenes. Pawley also was involved with the CIA in Nicaragua, and owned the bus line in Havana, Cuba during Batista’s time. Seems he had an affinity to dictators, and when Sergeant Trujillo forced a coup, and took control of the Dominican Republic, Pawley rushed in to bankroll him. Trujillo was so grateful, that he gave the country’s mineral concession to Pawley. Northwest of the Capital city, Santo Domingo (then changed to Ciudad Trujillo), lay a small moun-


tain of serpentiized periodtite with a thick layer of laterite rich in nickel-iron. This deposit was mined by bulldozers and trucks that carried the ore to a nearby smelting plant, and out came ingots of nickel-iron. I now have to surmise that Pawley, the astute business man, anticipated that the next Princeton student would find him more laterite deposits for a most modest investment. After each 60 days in the DR, I had to visit another Caribbean country for a few days and return to get another tourist visa. These breaks from geologic mapping provided nice chances to see other islands, and other student’s field projects before completing my thesis and graduating. Currie Palmer *63 and Frederick Nagle *67 carried on in the DR, completing Princeton theses on the north flank of the Cordillera Central and the north coast region. Harry had a copy of my thesis bound in leather by Princeton University Press with elephant hide end papers, with matching slip case, for presentation to Generalisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, Benefactor de la Patria, y Padre de la Patria Nueva. Pawley presented the bound thesis to Trujillo. Soon thereafter, Trujillo was assassinated during an evening walk along the cities’ coastal avenue. Turns out, I had come to know one of the assassins. So, my studies for Harry gained me experiences in a lot more than peridotite geology. There was not a suitable teaching position opening, so Harry had me stay on as an Instructor for a year. During my time mapping on the flank of the Cordillera Central (the highest mountain in the Greater Antilles under the tropic sun, I came to wonder whether gravity measurements might help in deducing the mountain’s structure under the ground. Prof. William ‘Bill’ Bonini ’48, faculty 1953-96, gave me 15 minutes of instruction and loaned me Princeton’s Worden student gravity meter. My Jeep was still in the DR, being taken care of by the company run by Pawley’s brother, Edward. So, accompanied by a geology undergraduate, John Whetten ’57 *62, we returned to conduct gravity measure-ments, around the country, in ten days. Turns out that those ten days changed a geologist into a geophysicist. Again, it wasn’t till rather recently, with the increasing informa-tion available via the Internet that I’ve been able to piece together what brought about that conversion, and, of course, Harry was responsible. In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the US Navy was very much concerned with being able to measure gravity from ships at sea, which is tricky to do on a platform that moves up and down and rolls back and forth. The Navy was not particularly interested in using gravity to learn about the structure of mountains and seamounts under the sea, as we geologist are, but in the vertical

integral of gravity over an area. Gravity varies as one over the square of distance to mass sources, whereas its vertical integral represents an equipotential that is proportional to one over the distance. The particular gravity equipotential that coincides with sea level is called the geoid. So, because there are gravity anomalies over the Earth’s surface and oceans, the geoid has irregularities in its slope (due to deflections of the vertical), and may be as much as a few minutes of arc. And, if a submarine does not know the correct ‘deflection of the vertical’ at its location when it launches an ICBM, that missile’s warhead could miss an intended hardened target 6,000 miles away. Harry Hess was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, and attended briefing in Washington, DC, when the significance to the Navy of gravity at sea was presented. Also, occasionally attending those Navy briefings was J. Bracket Hersey, a seismologist, at WHOI. Harry and Bracket would often chat after these meetings at the Cosmos Club where they stayed. After the Navy’s ‘gravity’ briefing, Bracket mentioned to Harry that he would like to start a gravity program at WHOI, and Harry said, ‘he knew just the man.’ My ten days of gravity measurements had made me an expert. Shortly thereafter, I drove to Woods Hole on Cape Cod for an interview with Bracket, and got the job of starting a gravity program at WHOI. Bracket applied to the Navy for funding, and I set off first to get a gravity meter. In visiting the Coast and Geodetic Survey and seeing how it took several people three days to manually process the strip chart records obtained previously at sea, it took 3 milliseconds to realize I needed a digital computer to process the data at sea while it was being collected. Bracket had the money from the Navy, I had the desire, and so the World’s first digital seagoing computer (an IBM 1710 Control System) went to sea on the Research Vessel Chain in 1962 to process data in real-time from our LaCoste & Romberg sea gravity meter S-13. No doubt I was primed to think of incorporating a computer from earlier using an IBM 650 computer that an off-campus contractor let Princeton students use at night, and that Charles Helsley *60 told me about. I started using it to try to learn how long it may have taken some long chiastolite crystals to grow in the contact metamorphic aureole of a gabbro intrusion in northern Maine I had mapped for my Northwestern University Masters’ thesis. One afternoon I explained these heat flow relations for heat emanating from a vertical dike to Harry. A few days later he had his copies of “Youthful Age of the Ocean Basins,” and I was the sole acknowledgement. <[email protected]>

Harry Hess Centennial

Documents

Transcript of Harry Hess Centennial