Main Street, Wyoming Classics; 105; Dr. Love

Win friends from the coasts ask for insight about the character of Wyoming and its people. One simple way to respond is to give them a copy of John McKee's book Rising from the plains. Ostensibly a book about geology. It includes the wonderful story of Ethel waxer a brave young woman who came to the wilds of the Wyoming Plains over a century ago to be a schoolteacher. What's that doing in a book about geology. Well she was the mother of Dave love and he was the father in the sense of modern geology in the northern Rockies. Love who died in 2002 was known to the world around by the time host Deborah Hammons interviewed him a few years ago. But he was always willing to hike around with his Wyoming neighbors often carrying a Geiger counter and speculate with astonishing accuracy about the minerals and water and history that label over the earth's surface. In this mainstreet Wyoming classic Dave love. Talks about his life his science and his home in Wyoming. Driving down. The road. He's.

Been. Singing a song about Wyoming a long time since really. Down the road. I mean the same as jazz room. Well you got down. Main Street. Doctor like you and your brother were very close in age your sister was born much later but you were the only children in a thousand square miles. Can you tell me what that was like when you were growing up. You have to imagine. That your world was populated by cowboys. And no children. No women. No radio no television.

No music. You had to develop. Other resources. Our house was lined with books our Bible was the nation it was the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica but we had a thousand other books several thousand in fact and the mother had been in Latin and Greek scholar and we had many books in Latin and Greek but of course we couldn't read others in French and German. They tried to teach us some French and some German but she despaired of Latin and Greek. Your mother was your your primary teacher when you were growing up. What subjects did you teach. She taught all subjects. We. Had no school house. We had school in the living room with

arr. house and it was unheated fireplace. It did not work. There was no stove there no central heating so we had to be bundled up and pretty much in the winter time. But it was off from the dining room which was always in the kitchen which are the most populous places in the in the this huge range house. So we were alone enough so that we could concentrate and get things done. Where are you live. There weren't any trees. I mean there were just rocks. Ken can you describe for me your first interest in geology. My first memories go way back. My other hand Lee county's field geology was a book about that I think was written in the 1870s and it opened the

windows to a whole other world for us and both plants and animals and rocks and earth history and it was fascinating to us. We could see rocks. Some of them were flat some of them were folded some are red. Some were candies striped Badlands. And when you have very little else to keep your mind occupied if you are writing for example for 10 12 hours behind a bunch of cattle the scene is not very inspiring but when you look at these rocks and you wonder why theyre there if you look at other places where theres rich grass or other places where there is no grass or other places where there are bog holes but swampy areas

in which we as children could dig and pull out the most modern and prehistoric bison skulls. And are Indian artifacts made of certain kinds of rocks all was pretty rocks. Those were the things that captivated my interest. Your mother wrote your unusual ability to detect arrowheads. What do you attribute that to you. It's not that my vision was any better it was because I was much closer to the ground that I could see things from a different perspective. Being the youngest. By the time you were in high school though you went into town into lander with your mother and finished high school there then went to the University of Wyoming where you obtained both your bachelor's and your masters. But after that you decided to go

back East. You went to Yale to get your Ph.D.. Can you remember that. What did you think this this young man from Wyoming. When I got my master's degree it was in the depths of the depression. I was lucky to get a job at $30 a month. And after a year of working as both as a consultant when there were jobs available are for the Wyoming Geological Survey I made $60 a month and they could see that the future was going to require something else. So I applied for graduate work at Columbia and hail. Columbia put me on standby Yale said Come ahead. They gave me three hundred and fifty

dollars a year scholarship and that was big scholarship. I thought I could make it on there. So I went back there and they gave me scholarships each year for three years. And that's how I got through going back there was one in one sense traumatic and another sense these were golden years. The golden years of my life. I learned so much from so many people about so many things. Those were always in my mind be the golden years. But it was as a graduate student that you were first invited to speak to the Geological Society of America. That was unusual for a graduate student. I was imbued with the absolute terror.

Of the doubt. A thousand times. But I went ahead and did it. And I was so unglued and being dressed up in a suit with suspenders and I forgot to fasten the suspenders. So I was up there and giving this world famous speech with my suspenders hanging down. Well how did they react. I was a graduate students do not ordinarily address this group. No. So I realized I was privileged and this was special and rather than it being a case of humiliation it became a case for much laughter and goodwill.

What about the contents of your actual talk. The contents were about the absurd range which we can see from this interview spot and up until that time people knew knew nothing about them circa range and. Theoretically all the rocks were horizontal and. All the younger rocks were horizontal and I found that many of them were not. Some were folded over others just like a deck of cards being shifted. And that could date them. And. That introduced a whole new concept of the timing of the last of the letter by the revolution which was the big mountain building revolution affected in the United States well you had many

revolutionary insights with regard to geology but when you finished with your Ph.D. You went to work for Shell Oil Company. What happened there because you didn't stay with them very long and as soon as I got my Ph.D. I was offered a job as Rodman with the U.S. Geological Survey. It was a temporary job with no perks no expenses other than $50 a month. And I thought I was pretty good and I deserved a lot better than that. But one of my esteemed advisers at Yale said take it. Get your foot in the door. So I took it and I went out to Utah and lived in Provo and worked in the Wasatch Mountains. I never worked any harder in my life and that. But it was only for five months and then it was over.

So I was out of a job. And some years before. A geologist with Shell Oil Company said what ever you want a job call me. So I called him and he said. Take the first train out to Centralia Illinois which was a boomtown he had just struck oil there. And for five years I worked for Shell and boom country you know in Michigan Arkansas Tennessee Georgia Alabama Mississippi. And those were great years because they were good to me. They paid me well. They supported my work. I had no complaints at all except. That the wonderful discoveries I had made and was continuing to make and for saying in the future everything with it

a locked file and never came out and it never has. And I couldn't see a professional life that was frustrated. By a locked file case. And that was the reason for leaving shell taking a 60 percent cut in salary and going back to the USGS on a permanent basis. It was during World War Two and we were sending planes and tanks and battleships into combat without any armor plate. The Germans had cut off a source of vanadium for vanadium steel and we had none. So it was a desperate time and I was assigned to prospect for and find vanadium to set up

mines and to. Determine the volumes of war and degradable where that could be mined and to find the salt and sulphur that were needed for the processing of Vanadium. We had known before the war that there was some uranium in the phosphor formation where the phosphate beds are in Wyoming and Idaho and so I was sent out there to do. First hand trench the exposures of. The phosphor to collect samples to analyze them in the field and then to locate eight mines. And we located the mines southeast of Afton in the

mountains. One of your major accomplishments is the development of theories of how Jackson Hole and the Tetons were created. Why did you start with that area why did you focus on that. First of all it's a beautiful country. I know you don't. But what was it about the geology beneath that facade of beauty. It is without a doubt at least in my mind. The most complete. Geologic record. From the beginning of earth history up to the present time. Not saying a lot when you look at the Grand Canyon you think there's a lot of history there but that's only part of it. In the Teton Jackson Hole country. There has been constant. Crustal activity of the earth especially in the last

100 million years. And he sees it with drawn and mountains were squished up and then they were buried with debris and then the debris on both sides went down and was preserved in the mountains without further volcanism vulcanism occurred in Yellowstone and. Went on for perhaps. 60 million years and is almost going on now. So it's an area of great crustal unrest and where the spasm of unrest there is a record preserved in some of the rocks in the area. I remember a young girl growing up in Wyoming. There was a phenomenon of people running around with Geiger counters apparently you had something to do with that.

I was. Asked to step in when ever there was a crisis of some kind and they needed something this time it happened to be uranium. This was my involvement to begin. And during the war because there was uranium in the vanadium in the past four years probation. And so we knew about it. And when the uranium boom started it was all down in Colorado and Utah and later it spread into Mexico and to Wyoming. But in Wyoming we knew there was some uranium because the cook in a sheep camp. In the red desert country had found this strange yellow

mineral and she had sent it in to a mineralogist in. Oregon. He named it date. And so we we knew that there had been some uranium in the silver mine that Lusk had been a silver mine many many years ago and it was now abandoned. So we knew a little bit there was uranium but then the people who were handling the money and the project said that the uranium had to be related to volcanic rocks. And so the concentration of investigation and money was in Colorado and Utah. I couldn't see it that way because we had found bones in the Powder River Basin that were radioactive.

So I prevailed on the survey to let me use a DC 3 all bomber to weather the magnetometer bomb out in the hundred yards of cable and a later which are recorded radioactivity two of five several traverses across the powder River Basin and we got several big kick some the scintillator and went out in the field in October we found a. Single what we call a uranium roll that's around two black deposit of uranium and it ran 15 percent uranium which was extraordinary

and it was so such a national importance that in two weeks I had written a report and had it printed. On this and the Atomic Energy Commission and the people who in the survey who had. Different ideas got a committee together to go out and see how much I was lying. Well we found about eight more deposits there. And they became years to come. Uranium mines. So that was one part of the story. As soon as the word got out and their uranium boom there started and people were harassing the ranchers and staking claims everywhere regardless of ownership the one company

offered me a million dollars to head it up and to leave the survey that time I was making about eight thousand dollars a year for little children. And so there was a temptation to to make the big bucks. But I bet you didn't. Why. Why did you how did how did you make that choice. A million dollars in what was in 1950 or early 40s for 1954. You turned down a million dollars to continue your work which you love and the Scotchman doing. Know it a temptation. Yes. But. Other things were more important. How big is this going to be. Were there other places. What challenges were left in the uranium and other associated minerals or the principles of or

finding all those things were involved in the decision to go where the adventure was and that's where the big bucks were. As a scientist I know that throughout your life one of the dilemmas you faced is that sometimes you discover things that lead to repercussions that you weren't expecting. One of the big areas was in the gas sales really not very far from where your ranch was when you go out and you look at that landscape. What do you what are your feelings about that. I wonder if I was right in the uranium and going on with the research necessary to determine why it is where it is in the world. Is that a public service or is there something that will be misused by countries and by people to

create. Kingdoms. Well enslave. Other parts of the world and I'm. Not sure what I did was a public service. Or detriment. Well you even discovered oil in Yellowstone and you made the choice to let that be known. Yes I wrote a paper on oil and the last time we were not allowed to use that title we had to call it hydrocarbons thermal areas when we know it has been discovered but it has been that study has been expanded and it's very useful in determining how oil can occur and volcanic rocks. And can it be

used to. Can these floods of oil that come out on the walls of your home can be used as indicators of past and perhaps future seismic activity. Does it all get squeezed out of the canyon walls by earthquakes things like that. So there are other uses for the information then saying we get so many barrels of oil out of this kind of rock. When you think about your unique upbringing your classical education growing up in a place in which you were surrounded with geology and had plenty of time to think do you think there could be a David Love today. That's an interesting philosophical question. I think the. Human beings can be

adapted to anything. They don't have to be parallel to my bringing up some of the geologists I've known have come from big cities. Some of them were born with spoons in their mouths and never have to worry about money and become great people. I could name a few that I worked with who were like that. And one of them particularly his middle name was Carnegie and he's used his money wisely and he used it for for the benefit of both economics and mankind. So I think anything is possible regardless of your background. Thank you Dr. Levy for sharing your home and your time with us. Well this has been a pleasure. It will be interesting to see what the spin off is.