Becoming a Geologist

My Parents

My parents were big believers in education, especially science and math.  As children, we were made to know that our primary responsibility was school, and everything else was secondary to that.  We had a good library at home, and there was always a modern set of encyclopedias in the house.  My brother and I read encyclopedias constantly, for recreation.  Neither of us ever went to the bathroom without an encyclopedia under our arm!  Science, electricity, and mechanics were some of the fields we devoured.  None of this was pushed on us, but the opportunities were presented, and we took advantage. 

My father worked in the electrical field (hey, that's a pun!); he was always bringing home something related to electricity.  It might be a spark coil that could deliver a hefty jolt to your body one week, a set of field telephones the next, telegraph keys, batteries, switches, tubes, and bulbs the next.  We always had plenty of 6-volt dry cells, rolls of wire, and solder to power up anything we might design, so the experiments were endless.  I was completely fascinated by electricity, and I was designing electrical circuits and drawing schematics in the second grade...when I should have been listening to the teacher.  I disassembled stereos, telephones, radios, clocks, and house wiring (don't try this at home), and tried to get the stuff reassembled before my father got home,  all the while attempting to avoid electrocution!  One of my favorite afternoon activities was taking the back off the TV, pulling the vacuum tubes, examining them, and replacing them.  I guess I was a nerd.   

Early Geology

I usually asked for one "big" toy at Christmas.  I asked for, and received, a chemistry set for Christmas in the second grade. In the third grade, I asked for, and received, a binocular microscope.  And in the fourth grade, I asked for, and received, a Skilcraft Geology Lab!  

We lived on the east coast, what is referred to in geology as the "coastal plain," and there were very few exposed rock outcrops nearby.  I often read books about gold or silver mines in the west, simply because that was where the rocks and minerals were!

Fossils could be found in our neighborhood, sometimes in strange places..  Fossilized shark's teeth were abundant; my brother and I dug them out of the hot asphalt roads that melted in the summer.  The teeth had made their way into the asphalt as Pleistocene fill material.  At some local limestone quarries, the Eocene was exposed. 

My uncle Raymond worked as a customs inspector at the large nearby port.  He was constantly bringing me a chunk of some rock or mineral that had come in by the boatload down at the port.  Iron ore, chromium ore, asbestos (everyone loved playing with asbestos in those days), bauxite, manganese, sulfur, or mica.  These little gifts meant more to me than any toy ever would.

We often vacationed in the Smoky Mountains, a full-blown rock paradise that I took great advantage of.  The car was always hanging low when we returned.  My parents were pretty supportive of my rock-collecting.  Since I picked up so many rocks from railroad right-of-ways, either road-bed or materials that had spilled from hopper cars, my father referred to my entire collection as "railroad rocks."

Mr. Berry and Oak Terrace Elementary School

Mr. J. Howard Berry was the principal at Oak Terrace Elementary School, a public school in North Charleston, South Carolina.  The school was later renamed "J. Howard Berry Elementary School."

Mr. Berry ran the school with an iron fist in the 1960's. He oversaw everything, from the cleanliness of the floors to the quality of the food served in the lunchroom.  Mr. Berry could show up in any class, at any time, and he was all over the place.   Some people, and probably many teachers, thought Mr. Berry was overbearing.  My own mother thought he was overbearing.  But I loved him.  That was because Mr. Berry knew all about the FUN things in the world.  And those things were science, art, literature, geography, and GEOLOGY.  There just didn't seem to be anything that a science-minded boy might be interested in that Mr. Berry didn't know all about.  I think my father respected Mr. Berry, because he knew Mr. Berry was a dedicated educator.  I didn't know it at the time, but I had encountered my very first Renaissance man.

(Left) Mr. Berry in the library at Oak Terrace Elementary School, surrounded by artifacts from around the world

Oh, yeah.  I was a little scared of Mr. Berry.  Sometimes a LOT scared of Mr. Berry.  Most people were.  You just didn't want to cross him.  I never saw him lose his temper in public, he just gave off a vibe that indicated you would not want to push him.  So nobody ever pushed him.  But he LOVED to see kids learn things.

On any given day, we might be studying our standard boring math or history when Mr. Berry would pop into the room.  The teacher would sigh, perhaps roll her eyes a little, then sit down.  Mr. Berry had taken over the classroom.  For the next 30 minutes, he might engage us with an impromptu French lesson (levez-vous!), play selections of Sousa's marches on a rickety old record player (I think he wound it up outside the room), or describe the gigantic stalactites (and their corresponding stalagmites) in some cave in Peru.  He knew how to fascinate students, and he put his heart into it.

When I was in the second grade, Mr. Berry came in our classroom, and asked the teacher for her best reader.  She picked me.  Mr. Berry then took me to a sixth-grade class, where he had me read out loud from one of their textbooks...perhaps because he was disgusted with the reading skills of some of the students?  It was easy to read, but I do remember missing one word; "echo,"  mispronouncing it "eecho."  The sentence was about "Echo Canyon," and this made an impression on me, for rocks were to be found in a canyon!  I wanted to be in the sixth grade!

The Science Lab

Mr. Berry established a science lab at the school.  Now, this was not just a room with a couple of dead frogs in it. This lab was packed to the gills with the most amazing dangerous stuff I could imagine.  Scales.  Chemicals.  Magnets.  Microscopes.  Bunsen Burners.  Mechanical wonders.  Batteries.  Voltmeters.  Steam engines.   Lightning generators.  Sharp things.  Gyroscopes.  Electronics, and the wire to hook  them up.  NUCLEAR materials, yes.  Telescopes.  Switches.  A cloud chamber!  Geiger counters.  Acid.  Mounted skeletons.  Convection experiments.  A kiln.  Scalpels.  Microscope slides.  All kinds of curiosities from all around the world.  And even a couple of dead frogs.  But most of all, the rocks.  Hundreds of specimens of rocks and minerals.  Mr. Berry loved anything scientific, but he especially loved  geology.  And he loved talking about rocks and minerals, looking at them, and handling them. 

(Upper Picture) Circa 1962, Oak Terrace Elementary School.

(Lower Picture) Students with artifacts brought back from Easter Island

I have no idea where Mr. Berry got the money to build his science lab.  It is a topic probably best left uninvestigated.  It was the dream lab Tom Swift would design.  No other schools around the area had anything like it.  Even my high school in the same town didn't have anything like it.  Looking back , it was amazing.  But it was there, and all you had to do was show a little interest, and it was all opened to you.  

One day, Mr. Berry came to the classroom, and asked if anyone knew exactly what was engraved on the linoleum block sitting in a case in the school library.  Well, I had taken the time to look at it once.  So, I raised my hand, and told him the linoleum block was engraved with the Cherokee alphabet.  As a reward, I was taken to Mr. Berry's private darkroom, that he also had installed at the school.  We spent most of the afternoon taking photos, developing the film, and making prints (actually, I took the photos, developed the film, and made the prints, while he directed me). Then we took one of his huge telescopes outside (he kept several at the school), and looked at sunspots on the sun (with the proper equipment, of course). I got to turn all the knobs while he looked on.  It was pretty close to magic.

One might think that I was Mr. Berry's "pet" from the above story.  Actually, he didn't know me from Adam.  This was the kind of thing he did when ANY kid showed a little gumption.  Kids that impressed him were always being hauled off to the Science Lab,  to look at new minerals he had acquired, or across town to a new archaeological dig the local college was excavating.  In fact, he was totally ignorant of my identity.  A few weeks after the Cherokee alphabet incident, I was summoned to his office for a reaming meant for another kid who possessed my exact first and last name.  It took me 10 minutes of stammering to convince him it was clearly a case of mistaken identity.  It was a narrow escape, as corporal punishment was still the rage then, and he was familiar with dealing it out.

"Berry's Camp"

Mr. Berry owned a country home called "Ingleside," at Liberty Hill, South Carolina, and here he ran a science camp in the summer for interested students.  One of the highlights of my life was being allowed to attend this camp.  There were perhaps 12 boys the year I went.  Everything was planned out, and everything was about science, with geology being at the tip-top of the list. We slept in tents at the back of his large property.   A couple of boys were singled out (perhaps their mothers had advised that their children were "sensitive"), and the unfortunates were quartered in the house with Mr. and Mrs. Berry.  They were pitied.   I much preferred the tents and pit toilets at the back of the property!  

I should point out for the modern audience that Mr. Berry was not anti-female; for many years previously he ran a camp at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, where he had facilities for both girls and boys.  But this was his first year of running the camp at Ingleside, and he probably figured the primitive facilities were more suited to boys than girls.  Living in the woods made us boys more animalistic, so he was probably right. 

Mr. Berry charged $50 for ten days at his camp, an amount that was astronomical to me in those days,, but I suspect it barely covered his expenses, since he hired several college-age counselors to help him run the place. My parents put up the money, which was probably not a pittance to them, for which I am eternally grateful.  I am not sure my parents ever knew just how much this camp meant to me.  Those 10 days set me on a path.

Highlights at the camp were numerous field trips to nearby sites of geologic interest.  One trip involved a journey to a dangerous mine that contained a pegmatite that gave up garnets and various other crystallized minerals the size of of saltshakers (Mr. Berry thought children should be allowed to participate in "hazardous" activities...as long as they were pursuing the Cause of Science...better to be dead than stupid, he believed).  Mixing acids, burning ourselves with flaming phosphorous globules, and scrambling up death-defying cliffs at abandoned mines was all part of his elaborately simple strategy to keep things interesting, and let us figure out stuff for ourselves.  Besides, you really couldn't  learn anything if you worried too much about cutting your hand off with that band saw, could you?

Mr. Berry smoked like a fiend at the camp that year, but spent a whole lot of time advising us boys that we should never smoke, advice that I thankfully heeded.

The biggest treat came at the end of the camp.  It was a wonderful overnight camping trip to Spruce Pine, North Carolina, where we attended the famous rock and mineral show held there every year.  It was there, in the summer between the sixth and seventh grade, that I figured out what I wanted to "do" in life.  

Duke and Christine with Duke II at Mr. Berry's country home (Ingleside) in Liberty Hill, South Carolina, 1967.  Duke crash-landed his Air Force jet on Easter Island, and brought back the items shown in the picture above.  Ingleside was also the location of Mr. Berry's second science camp.