Jane P Davidson - Patrons of Paleontology: How Government Support Shaped a Science

PATRONS OF PALEONTOLOGY

Life of the Past

James O. Farlow, editor

PATRONS OF PALEONTOLOGY

How Government Support Shaped a Science

Jane P. Davidson

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

2017 by Jane P. Davidson

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davidson, Jane P.

Title: Patrons of paleontology : how government support shaped a science / Jane P. Davidson.

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Series: Life of the past | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001785 | ISBN 9780253025715 (cl : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: PaleontologyFinanceHistory18th century. | PaleontologyFinanceHistory19th century. | PaleontologyFinanceHistory20th century. | PaleontologyUnited StatesFinanceHistory19th century. | PaleontologyUnited StatesFinanceHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC QE705.A1 D38 2017 | DDC 560.72/073dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001785

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His name was James W. Pierce. He was born in 1880 and died in 1969 one day short of his eighty-ninth birthday. When he was almost sixteen, he and his four younger siblings were orphaned by the death of their father. Their mother had died about three years earlier. It fell to him to raise his family. And he did. It is told in his family that when he and his oldest sister went to school, they took the little ones along and the children slept on the benches while Jim and Alice studied their lessons. Jim grew up and married Bertha Akers in 1902. Together they had ten children. Jim and Bertha raised their family on a farm in rural Missouri, about sixty miles south of St. Louis in the Ozark foothills. It is told that Jim and Bertha were very concerned that their children get as much and as fine an education as they possibly could. A good education was a way up and out of the lives they had. In these early years of the twentieth century, a good education was probably going to end at about the eighth grade. Some would go on to high school. These were difficult things to accomplish. For example, one of Jim and Berthas sons, whose name was Robert, rented a room along with his cousin in the town near where they lived so he could finish his senior year because it was so difficult to ride horseback every day to and from the high school in the winter. Too much for both rider and horse. The high school was located about five miles away from the family farm. Thus, when Jims days work on the farm was done, and he was so tired he would fall asleep eating his dinner, he would nonetheless get up, change clothes, get on his horse, and ride on such roads as there were through the rural Ozark preNew Deal darkness to the one-room schoolhouse a few miles away and be the president of the school board. Jim and the farmers nearby thought that education was invaluable. They taught their children that.

His name was Robert W. Pierce (19132001). Robert was the fifth of the ten children of James and Bertha. He went to college before and after World War II. Robert began as a teacher in one of those one-room schools in rural Missouri. There is a photograph of him, along with his little brother, George Pierce, with the entire school population of the Sittin School in 1933. George, in his late teens, still looks like a boy. Robert was barely twenty and seems so very young in that photograph. George had just recently been one of Roberts students. George had come to help Robert give and grade the final exams for five students who would finish eighth grade. Education was so important that all the students dressed in their best for this photograph, and Robert had on a suit. In these one-room schools in rural Missouri, he taught everyone who came through the door, from elementary to high school ages. He had fistfights with the bigger boys who did not want to be there anymore. He gave emergency first aid to two little ones who arrived at school one winter day with frostbite. Education was sacred.

Eventually Robert taught high school and served on the school board in the tiny town of Glenrock, in the oil fields of Wyoming. There my parents met the couple that would be my godparents. Ernest, my godfather, valued education as well, even though he had almost none in the formal sense. He read all the time and taught himself. He was what they called a rock hound, but he was much more. He was a lapidary as well. His rock shop was full of his jewelry. It was he who taught me about fossils. He knew as much about them as a student of geology in a university would have known. And my dad would stand there and listen, because he thought fossils were cool too, and he wanted to learn. Ernest worked in Conocos oil fields. Eventually my dad went to work for Conoco too. He began as a groundskeeper in the refinery in Glenrock, Wyoming. He pulled weeds, killed rattlers, and raked rocks. When he retired, Robert was running three of Conocos petrochemical plants. He worked eighteen-hour days, normally, and on weekends went to the plants to catch up on his paperwork. Robert thought education was important and a way up and out, just as his parents had thought. In a time before smart phones, the men in his plants knew precisely how many minutes it took him to drive home from the plant at the end of the day. When I was in high school, the phone would begin ringing just about the time Daddy should have been home. Im sorry, Mr. Pierce is not here yet oh! Wait, sir, I see him pulling into the driveway. Do you wish to hold for him? I would stand there holding the phone and my dad would come in, look at it, and look like thunder. He would take the call and then turn around, no time to eat, and go back to the plants. Before he left, as he did every day, he would ask What did you learn in school today? Not, what did you do? What did you learn? I had to have a list of particulars to tell him; if I tried to blow it off, he would say, I do not believe you did not learn anything today. You have a fine high school and good teachers. If you did not learn, it is your fault. Now, what did you learn today? Every day. It was his way of telling me I was more important than Conoco. I am sure Granddad asked his children the same thing. Every day.

His name was Charles J. McClain (19312015). Charles was my cousin. His mother was one of my dads little sisters. Charles started teaching in a one-room rural Missouri school at age sixteen, right out of high school. Just as his mother had done, just as Uncle Robert had done. Eventually Charles had a stellar career in university administration. He founded a college and was for a very long time the president of a university. After that he served in the position equivalent to chancellor of the Missouri university system. Charles earned his Doctor of Education degree at age twenty-eight. I was impressed. I set out to be a college professor too and to beat Charles in obtaining my PhD at an earlier agewhich I did, though I never fully caught up to his great career. I suspect my aunt asked him what he learned at school every day too. She was a teacher who had started right out of high school as well, earned a masters degree, and taught all her life.