AASP Primary Records Program

Where are They Now Series
Judy Lentin
AASP Newsletter 25(4): p. 13-14, 1992.

KEN PIEL

Ken Piel had been employed at Unocal for just two months when he traveled to Tulsa to attend the meeting which concluded with the founding of AASP. As the newest professional in the room, he for the most part listened as he sat in awe of those palynologists whom he had previously known only by name.

Ken, as with a number of other industry palynologists began his career with project in the Alaskan Tertiary - including a study of fossil leaves from an Alaskan Peninsula field party, and in 1969 and 1972 participating in field parties. Subsequent work in the Gulf Boast Tertiary was followed in 1975 by the first of three seasons of field work in the British Jurassic in support of Unocal's exploration in the North Sea. Transferred to London in 1986, he provided on-site biostratigraphic expertise to Unocal's Irish Sea, North Sea, Middle East and Africa Divisions. In 1987 he hired his replacement and in 1988 returned to the US.

Ken has served AASP as President (1975), Councilor (1976), and Secretary-Treasurer (1982-1986). He was general chairman of the 1973 Annual Meeting, and a member of the Local Committee for the 1991 Meeting. His committee work has included the Bylaws and Nominating Committees; and Chairmanship of the Chair-in-Palynology, AASP CENEX, and AASP CENEX Finance Committees. In 1990 he received the AASP Distinguished Service Award.

Ken opted for an early retirement from Unocal, and is now in the process of selecting a new career. Residing now in Massachusetts, he watches the gold, orange and red leaves - the colors of fall - adorning trees and drifting past the window while writing his biography.

Oral History of Ken Piel
Recorded at Ken's office in Springfield, MA
November 11, 2003
Interviewers: Harry Leffingwell and Sarah Damassa

Sarah:
Ken, let's start from the beginning. Tell us about where and when you were born, and something about your parents and siblings.

Ken:
I was born in Perry, Oklahoma, in January of 1936, a small farming community of 4,000 - 5,000 people, the 5,000 coming a little later when oil activity flourished in the area. My father at the time I was born was a farmer, but earlier in his life he had done concrete construction work in New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Texas.

My mother was a homemaker; prior to the birth of her children she had worked in retail sales, and she returned to that occupation after my brother and I were in high school.

I have one brother who is 5 years my junior. He spent time in the Air Force, then worked as a TV repair specialist, a farmer, a welder, a machinist, a tech service specialist and a Division Manager for Ditch Witch, Inc., a company headquartered in Perry which has made trenchers and more recently underground boring equipment that emplaced a lot of the fiber optic cable that was laid in the late 1990s.

My father was born in Oklahoma in 1903 while the area was still Indian Territory. His early recollections include Belle Starr and her gang holding up the railway station in Perry and making off with a payroll, and with Perry the county seat of Noble County he recalled a public hanging in the courthouse square when he was a small boy. He and his family were also caught in the tornado that hit Perry around 1913. He recalled that the family was at the table eating dinner and the tornado came out of a strong thunderstorm cell. He remembered the roof flapping up and down on the walls as the storm passed, and as many strange stories come out of these incidents he recalled that grandfather had just recently completed building a new barn. Their 4 cows were tied to the 2" x 8" which formed the top of the manger in the barn when the storm hit. When the storm was over and the family went outside to survey the damage, the barn was gone--the only thing remaining was the 4 cows still tied to the 2" x 8" grazing peacefully down the hill.

Harry:
You were born at a time and place that experienced two of the greatest catastrophes in the United States--the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a multi-year drought in the midwestern US that led to the great migration of farmers to California. I suspect that you were too young to remember those days, but did your parents relate any stories of that historic time?

Ken:
Although my father's work as a construction worker ended when the depression began, they never really spoke of either those two thing in any detail. The Dust Bowl days were really 1933 - 1936 (the most severe part of the drought), and they had just started farming at that time.

Sarah:
What crops were they growing?

Ken:
This is wheat country, and that gave my father his first experience with government control of crops. I hadn't been aware that that program had been effect that early until my father spoke of it, but for his first wheat crop he planted all of the arable ground to wheat. In the spring some fellow from the Agriculture Department came to the farm and said, "It is that you have to plow up some percentage of your wheat crop or you will not be allowed to sell any of the harvested crop". So the painful process began of plowing up the specified amount.

My mother came from a large family, and when each of the daughters married and went on a farm with their husbands my grandfather gave each couple a cow as a wedding present. I still have a picture of my father and that first cow. My parents were quite poor when they started farming, and looked for ways to acquire the necessary equipment. My father found an old steel-wheeled tractor that was worn out and would not run. He towed it home somehow, and completely rebuilt the engine and the rest of the tractor as his first piece of equipment.

He was quite successful as a farmer, so much so that absentee owners of nearby farms contracted with him to till their land in addition to the 80 acres farm on which we lived. I used to enjoy spending as much time with my father as possible, of course. He came home for lunch (or dinner as we referred to it) and when it was time for him to return to the field I would climb on the tractor with him and ride out to the road. When we reached the road he would say, "Well, son, I've got to go." To prolong my time with him as long as possible, I'm told that I would say to him, "Dad tell me a story." And being the good father he was he would tell me some story and then set me down from the tractor and continue on to the field.

He assembled a harness that I could wear and ride on the tractor with him when he was working the field at home. The harness had a rope which could be tied to the tractor so that I would not fall off and be caught under the equipment. After I tired I would come back to the house, take off the harness before going into the house, and my mother always said that if she looked out and the harness was gone she knew that I had walked back out to the field to ride the tractor with my father. It was quite an interesting life growing up on the farm.

Harry:
That's fascinating. In my view one of your strongest professional traits was your dogged determination to get the job done regardless of the magnitude of the obstacles before you. Can you relate the development of that trait to anything in your early years?

Ken:
Well, I think that--as most kids do--I took many of my traits from my parents. My parents both encouraged my brother and I to always do the best we could in any job we undertook. And they set the example of doing that. My father was a master carpenter. When he worked in home building near the end of his working days, the crew always gave him the "finish" work to do in the house, because the doors were always hung squarely, the hinges were always set properly, everything was just beautiful.

But, at the same time they gave my brother and I all the latitude in the world to seek out what we wanted to do. There was no pushing in one direction or other. I've always thought that--because my family was very deeply religious--my father harbored the secret desire that I become a minister. But, to his credit, he never mentioned that or attempted to push me in that direction. My brother and I both say that our father was our hero. He was our role model and he always commented to me that I had an intense loyalty. I am thankful now that, while he was still alive, I sat down with him and told him that I owed that sense of loyalty to him and I related to him the incident which impressed me so deeply. Prior to its acquisition by ARCO, the Sinclair Oil Company had a bulk plant at Perry and an agent who delivered gasoline, oil, grease, etc. to farmers. The agent was a marvelous, roly-poly gentleman of enormous good humor--always with a laugh and a smile--and very accommodating in his service to the farmers. Suddenly he was gone, having been dumped by Sinclair. In due course, the fellow who replaced him came to the farm to attempt to keep my father's business. I guess I must have been there when the fellow came by, and my father said to him, "Your company treated Roy like dirt, and I'll never buy another product from Sinclair. I'll do business with somebody else."

Sarah:
Was there an alternative?

Ken:
It was much tougher I can tell you because there were not a lot of bulk agents in that area. But that was my father. If you treated his family or friends poorly, don't come around looking for anything else. My parents often wondered in their later years whether they had done too good a job encouraging their sons to do the best job; my brother has the same determination about the things he does as I do.

Harry:
I'd comment that it seems that same trait has been passed on to your own sons as well.

Ken:
Well, I'm a very lucky man. I don't know how I was so fortunate to have 3 such wonderful sons that I do.

Sarah:
Well, maybe their dad had a little to do with that.

Ken:
Well, that's kind of you.

Sarah:
What early experiences stimulated your interest in the sciences?

Ken:
Well, I think a certain amount of it goes back to being raised on a farm, being close to nature, seeing the interactions of weather and the crops, and lots of exposure to plants and animals. Also, in 1940 my parents were able to purchase their own farm from the first "FHA" which was the Farm Home Administration. Not long after they bought the farm oil exploration sprang up in the area, and that was another thing that began to tilt my interest toward the sciences. There was the excitement of going out to the drilling rigs when father would let me accompany him, although often he went there at night and I wasn't able to go along because it was my bedtime. But, on one occasion I had the opportunity to talk to the geologist one time and I was fascinated by the fact that they were taking samples that had come up from the drill bit. I asked him why they were taking the samples and what were they used for, and the gave me a simple explanation. Then, in my senior year in high school chemistry class, I actually distilled crude oil--in a lab without a fume hood. We just opened the windows and let the breeze take away the fumes.

In an episode that could have turned out much worse, in the cleanup operation a week or two later, there had been quite a nasty residue left in the bottom of the large flask which had been the distillation chamber (Harry: a high sulfur crude I take it? several chuckles). In trying to clean it up I had mixed some gasoline and some hydrochloric acid, quite a mixture to try clean it out. The class was in session and I was in the lab part of the classroom shaking this flask with its admixed liquids and pressure built up that I couldn't contain with the stopper. Some of the liquid spewed out, and some of it splashed on students in the front row. Holes began appearing in the blouse of one of the girls, who left promptly to the restrooms and someone got her a fresh blouse. Although no serious medical problem resulted (the HCl was pretty dilute), the result clearly could have been much worse. I've thought many times since how lucky I was not to have caused someone a serious injury just out of lack of knowledge.

Harry:
So you went into science in spite of this?
Sarah:
And they let you? Many chuckles.

Sarah:
Were there any other scientists in your immediate family?

Ken:
No, none at all.

Sarah:
So you were the black sheep?

Ken:
My mother and father both came from large families. I was the first person in my mother's family to go to college, and in my father's family there was one cousin that started college at the same time I did. We were sort of the trailblazers in those families.

Sarah:
You just told us about the experiments in the chem lab. Were there other interactions with the petroleum industry you can relate to us?

Ken:
There was a lot of activity of around Perry, quite a flurry of it for a couple or three decades. As with most teenagers, when I was 16 or 17 I was looking for a way to earn some bucks, and fortunately for me one of my uncles was a driller. He offered to take me out and start me in the oil fields, and took me out on his crew. Before I went out my father sat me down and talked with me about safety on the oil rig, what you stay away from, and what you don't do. One of the things he told me was that, if you ever hear somebody yell don't look around, just get off the rig floor. So we were making a routine connection one night and I hear somebody yell, and I was halfway down the catwalk before I turned to look back. It wasn't anything serious, and the crew had a nice hee-haw at my expense. Several chuckles!

I worked on drilling rigs in the Osage County area of northeastern Oklahoma, in southern Kansas and in central Oklahoma. When you work in the oil field you start out on the rig floor, and if you are fortunate enough you work you way up to working derricks--the most fun job on the rig. I worked my way up to derricks at age 20 or 21.

Harry:
What specifically were the aspects of that particular job; working the derricks?

Ken:
Well, that's the fellow who stands up in the derricks I worked on. They were called "doubles" because the stands of drill pipe had 2 joints of drill pipe in them. You stand on the "board" and disconnect the elevators (which pick up the drill string) from the pipe so that it can be set down on the rig floor. After the bit has been changed and the drill string is being returned to the hole again, the blocks (pulley system) come up and you shove the stand of drill pipe out into the derrick, grab the "horns" (handles) of the elevators and snap them shut. You work with a safety harness and a line which is tied to the railing behind you. To do the job properly you have to throw yourself out into the open space of the derrick. If the derrick man is not willing to be out into the space of the center of the derrick he won't be a very good derrick man. It's something that young guys do better I think because death is the farthest thing from their minds. I'm not sure I could do that now, even though I know it's perfectly safe since your harness is tied to the back of the "board".

In one of my more exciting oil field experiences occurred during one of these "trips" (when the drill pipe is pulled out of the well bore, the bit is changed, and the pipe is returned to the hole). When you are ready to begin running the drill string back into the hole with the new bit, the driller takes you up--you ride the blocks up--and coasts the blocks toward the board and you step off into space and onto the board. One night it was sort of rainy and I was riding up, and you worked with leather-soled shoes which after a while are sort of slick and don't have good traction on metal. So burlap bags were put on the edge of the board to stand on to provide a surface with some traction. These things, invariably over time, get drilling mud in the burlap and drilling mud is quite slick. That combination--rainy evening, drilling mud was slick--as I stepped off and felt my foot begin to slide. It was 60' down to the rig floor.

Harry:
Oh, wow!

Sarah:
And you weren't roped to anything at this point?

Ken:
No, I was in space. I managed to lunge out and grab the side of the derrick and pull myself up onto the board. That was the closest I came to a serious accident in the oil fields.

Harry:
I can't imagine many palynologists have had that well site experience that you have had, actually working on a rig.

Ken:
Well, it gave me some insights, both good and bad, into things that go on on wells. I recall that when I was new and working on my uncle's crew, the newest guy gets assigned to "catching" samples. So, you take samples off the shale shaker, was them off thoroughly and bag them. And I think uncle didn't understand the importance of samples, but when I first started I was very careful--I would wait to see the mark on the kelly just disappear into the bushing and I'd grab the sample right quick and wash it up. I tried to time it exactly. He saw me doing this and one evening he said, "You don't have to be quite that careful, as a matter fact sometimes you can catch a couple of samples at a time, get a sample ahead." We were catching samples at, I believe, 10' intervals (maybe 30' intervals) so uncle was the one with the experience so I took him at his word. I didn't know how critical cuttings samples could be. One night as we were getting ready to go off tower at 11:30--one of the things he had always said to me was to be sure I was caught up on samples when we went the new crew came on--so he asked me if I was caught up. I said, "Oh yeah, I'm 3 or 4 ahead". He said, "Oh, my God, and he went running out to the shale shaker, grabbed those 3 or 4 samples and threw them out in the mud pit. That was the last time I did that. I began to understand that you shouldn't get that far ahead.

Harry:
Did you have any experience with cable tool drilling, or was it all rotary by the time you started?

Ken:
It was all rotary. I remember when they were drilling in the area of father's farm when I was a kid, that they used the build-up type steel derrick which they built up a piece at a time from the ground up, obviously before the time of the tilt-up derrick they used when I worked in the oil fields. At that point in time cable tools were used to complete a well. When I was working in the Osage it was a development drilling thing that was going on. We knew pretty well where the top of the producing formation would be, and we would drill within a few feet of it and then a cable tool outfit would be brought in to finish the hole to avoid injecting a lot of mud into the formation around the borehole and making completion that much more difficult. That was the only use of cable tools when I was in the oil field.

Sarah:
Were you ever on site when a gusher roared up?

Ken:
I'm afraid the gushers had all been found by the time I was doing that.

Harry:
Mostly in Hollywood, perhaps! All laugh!

Sarah:
Well we see those great scenes in films, so you just sort of wonder . . .

Ken:
Well, yeah, Spindletop was long finished by the time I got to the oil fields. Most of the rigs I worked on were on the Osage and that was all development drilling so the reservoirs had been tapped and there wasn't a lot of gas pressure left. We never, on the exploration things I worked on, hit anything that was something that couldn't be controlled by the balance of mud in the hole. When you got near the formation, if there was any danger, you'd always increase the mud weight to try and make sure that nothing happened. And one of the things you always did when you started to drill was to check the blowout preventer--go down and close the rams on that thing physically. That was before they had the electric rams which the driller could activate by throwing a switch on the rig floor to close them. You had to get down under the rig where, fortunately at that point in the operation it wasn't a lot of drilling mud all over, and closed that so you were sure you could shut it down if you had to, even though the danger was not great.

Harry:
Your undergraduate major was science education. What influenced you to go to university and to major in science education?

Ken:
Well, I graduated from high school when I was 17. By that time I had already made the decision that the farm was not for me. It was nice, but it was not something I wanted to do the rest of my life. When I went down to pre-enroll at Oklahoma University--I can't recall whether there was any testing involved or not, if there was it was not to any great extent--but I was placed in the advanced group of freshmen, and got landed with 21 semester hours the first semester hours and 22 hours the second semester. They noticed my good chemistry grades--despite the poor lab practices--and said, "Gee, you know you look like maybe you should be in Chemical Engineering". So, that's where they slotted me. In addition to the heavy class load, and that included things like chemistry lab in addition to lectures, I was working in a sorority house 5 or 6 hours a day to earn my board; and Oklahoma University being a land grant college I was in ROTC which required 2 hours of drill each Tuesday afternoon. So, I had a pretty full schedule. Sciences, of course, were part of the standard curriculum that any freshman got into. They gave you a fairly broad look at the sciences, both geological, physical and biological, and by the time I was a Junior the urge to teach had surfaced and I finally found the area of science that really caught my interest--in the first botany course I had. It was taught in a unique fashion--something called the Ohio State method--in which there was no laboratory, but 5 hours of lecture each week, and the instructor did experiments on a bench in the front of the classroom and engaged the class in discussions about what was obvious there and what implications this might have, how would you explain what you had seen, what was going on. Really, a marvelous way to teach that course as far as I was concerned. That really caught my fancy. Then I got into the second course, called Plant Kingdom, taught by the man who was my academic advisor at the time--an absolutely marvelous professor named Elroy Rice. He taught the class so well, it was so interesting and he was such a helpful, caring individual that I was pretty well hooked on botany at that point in time. It just progressed from there; of course the Education courses--which, as you know Sarah, are required if you want to get into that--so I finished off with a major in Secondary Science and Math Education.

Harry:
Well, I'm going to have to ask you, what was your job in the sorority house? Several laughs!

Ken:
Well, it was serving meals and washing dishes. It was quite interesting. I worked in a sorority house for 2 ½ years, switched over to a fraternity house for ½ year, and then worked in a restaurant on Campus Corner called the Town Tavern. All very interesting experiences. I learned from the short experience at the Town Tavern that I really didn't want to be a waiter as a career. I was not well suited for that.

Sarah:
How and when did you first learn about palynology?

Ken:
It was an interesting combination of events and I've reflected back many times on the seminal event that started me on that path. In the spring semester of 1957, my senior year, I was taking a course entitled Spring Flora of Oklahoma from Professor George Goodman. And as the semester ended Professor Goodman said, "There's a group called The Southwestern Association of Naturalists that's meeting here on campus, they have a 2-day weekend field trip, and I invite anyone in the class who's interested to go on that field trip. On Saturday morning I was the only class member who showed up, intending to go for one day. As a part of the field trip they provided a box lunch. When I got to the designated location I found Professor Goodman, and he asked if I had a ride. When I said I didn't he said, "Well, let me put you with Dr. Traverse of Shell Oil Company and you can ride with him". [both Harry and Sarah chuckle.] Traverse was working in Shell's Bellaire lab at the time and he was using the trip to collect modern pollen for the reference collection he was building at Shell. He was also collecting the plants from which the pollen was taken so that they could be deposited as vouchered herbarium specimens.

I had the chance to work with Al on Saturday, and of course as both of you know Al is very voluble and engages people in conversation. He and I had many vigorous discussions ranging from botany to government policies on farm acreages. When we got to Weatherford in southwestern Oklahoma on Saturday evening, Al said he had really enjoyed talking with me and appreciated my help, and he inquired whether I would be along the next day. I said that I hadn't brought any clothes and so would have to return to Norman with the group that was returning that evening. Al said, "Well, if you want to stay and work with me tomorrow, I'll pay for your banquet ticket and motel room tonight, I'll lend you a suit of clothes to wear to the banquet, I'll pay for your lunch tomorrow, and besides I'll give you $20 in spending money." [Sarah says, "Wow", and both Harry and Sarah chuckle.] I accepted immediately.

When the trip was splitting up in the Arbuckle Mountains in southern Oklahoma on Sunday afternoon, Al said to me, "What do you do during your summers?" I told him I worked on drilling rigs in the oil field, and he asked if I would be interested in doing something like "this" with Shell over the summers. I said I would like that very much and Al asked me to write him a letter to that effect when I got back to campus. Of course, summer positions had long been filled by that time so Al suggested that I write his friend Charlie Felix of Sun Oil Company. I wrote to Charlie, but he was out of the office on business, the summer wore on, and I accepted a teaching job in a Junior High School in Colorado.

I spent a year in that position, locked horns with the Principal on many occasions, and of course that was a losing battle. When it was clear that I was going to be leaving there at the end of the term I wrote Al in March to inquire whether there were any summer jobs with Shell. I fully intended to obtain another teaching job for the fall. Al sent me an application for employment with Shell, and in his letter he said that Shell was opening an operational laboratory in Baton Rouge, and he asked whether I would be interested in that position. So, I filled out the application, went down to Denver for a physical exam by the company doctor there, and was offered the position of laboratory technician in the Baton Rouge office which stated July 1, 1958.

This was the place I first encountered palynological techniques. Charlie Trotter, the head of the Baton Rouge lab, had been a Bill Spackman student at Penn State, had done a lot of work in the Everglades, and he taught me palynological techniques and eventually pollen morphology and identification.

Harry:
Can you tell us a little more about your early years with Shell? Shell, of course, is one of the real pioneers in stratigraphic palynology. How was the laboratory organized, and how much interaction did you have with the research group in Bellaire? Who were you colleagues besides Trotter, and what major projects were you working on at this time?

Ken:
The Baton Rouge was Shell's Southeast Louisiana Division. All of the research in North America was done in Houston in the Bellaire lab. The Baton Rouge lab was strictly operational. There were 2 palynologists: Charlie Trotter and a fellow named Paul Storm, who had done some work with Kathryn Clisby at Oberlin College in Ohio. He was a geologist primarily, but had had some palynological training so he fit into that job rather nicely. Our work was all in the Gulf Coast, more particularly in the Mio-Pliocene of offshore Louisiana and a bit in offshore Texas. We worked in close conjunction, and at the behest of, Shell's Marine Group in New Orleans who were exploring in the areas off the Mississippi River Delta and along the shelf areas of Louisiana.

The reason for starting palynology in that area was the problematical nature of the forams as exploration moved down-dip in the Gulf. They needed a new stratigraphic tool to attempt to draw some time lines within which the forams could be used. So, enter palynology. This was not long after the classic paper that I'll talk about again I'm sure--the Kuyl, Muller and Waterbolk paper detailing the use of pollen in the Maracaibo Basin of Venezuela--a seminal paper that I think started this whole industrial palynology revolution.

The Hague was never involved in anything that we did. Charlie would talk from time to time about The Hague and some of the people that were there, one of which had come to Houston at one point in time. The two people whose names I recall are Chris Gutjahr and Bert Von Raadshoven. Gutjahr had spent a fair amount of time in Africa as an ex-pat, but the only contact we had with those people was that if they had generated a report or some technology that was useful to us it was made available to us, to Charlie and Paul. At that point in time I was working strictly in the lab.

Harry:
Were there any training exercises between the operational labs and Bellaire, the research lab?

Ken:
None that I was aware of, certainly none that Charlie or Paul participated in. I think maybe that style of thing came along a little later in the industry--or if it was there it didn't filter down to the palynology people at that point in time.

Sarah:
Can you generalize about some of the strengths of the Shell approach to palynology in those early years?

Ken:
Shell certainly had a multidisciplinary approach. They made every effort to combine palynology with forams and use everything available. Not that the fellow worked with us, but in the Baton Rouge office they had a fellow named Gil Klapper who later went on the University of Iowa--you've probably heard his name, a conodont specialist. Gil was working in the Southeast Louisiana Division at the time we were there--clearly on much different problems than we were working on. Our work was confined to the Mio-Pliocene of the offshore Gulf of Mexico.

They were strongly focused on the geology and geophysics of these intervals. They put all of this data together in their exploration program. In palynology I know that we spent a lot of time getting the morphological detail right for the pollen and spores. So I think it was a top-notch effort by people who knew what they were doing, and who were quite careful in their work.

When we began our studies, Shell provided 3 wells that had been sidewall cored at 100' intervals specifically for palynological use. Each was analyzed and from these analyses meaningful stratigraphic markers were noted. The same 3 wells were then studied using cuttings samples to compare the results, and that comparison showed that cuttings samples could indeed be used. The most prominent stratigraphic marker was the earliest geological occurrence of the pollen of Artemisia (sagebrush), whose sharp base on the histograms generated from the sidewall core studies was readily apparent. In the histograms from the cuttings samples the occurrence of Artemisia dropped sharply at the same point, then "tailed" for perhaps 100' down the hole. This exercise provided considerable confidence in the usefulness of cuttings samples, and was another example of the thoroughness of the Shell approach.

Harry:
Shell used a numerical code system for taxonomy. Did you find that cumbersome in relating the palynomorphs you studied to those recorded in the literature, or just how was that handled at the time?

Ken:
I don't think it was cumbersome at all. It was really, the system was simplicity in itself. Designations for pollen grains all began with a "P". If they had colpi, the next letter was the number of colpi. PCO would mean a pollen grain with 3 colpi and no pores. The next indicator was the number of pores. So, a PC3 was a tricolporate pollen grain. Then the specimen was given a number, and that number was simply it's the next number that came up when the specimen was described.

Sarah:
So numbers were assigned chronologically when they decided it was a new form?

Ken:
Yep. It was very easy to use, very easy to teach, easy to understand--it worked beautifully. In 1958, of course, palynological literature was in short supply. The taxonomy was not well fleshed out in a lot of these areas, and what was available was in large measure stuff from German lignites, Thomson and Pflug's work for instance--I know that we had their Palaeontographica paper that people referred to a lot in the office. But, even though we weren't producing a lot of published material, this was pretty much--at least for the oil industry--a cutting edge effort. People were blazing a new trail. It was easy enough to compare our photographs of type specimens with things in the literature to make some comparisons when we could find things that had been published that were similar to our things. So, I didn't find the numerical code system difficult at all. In fact I continued using it, in my head at least, after I left Shell.

Harry:
How did Shell coordinate that between operational offices and divisions? Did they try to unify it, or did each operational laboratory have its own taxonomy to deal with?

Ken:
I left Shell before we really had other operational labs with which it might have been required to coordinate the code system. I think that they did that later on, and I believe that the fellow who was involved to a great extent in that was someone who had started out as a lab tech in Houston named Tom Tesch. You may have met him--an AASP member for a number of years. I think Tom did a certain amount of that, but when I was with Shell (I left in 1963) there simply wasn't anyone else in the country who was doing what we were doing--and certainly not in the area we were doing it. Later on I believe the Houston office picked up the Texas offshore studies from our office.

Harry:
Did you have any further dealings with Al Traverse when you were in Baton Rouge?

Ken:
No, seldom saw Al. He was in Houston at the Bellaire lab, but actually Al left Shell probably not long after I left. As you probably know, before he went to Penn State he went to the University of Texas for a couple of years.

Sarah:
Shell's central research facility was in The Hague; what sort of projects were going on there and what type of coordination between The Hague and the operational labs?

Ken:
There didn't seem to be anything--it sort of seemed like The Hague was a separate company except that I believe we had access to their technology. They had a lot of people that went out on ex-pat assignments--Africa and Southeast Asia were 2 of those areas where they really concentrated their people. In some cases, certainly for those people who went to Africa, they encountered some severe health problems. I know that Charlie Trotter had mentioned in passing that Chris Gutjahr's health had been damaged a great deal by being in Nigeria I believe it was for some years. In Baton Rouge we were pretty much left to our own devices. It was Charlie's lab to run and he ran it very well. The Marine Group (New Orleans) was happy with what we were doing--the correlations we were able to develop for them--and so the contact, if there was contact with The Hague or even Bellaire, was pretty much transparent to me when I was in the lab.

Harry:
Historically it would be interesting to learn of Shell's lab techniques at that time, their data acquisition methods within each office and within the company, and the data display methods used in that era. Can you enlighten us about that aspect of their operations?

Ken:
There are all sorts of aspects that were unique, and probably would seem terribly primitive to anyone starting in palynology today. My experience in working on drilling rigs actually left me puzzled the first time Charlie and I sat down in the lab to process samples. We opened the first sample bag, I looked at the contents, and I said, "Charlie, these aren't cuttings samples, this is drilling mud"--because I wasn't expecting the relatively unconsolidated material that came up as samples. He assured me that it was most likely sample so we proceeded.

Samples were extremely rich in microfossil content, so much so that we started with only 6 grams of sample. This was crushed up and launched on its palynological way, as people still do. We used a hot plate in the fume hood, and standard HCl and HF treatments. We had metal beakers (maybe stainless steel) 250 ml in size, and we would bring the HF to just "turning over" in the beakers until the sample reached a very viscous state--not to dryness. Then we proceeded with the rest of the processing. All of the centrifugation was done in table model centrifuges because we had small amounts of material to deal with, and you could have the centrifuge sitting right in the fume hood. This eliminated the need to provide venting, as we would have had to do for the larger floor model. I'm convinced we had the best available fume hood technology--put out by a company called Metalab in Houston. There was absolutely no escape of fumes into the laboratory at any time. It was a very safe place to work--we used rubber gloves, but did not use face shields. Rubber aprons were available for use. One interesting aspect: our heavy liquid separations were done using bromoform, which is pretty much a No-No in this day and age, and we did the bromoform treatment outside the fume hood. Despite that, as far as I know I have experienced no ill effects from my year and a half engaging in that practice. I've always felt that bromoform was a superior heavy liquid for these separations because it lacked the viscosity of ZnCl. I always felt that it was more difficult to adjust the specific gravity of the latter to obtain the results you would get from bromoform--where things really separated beautifully. You ended up with a very nice pellicle of material and could get rid of the heavy mineral fraction.

Sarah:
You have been saying "We"; did you have technicians or did you do your own sample processing?

Ken:
I did the sample processing until I left the laboratory to move to doing routine sample counting. Someone else was then hired to replace me in the lab. Once the sample processing was completed, the residue was put in a glycerine / alcohol mixture in small vials with cork stoppers. When it was time for the sample to be analyzed (counted) temporary slides were prepared by placing a drop of two of the slurry on a slide and covered by a cover slip. When the counting of the sample was finished the residue scraped off with the cover slip and, inasmuch as possible, was returned to the vial. It was an easy and convenient method to study samples, but if someone wished to examine the exact materials you had studied it was not possible.

Harry:
When was the heavy liquid technique introduced at Shell?

Ken:
Do you mean in time or in the processing technique?

Harry:
Yes, in time.

Ken:
It was something that Charlie explained to me when he taught me the processing technique, so it predated my starting at Shell (1958) unless he brought it to Shell when he went to work for them. He had spent some time in Houston so I suspect that he simply took it from the research lab and brought it with him. He was selected out of that facility to head the lab in Baton Rouge.

Shell had an extensive collection of palynomorph type specimens. These were prepared in an interesting fashion. The palynologist would take a bit of the slurry mix--the same type of material that would be used for sample counting--and spread it reasonably thinly on a slide. Under a 10x objective, and using a dissecting needle, all of the extraneous materials would be cleared away from around the pollen grain or spore. That's not something I could do now--my hand is not nearly steady enough--but younger folks can clear away all of the trash so that only the microfossil of interest remained in a clear field. At that point another dissecting needle with a dot of glycerine jelly would be used to go in and pick up the microfossil, put it on a clean slide, and lay a cover slip on it. You would then hold a previously prepared stick of paraffin (about the diameter of a pencil) over a small alcohol lamp until the tip was liquid, and put a drop of paraffin at the edge of the cover slip. The slide was then held over the alcohol lamp--the glycerine jelly melted first and surrounded the microfossil, then the paraffin melted and flowed around the small circle of glycerine jelly. You ended up with the specimen in a clear area of the slide and available to be photographed.

When the samples were counted we borrowed the Pleistocene palynologists' method of Pollen Sums, in which the number of pollen grains from the arboreal angiosperms was used as a sum against which everything else was calculated. Initially the microfossils were reported by scoring on a piece of paper. Later, Shell bought tape recorders for our use, the counts were spoken into the tape recorders, and you would later score or tabulate the microfossils yourself--or, at times Shell brought in temp hires to tabulate the counts. We worked at sample intervals of 30' - 120', depending on the kind of resolution we were looking for in any particular well.

When the counts had been finished for a well, it was time to make the data display. We did large "sawblade diagrams"--we had drafting tables in our offices--on a 42"-wide roll of heavy weight, gridded drafting paper. We would plot the percentage points at each sample depth for each palynomorph type, all done in India ink so any mistake brought out the electric eraser to attempt to clean up the dot without eroding the drafting paper. Then all of the dots were connected with drafting triangles to form the sawblades for the individual palynomorph types. We had corkboard on our walls and the diagrams--often over 10' in length--were pinned to the wall for study to draw the horizons defined by our marker types, and to look for any other signatures of interest. Shortly after the division was transferred to New Orleans in 1960, Charlie began to get computer printouts of the data which had been digitized from our counting sheets. These printouts were little more than columns of numbers and symbols which represented a range of occurrences (e.g., 1-5, 6-10, etc.)--printers capable of producing sawblade diagrams from digitized data were still several years away. But this step did save the substantial time that had formerly gone into drawing the diagrams.

Harry:
This is very interesting. I know that I was at Exxon Research in Tulsa and it seems obvious that Shell had preceded us in the use of heavy liquids. I know that development of first ZnCl, then ZnBr, was around 1958 or 1959, but it wasn't preceded by bromoform. ZnCl was the first agent we used, and I know that Gulf with George Fournier did a lot of single pollen mounts of type specimens, so it's interesting to see how these different labs evolved techniques independently and some became virtually similar.

Sarah:
Regarding interdisciplinary approaches used in Baton Rouge, to what extent did you use dinoflagellates in the Gulf of Mexico those first years that you were there?

Ken:
We tabulated the marine microfossils the best we could. This was 5 -6 years before Bill Evitt's first publication came on the scene . . .

Sarah:
Right. So you were dealing mostly with "hystrichospheres", right?

Ken:
Right . . .

Sarah:
With a few dinos thrown in for . . .

Ken:
We had 3 categories: Dinos, Hystrix and Varia. That sort of gives you the feeling we were feeling around in the dark. The difference between a Dino and a Hystrix sort of depended on who described it.

Sarah:
The Hystrix were the spiny things obviously . . .

Ken:
Right. Right. And some of those were called Dinos, too.

Sarah:
Well, OK . . .

Ken:
Obviously we knew very little about these things, and they didn't make a whole lot of sense stratigraphically. Of course there were areas where they were absent, and because we knew those were marine microfossils we assumed we were probably not in marine sections when we did not have at least some of those--or, certainly if you had them, you knew that you were in a marine section. We actually had some colorful names for some of these things--from lack of knowledge of what they were. One "species" that was in sort of the Batioladinium complex was called Varia catfish because of the protrusions which looked a little like the "whiskers" on a catfish. But that was the state of the dinocysts in the late 50s--really a puzzle, we didn't know what to do with them in fact.

Harry:
Do you have any advanced information about Muller's work in the Orinoco Delta before it was published?

Ken:
None that came to my attention while I was there. I think I encountered Muller's work near the end of my time at Shell, or when I was at Tulane, one or the other. I think he published that in '62 didn't he?

Harry:
1959.

Ken:
1959? Oh, OK, it was a little bit sooner than I thought. It was not something that we had running around the office.

Harry:
Yes, because it was apparent from that study that the use of marine:non-marine ratios could be very helpful in applications work it seemed to me.

Sarah:
Right.

Harry:
Ken, you left Shell to return to university for a graduate degree in Botany. What prompted that decision?

Ken:
By 1962 or 1963--well, to go back a little further, Shell needed another microscopist to do routine counting, and even when I was a lab tech I would often finish my sample processing work by noon and if I didn't have another set that needed processing I would often go into Charlie Trotter's office where he would be counting samples. He had a microscope with a trinocular head, and I would sit on the table and peer down the trinocular head as he was counting because I was fascinated by the microfossils. I learned what most of the pollen types looked like, so when they needed someone else to do routine counting I was the natural choice.

So, they bought another microscope and set me down to count samples. This was even before we left Baton Rouge in 1960. So by the time I was there a little less than 2 years I was out of the lab and at a microscope. That meant, of course, that they had hired a new lab technician, and we moved on to New Orleans. It was clear to me that I had no opportunity to move up professionally in the company because I had no formal training in palynology, and when all of the interesting discussions took place I was on the outside looking in of course. It was also my suspicion that the oil companies--which expanded and contracted their staffs periodically, I was familiar with that . . .

Sarah:
So you had already seen that pattern . . .

Ken:
I had seen that and knew of it and here I am sitting in what I called the "kick-off" position--if someone was expendable it was me. Not the lab tech who prepared samples and not the professional palynologists with formal training. And I also had thought about going back to teaching, so I had spoken with a fellow named Neal Walther whom we had working part time at Shell. He was a pre-Med student at Tulane, and he and his wife often played bridge with my wife and me. I confided in him that I was pretty seriously considering leaving Shell, going to graduate school to get my MS, and going back to teaching. Neal said, "Why don't you do it at Tulane" (I had mentioned I was probably going to go back to OU). I said, "Gee, Tulane is the "Harvard of the South" and my academic record at OU I don't believe qualifies me for Tulane. He said, "Well, you know, in the Botany courses I had there, the laboratories were taught by Zoology grad students. I think that you might find a better reception there than you think".

So, in September of 1962, I hauled myself down to Tulane for an appointment with the Chairman of the Botany Department, a curmudgeonly gentleman named Thomas Theron Earle. I sat in professor Earle's office and said, "Dr. Earle I'm here to talk with you about a graduate assistantship, and doing a MS in Botany". He said, "Well, it's kinda late to talk about assistantships for this year". I said, "Oh, no sir, I'm talking about a year from now". He though that was interesting that someone would approach him a year in advance, and he only asked me one question concerning my academic record at Oklahoma--"What were your grades in Botany". I said they were all As and Bs, and he said, "Fine". So, in due course I was offered a teaching assistantship.

Professor Earle also confided in me during that interview that, since I would be working as a teaching assistant, they would allow me 2 years to complete my MS--otherwise they would expect it to be completed in 1 year. He said anything longer would be a waste of my time and theirs too.

Harry & Sarah:
Oohs, and chuckles. That's really laying it right on the table isn't it?

Ken:
There was nothing hidden about Professor Earle. He let it all hang out, and very quickly. So that led me to Tulane University for my MS.

Harry:
Can you tell us a little about the circumstances that led to your thesis study of some Recent sediments from the Mississippi River Delta? And what were the major findings of that research?

Ken:
Well, in all of the wells we looked at in offshore Louisiana there was an incredible amount of pollen and spores deposited that had come down either, depending on where you were on the Louisiana coast, from a tremendous drainage area of the United States. The source area was enormous. Down through either the current Mississippi, or, alternately, through the Atchafalaya Basin. There were no published papers of which we were aware that discussed pollen origin vs. transport vs. sedimentation. And we always thought that we perhaps could have done a better job if we had had some ways of assessing those factors. We knew that some of the pollen was coming from a long ways away because we had reworked Aquilapollenites coming from the Rocky Mountains. We had sagebrush pollen, Artemisia, which formed a major marker and that was obviously coming from the Western Interior somewhere. So we knew that this was a complex problem that no one had come to grips with. And here I am doing a MS at Tulane and sitting 75 miles from a modern delta, albeit the Mississippi is clearly unrepresentative of most deltas in the world. Still, it was the one were dealing with and one that had enormous source and drainage areas to play with. And, it seemed to be there might be some possibility of beginning to make some contribution to the science of palynology.

My thesis professor, Dr. Willis Eggler, and I managed to borrow a coring device from Dr. John McDowell of the Geology Department. It was really "sophisticated". It was composed of a piece of aluminum pipe that was sharpened on one end, with an aluminum plunger with 2 O-rings that you would set at the bottom of the pipe prior to pushing the pipe into the sediments in an attempt to minimize compaction of the sediments. The plunger was held in place by a chain which attached it to the top of a tripod whose legs rested on boards to prevent its sinking into the sediments as the pipe was pushed into the sediments, and a clamp with 2 handles could be clamped to the outside of the pipe to push the pipe into the sediments. Of course you accomplished all of this while standing in mud and water up to waist deep, and Professor Eggler and I had quite a time in the ponds and marshes of the delta.

We took 10 cores, all of them less than 6' long, in places I had selected on a map of the Mississippi River delta to look at several types of environments there. The Fish and Wildlife Service were the people we worked with, and they took us around the delta collecting. A fellow named John Nowak was the Manager of the Delta Refuge at the time, and was most helpful. The Delta is one of the most incredibly beautiful places I've ever been. It's quiet, calm--I saw deer run across a pond that we would sink down in, and they didn't sink in at all. We were taken around by a Cajun gentleman by the name of Otis. Very colorful character. We had a boat that was pretty fast; I would lay out my map and say to Otis, "I want to go there". He would look at the map, and say, "OK, get in the boat". And we would go flying down these bayous and small passes, we would have no idea where we were, and pretty soon Otis would shut down the boat and say, "Here we are". So, Professor Eggler and I would climb out into the water and mud, set up the core rig, take a core, lay it down on a board on the boat and extrude the sediment. I would then sample it at 6" intervals for study.

The results I obtained were, I thought, quite interesting. The pollen complex from Grass, Typha and the Cyperaceae seemed to indicate that you could tell the depositional environment of a pond from that of a marsh because that pollen complex was less dominant in the ponds. One of the big prevalent pollen producers and cover plants of the delta is the Alligator weed, Achyranthes philoxeroides. It has a fenestrate pollen grain, and that seemed to indicate when deposition in a pond had filled that area so that it was emergent. I had taken a core part way up a levee from a pond, and as you moved up through the core Achyranthes philoxeroides topped out. I believe that this top was the point at which that part of the levee emerged from the pond. The strange thing was that Achyranthes philoxeroides grows in the marshes, but the pollen was predominantly found in the ponds. The explanation I devised for that involved the fact that Achyranthes philoxeroides flowers early in the spring, and that the high waters of the spring floods moved the pollen predominantly from the marshes to the ponds. The other thing is, Achyranthes philoxeroides was only introduced into the delta after 1900, and in 2 of the cores I could see a base for Achyranthes philoxeroides. The cores were taken in a part of the delta that was receiving less deposition than it had earlier, and I think in those 2 instances we were seeing the sediments that had been deposited post-1900. Not altogether bad for 6 short cores. It was also fascinating to me--and I had intended to continue this--but that got changed.

Sarah:
Did you also see in your modern cores things from remote distances that sort of tied in with the Tertiary sediments you had looked at?

Ken:
Yes. Although I believe I saw Artemisia-type pollen (I didn't check that out when preparing for the Oral History), certainly the number of types of Compositae was not nearly as diverse in those sediments as I had seen offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. That may be because it has received a disproportionate share of the bedload from the river.

Sarah:
It's such a huge, huge system to try to . . . there's no way you're going to be able to sort out all of the variables . . .

Ken:
Yes, that's a lifetime of work for several people.

Harry:
Well, your description of that reminds me that, when I was working with L. R. Wilson, we did bog studies in New England and there's a similar base there of Chestnut becoming extinct in 1918--about the same time frame--so you could use that as an absolute dating point. Did you then use your knowledge of the modern pollen from what you had learned at Shell, or did you also collect from modern pollen to identify what you were seeing in the samples from the delta?

Ken:
The only thing that I did from modern pollen I collected, in part on my own, this always fascinated me, I would collect things growing near where I lived and process them up and make slides of them. Actually, Achyranthes philoxeroides was one of the things I had gotten during my collecting, and when I saw it in the delta it was obvious what it was. The rest of the things in the sediments were things familiar to me from the Tertiary Plio-Miocene of the Gulf, otherwise it was pretty much a layon. We saw pollen similar to that--in fact there's a nice peak of it in one of the well sections--I think it's clearly a facies marker, not a stratigraphic marker, in the Tertiary. We had seen that in the Gulf, but didn't know what it was until I got a glimpse of perhaps a relative of its parent plant when I did the delta work.

Harry:
Did you see any dinoflagellates in this study?

Ken:
I don't believe I saw even one. I think it's too turbid in the areas we sampled. We didn't sample out at the edge of the delta where you might have seen the saline influence. This was mostly marshes, ponds and levees. Interesting thing--one of the places we sampled, Professor Eggler was always very sharp about the delta, he was a plant ecologist and had done work in the delta--Eggler knew to avoid areas where they had done dredging which produced spoil banks. We actually sampled one spoil bank, and it was an admixture of several environments--you couldn't tell much of anything about it. Everything else from the other cores was fairly clear . . .

Sarah:
Made sense compared to this . . .

Ken:
Just like someone stirred together sediments from several environments.

Sarah:
Other than your thesis work, what were the scientific highlights of your time and your professional associations at Tulane?

Ken:
Tulane had a small, but incredibly talented, faculty. And of course Tulane had traditionally been a "boys school" and was co-located with Sophie Newcomb College, the "girls school". Of course that gender separation was no longer in existence when I was there. But my botanical and geological background both were broadened considerably while I was there. Tulane's Botany Department was, by and large, sort of like that at Minnesota, although much smaller--a classical botany school: Plant Anatomy, Plant Morphology, Mycology, then moving into Cytology and Genetics at the time I was there under the aegis of Professor Gene Newcomb.

It was also an opportunity to plan, initiate and complete a palynological study. There were 4 people there that were really valuable to me. It began with the fellow who was the Mycologist, Dr. Arthur Weldon. He, as much as anything else, is responsible for my doing a PhD. I had intended, pretty much, to do my MS and then return to teaching in high school. After the first year I taught the summer school botany course with Weldon . . .

Sarah:
At the university . . . ?

Ken:
Yes, at Tulane. Weldon and I would go out in the afternoons and collect specimens for the next day or 2 days classes and bring them in. We had lots of time to chat, and we would sometimes go and have a beer afterward to relax. One day I happened to be driving and dropped Weldon off at his house when we had finished, and he said, "Oh, by the way, are you going to go ahead and do a PhD?" I said, "No, Dr. Weldon, I really don't think I'm PhD timber". He looked at me and said, "I wouldn't spit on 80% of the people who do PhDs, but I'm telling you that you should do a PhD." I took that to heart and reoriented myself and began looking to apply for PhD studies after Tulane.

I recall also Joseph Ewan who taught Plant Taxonomy and History of Botany. The man had an AB from the University of California (Berkeley), but he was one of the sharpest and most gifted people. He used to talk frequently about how people taught history classes, and said that history teachers so often missed the boat because they required students to rotely memorize dates and events. Rather, he said, why not talk about the events, conditions and times that precipitated these events--things don't happen without a reason, and people would be much more receptive to history if they had this sort of background. And that's the way he taught his courses. He gave, in laboratory, some of the toughest exams I have ever seen--fair, but tough--he really required people to work hard. That was a consistent theme at Tulane.

I earlier mentioned Gene Newcomb. Young professor who taught genetics and cytology at Tulane. The man was a saint. When I was trying to finish off my thesis--I had written it up--and I took it first to Professor Eggler who was my thesis advisor. I came bouncing into Eggler's office one Saturday morning with all of this written out, plopped it down on his desk, and Eggler said, "Leave it with me". So I left it. I asked when I should come back, and Eggler said, "One week".

The next Saturday morning I again came bouncing into his office--he was at Newcomb College--and I said, "Well, how was it?" Professor Eggler was a man of few words. He reached into the bottom desk drawer on the right side of his desk and produced my manuscript and laid it down on his desk. When I saw it I knew that I was in trouble. Blue and red marks all over the pages. Eggler slowly raised his eyes and fixed me with his best glare and said, "In a word, terrible". (much laughter) And it went from there. So I re-wrote the thing, and this of course was in the days before personal computers, when things were hand-written or maybe typed, and of course there were not palynologists at Tulane to supervise things--even though Bob McLaughlin, later a professor at the University of Tennessee, had done his PhD at Tulane. So I was the second palynologist that had come through Tulane. Gene Newcomb sat with me several afternoons in my office in the botany building and listened to me color the air about why "these guys" couldn't understand what I was trying to say palynologically. He would listen to a 2 - 3 minute rant on my part, smile, and say, "I'm sure that you're right, but can we say it this way?" Then we would go on to the next part, I would rant again, and once again Newcomb would say the same thing. He saw with me 2 or 3 afternoons, and without him I don't think I would have gotten it through.

Professor Eggler, despite his crustiness, was very valuable in getting this through and supervising the whole thing. Arthur Weldon was a fascinating character. He invited me, if I decided not to pursue palynology, to work with him in mycology. Shortly after I got to Tulane, Weldon said to me one day, "Where does all this oil you guys explore for come from?" I said that to the best of our knowledge it was derived from the burial of diatoms, dinoflagellates, etc. whose organic fraction over time produced crude oil. He sort of nodded and left, and a couple of day later he came back with a vial, with a small stained pellicle at the top. He said, "You're right, that's where it comes from." He had taken--where he got them I don't know--some diatoms, chucked them into water in a beaker, boiled the water for a time to get the material out of the diatoms, then stained for fats and oils. And that was what this small pellicle was.

Sarah:
So, you mentioned the mycologist, right? Arthur Weldon? Sort of lighting a spark in your mind about pursuing PhD work, and you ended up at the University of British Columbia, again in botany. Can you describe how you arrived at that decision, what got you up over the border, and all that?

Ken:
It was interesting. It was the best of both worlds. While I was at Tulane I, of course, relied a great deal on Charlie Trotter; if I needed help in palynology I called Charlie and talked with him. I talked with him about doing PhD studies, and he said, "Well, Kenny, when I got ready to do my PhD I wrote to several universities and to this day I've only heard from 2 of them. One of them, clearly, was Penn State where he did his PhD, so he had a great place to study--as I mentioned he studied with Bill Spackman. I wrote to 10 universities and I heard from all 10. At one time or another 3 of them made offers of assistance, but I selected UBC because I knew a little bit about Glenn Rouse's work and admired what he had done. Also, I had a wife and 3 sons at the time so I needed a little bit more support than the ordinary graduate student. Glenn saw that and saw to it that I had the funds to come and study there with a family. So, the timing was right, the support was right and it was the best of both worlds for me.

Harry:
Who were your most influential teachers at the University of British Columbia, and why?

Ken:
Clearly, Glenn Rouse--one of the finest teachers I have ever known--both in the lecture theater and in one-on-one situations. There was an incident in my second year there--Glenn was lecturing the first semester in the beginning Botany course, and the class had lots of engineers and foresters in it, lots of "macho" types of guys. Glenn got along with these people beautifully, and they loved him; they loved his lectures. They were delighted with the course. At midterm, at the end of the first semester, the fellow who was the plant taxonomist came in to lecture. His style was not to interact with anyone, but to plunge the room into darkness and show slides for an hour, then turn the lights back on. This was like being cast into hell after a semester with Glenn Rouse.

With the students disdain for the new, and quite prim and proper, lecturer, came the hijinks. The lecturer had the short, slender Departmental technician run the projector and show the slides during his lecture. At one or more points during a lecture one of the students would unplug the projector, and when the tech trooped back to plug it in again someone would substitute a "girlie" slide, which would then appear on the screen when the projector was plugged in. As you can imagine, relations just went from bad to worse.

Came the first test that he gave, and it turns out that the foresters and engineers did poorly on the test. This fellow decided to hold them up to the rest of the class in disdain because they had not done well. He highlighted their test scores and how bad they were. Poured fuel on the fire. I did not know that all of this was going on, of course, until one day when the Plant Ecology class I was taking took its afternoon coffee break. I was in the room having a cup of coffee when I see Glenn Rouse appear in the doorway and motion me to join him outside. I went with him to his office just a couple of doors away. He said, "We've got a problem, and I want you to solve it." My reaction was, "Me, Chief (the nickname I had for Glenn; his name for me was "Gator")?" He told me what had happened, and that the aftermath of this test episode was that the students were threatening to physically throw the plant taxonomist into the pool. Glenn said, "I want you to go over there and solve that problem, and throw people out of there if you have to." My response: "What? Why me?"

So, it turns out that the next day I did go over there and saw what was going on. I had a lab that afternoon and, fortunately, in my lab were the leaders of at least the forestry class--I don't know about the engineering class.

Sarah:
This was a lab for which you were the T.A.?

Ken:
Yes. And I had an excellent relationship with the students in the class. I loved them and they loved me. Before beginning the day's lab exercises I said I had something to talk with them about. I said to them, "I saw what happened in lecture this afternoon, and I got to tell you that you are setting yourselves up to regret this. I know it's tough listening to this lecturer, I know his style isn't what you would like after having Professor Rouse, but I have to tell you that at the end of this semester this lecturer will forget all about this. But you won't forget it because you're going to be repeating this course next year. It's that simple--guys, just knock it off."

I was so surprised and gratified when I found out later that the president of the forestry class went to the forestry class and the engineering class and said, "Hey, guys, Mr. Piel said to knock it off, so you guys knock it off." There was no more problem from that point on. I hadn't looked forward to going over to deal with the problem, but it turned out OK.

I admire Glenn Rouse for so many things.

I also had great admiration for Professor Vladimir Krajina, the plant ecologist. Much of my research dedication came from the example that man set. His research was his life. I don't know how he managed to have any family life because he was at the lab days, nights and weekends it seemed. You seldom saw the light off in his office and lab. And he was the strongest supporter of graduate students you could imagine. Over 30 grad students in botany when I got to UBC, and that made for lots of healthy interactions and discussions over coffee, beer bars, etc. The grad students started their own seminar group, and Professor Krajina never missed a single presentation--even though he was extremely busy with his own research. To him that was a commitment he felt a faculty member should make. He was the only faculty member, I believe, who was there for every seminar.

The story I recall about Professor Krajina is absolutely amazing--as told to me by his grad students. He was a full professor at the University of Prague in his early 20s. During World War II he was a leader in the Czech underground. He used to lapse into stories about this period in his life during plant ecology lectures, and his students in fact told me that if I wanted to pass his course I should read several key publications and I would be fine. I did so, and I did well in his course. It wasn't possible to get all of the necessary information from his lectures because he just veered off so many times--these incidents were still very close to his heart.

He survived the war and became the Minister of Forests and Agriculture in the Free Czech government right after the war. With the establishment of the Communist government in Czechoslovakia, and "Kraj" again went back to heading the underground. He was on their hit list, but they couldn't catch him--so they arrested and shot his brother. The underground got both Kraj and his family out on skis, and the family came to Canada--they landed in eastern Canada. And Kraj got the job at UBC.

They arrived penniless, of course. But, anxious to do his research, Kraj bought a bicycle. His first research area was around Hope, BC, 90 miles up the Fraser River Valley from Vancouver--and Kraj rode the bike both ways. That was how dedicated he was, and how anxious he was to begin his research. He had done the biogeoclimatic zonation of the vegetation in British Columbia long before I got to UBC. He spoke 7 languages.

One of his grad students told me he (the grad student) had spent 2 summers on Banks Island trying to work out the vegetation zonation. The 3rd summer Kraj came up to spend some time with him, and he said they weren't on the island 15 minutes when Kraj was telling him things he hadn't seen in 2 summers of work. Just an absolutely incredible man--just observing him made you think that if you went into a research career you owed it every ounce of energy you that had.

I guess the third person who impressed me--you both know him very well--was Max Taylor. I had an oceanography course from Max. His knowledge of the breadth of the organisms in the oceans just amazed me. Of course, I've never had a better dressed professor! Those are the 3 people I recall most vividly from my time at UBC.

Sarah:
What led you your dissertation study of Middle and Late Tertiary sediments from the central interior of British Columbia.

Ken:
Well, I had gone to Vancouver initially with the intent of continuing the modern pollen distribution and deposition studies. One of the questions I had asked Glenn Rouse when we were discussing whether I would come to UBC or not was 'Do you have a river delta there?' He said, "Oh, yeah, we've got the Fraser." I said, "OK, sounds good to me."

Now, there were a number of samples available in Glenn's lab when I got there, obtained from wells drilled by the Provincial Water Resources Department while looking for aquifers. I processed what seemed like an Avagadro's Number of these things, and all were barren--not a pollen grain or spore to be found. Presumably this was the work of the Chytrid fungi in the sediments. Glenn had been the first one to tumble to this phenomenon, and he saw it in Burrard Inlet where--periodically--large amorphous lumps appeared on the surface. Nobody could understand where these were coming from. Glenn looked at the bottom sediments in the Inlet, and he saw that there was a tremendous amount of conifer pollen present in the sediments. He found these marine fungi--Chytrid fungi--feasting on the conifer pollen. He could see the active breakdown, bit-by-bit, of the conifer pollen grains, and that stuff was going on below the surface also. When enough of dissolution had taken place, this waxy material would congeal and rise to the surface. We figured that was what had done in the pollen and spores in the Fraser River delta also.

Sarah:
Were the fungi still there in the sediments?

Ken:
Didn't see them in the samples I prepared. So, fortunately, about that same time the Water Resources people came to Glenn regarding another project they had going on in the Interior. They were having trouble with their time correlations between different outcrop areas, and they asked Glenn if he had a graduate student who could work on this. He said, "Yep, just got one who arrived." This was doubly good for me because the Water Resources Department had money to fund this study. That's what got me started on the Mid- to Late Tertiary material in the interior of the province.

Harry:
So what were the results of your dissertation? What were the highlights?

Ken:
We were able to relate the Oligocene assemblages to floras that are now extant in southeast China. We were uncertain as to the exact part of the Oligocene we were dealing with. We were sure that it was later than Eocene, and we were pretty certain it was not as late as Miocene. Then Glenn went up to the study area--these were outcrops, many of them along the Fraser River--he went up at the time of a low water level and as he was walking along one of the outcrops he noticed something sticking out of the sediments. It looked like a vertebrate fossil. He excavated this and sent it off to L. S. Russell at the Royal Museum in Ontario. Russell was able to date this as part of a Titanothere jaw, and assign a late middle Oligocene age. At last we had a spike we could drive into the sedimentary column, and we then were more confident of the later assemblages in the Miocene. We looked at the Oligocene and Miocene, and this was the first published study of Oligocene from the Pacific Northwest. Glenn had done lots of work on the Eocene, Paleocene, and Late Cretaceous, but had not run into any Oligocene until we got this.

Harry:
Well, I remember interviewing you at the University of British Columbia for a position at Unocal Research upon returning from a field trip in Alaska. I also remember a memorable evening with Glenn Rouse on his boat The Metasequoia watching fireworks--I've forgotten just what the celebration was, but in any case tell us your thoughts about returning to the petroleum industry as a full-fledged, professionally trained palynologist.

Ken:
I've thought back many times to that afternoon that we spent together, Harry. I knew nothing about it until Glenn came to me that morning and said, "Harry Leffingwell from Union Oil is here; I've got this meeting this afternoon, and I'd like you to spend the afternoon with him looking at samples." I said, "OK, fine." I've reflected back many times--Glenn was peculiar in the fact that he sometimes complained about all the meetings he had to go to, yet he seemed to get himself on darn near every committee around. So, the thing I've reflected on is that I'm not sure he really had a meeting that afternoon. I think it was Glenn's way of putting you and I together. He was never caught short on looking ahead at things, so I think that maybe Glenn just sort of lost himself that afternoon to give us some time together. After you had left, Glenn said, "Well, you must have made a good impression on Harry because he asked when you might be finishing up." So, you and I had a conversation and an exchange of letters and I told you I would let you know when I was finishing up.

I had thought of teaching, and there were 2 ecology graduate students--one of whom had already taught at St. Catharines and one who was going there to teach--and the Department there was expanding and they had wanted to add a palynologist to the faculty. These 2 people talked to the Departmental Chairman and told him that if he was serious about adding a palynologist they knew where he could get a good one. So, I had written you in the early summer of 1967 that I was going to finish up a year earlier than I had thought, and at the same time I was preparing my resume for the Department at St. Catharines. As I was preparing that resume a grad student located me to tell me I had a long distance phone call from someone named Harry Leffingwell. We had the phone conversation, you invited me to come to Unocal for a formal interview--tickets to be waiting at the Vancouver airport for me. So I was interested, accepted your invitation, and I never completed that letter the St. Catharines. I still have that partially completed letter in my memorabilia files.

Sarah:
The path not taken . . .

Ken:
Yep! So, I went to Brea--I remember I was impressed with the helicopter from LAX to the Disneyland Hotel . . .

Sarah:
That would have done it . . .

Ken:
Yep! There was--I remember, Harry, that you, Marjorie and I went to dinner one evening down in San Clemente. We were looking for a restaurant that had a rather Middle Eastern name, and this was just at the time of--or shortly after--the 7-days war. And while we were having a difficult time locating the restaurant, you remarked, "Maybe it has been taken over by some Israeli fellow." I've told many people--both during my time at Unocal and subsequently--that I thought I got the best job available in palynology in my lifetime by going to Unocal. I was thoroughly sold on the environment, the group, the people when I went there for the interview. That was the turning point--no way was I going to go and do anything else at that point in time.

Sarah:
I find it particularly lovely that you think that--whether you know for sure or not that Glenn sort of made a graceful exit that day--because imagine how nervous you had been as a graduate student if Glenn had said to you, "Well, here's Harry Leffingwell from Unocal and he's going to interview you for a job." But, instead, he said, "Here, look at samples with this guy; just pass some time." What a lovely, informal way to get to know each other and, for you Harry, to get inside to see how Ken's brain worked; just remarkable.

Ken:
Fortunately, Glenn had a beam splitter so that we could put two "heads" on the microscope and just sit there and scan back and forth, look at things, talk about various forms.

Sarah:
So, there you are; you establish your working relationship from Day 1; fantastic.

Sarah:
Ken, when and where did you give your first formal talk as a palynologist and what was the subject of your presentation?

Ken:
As a student, my first formal presentation of anything palynological was at a Canadian Botanical Society meeting in Vancouver. As a professional it was at the International Botanical Congress in Seattle in 1968. Both were on my dissertation material. The session at the IBC was most interesting. I was absolutely terrified when I gave my paper because, sitting in the audience, besides other people, was Jim Schopf--and sitting in the front row, no more than 6' from me was Gunnar Erdtman . . . (chuckles!)

Sarah:
Mr. Pollen himself . . .

Ken:
Absolutely! Erdtman sat there ramrod straight, never moving his head, only shifting his eyes. Absolutely eerie! I had given my slides--I had some 3" x 5" lantern slides I had prepared myself, with conifer pollen and other things--to the projectionist in the proper orientation. But, when I got to the conifers in the presentation I saw that the guy had loaded the slides upside down--so the bladders were up rather than down. I saw it on the screen, but there was nothing I could do about it so I proceeded with the talk.

When I finished my only objective was to get back to my seat before Jim Schopf could ask an embarrassing question. As I was going to my seat I heard Erdtman nattering on about something. I didn't pay any attention. The next day I saw Del Potter, who had been in the session, and I asked him, "Del, you were in that session yesterday when I gave my paper, weren't you?" He said that he was. I said, "What was it that Erdtman was saying when I was on my way back to my seat?" Del laughed and said, "Oh, you'll never believe this. Erdtman said it was so refreshing to find an American palynologist who knew the proper way to display conifer pollen." (Many chuckles!) Apparently, Erdtman had always advocated that conifer pollen be displayed with the bladders up rather than down. Amazing episode. (More chuckles)

Harry:
I spoke earlier about your dogged determination to achieve project goals, and one example is your efforts in the Palynodata project. It would not have succeeded without your leadership. You have published a history of the project, but perhaps you can relate some of the crises, the highlights, the personalities, and some interesting anecdotes of that long effort.

Ken:
That's probably been the longest running show of my life. To set the stage for all of this--to put it in perspective--Gerhard Kremp and a colleague of his, Judith Methvin, had done a survey of the published palynological literature, the pre-Pleistocene stratigraphic literature. They had determined that there were essentially 2,700 pieces of literature, and after 3 years of dogged work Gerhard managed to get Exxon, Amoco, ARCO and Gulf to agree to support his project to "computerize" these 2,700 articles--the world's stratigraphic palynological literature. A nice project to do. He projected that it would take 3 years to do it.

Well, what nobody could envision was the coming explosion of palynological literature--and the project just never caught up. It just couldn't keep up with the deluge of papers. The project was a loosely held consortium type of thing, with a growing number of sponsors--Mobil was the 5th company to join, Unocal was the 6th, Chevron, the Geological Survey of Canada, Texaco, etc. down the line. It was run by a Steering Committee composed of a representative from each sponsor. Of course, this was a time when each industry sponsor kept everything proprietary, and this project was proprietary. It succeeded for a number of reasons: it did not attempt to do "too much"; in the modern parlance of the athlete, it "stayed within itself", whereas the 3 or 4 other competing projects at the time were attempting to do too much or did not plan as well. And, because of the leadership of one Charlie Upshaw, who was the Chairman of the Steering Committee and who bluntly--and in no uncertain terms--told the University of Arizona we'll put this project there and we'll support Gerhard Kremp to do this, but we won't pay a dime of overhead. So the University did not get their usual 50% as overhead, and that money was available to do the project. Those were 2 important things, early on in the project, that equipped it to succeed.

There was a Steering Committee meeting in 1969 where some of the competing parties got together. Jack Morrison and L. R. Wilson (Oklahoma University) were there; George Hart (Louisiana State University) was there; Bill Spackman, Al Traverse and Bob Sanders (Penn State) were there. I know that Wilson demonstrated part of the GIPSY system that was available at the time, but in the end the project that succeeding in lasting was the project that Gerhard had put together. By the end of 1970 the consortium had a set of keypunching instructions so that data could be entered. Little did we know the problems those would cause! In all fairness, this was early days in computers and the people who wrote up these instructions were not aware of the pitfalls they were opening. Unocal joined in early 1971 and the companies, deciding that they were all in this together, elected to split up the data from the abstracted documents with each company keypunching the data from an equal number of documents. At that point in time there was no data entry via PCs--computer punch cards were the order of the day.

After Unocal entered Palynodata as a sponsor they moved very quickly to set up their own in-house datafile. It moved so quickly that, by the AASP meeting of 1971, Unocal demonstrated their system for the other sponsors at the Steering Committee meeting. By October 1972, the AASP meeting in Rhode Island, the keypunching instructions had come home to roost! They had been written very loosely, about how you could handle various things, abbreviations, etc. Of course, the computer didn't understand anything but one set of abbreviations. So you had 6 companies who had each keypunched several hundred documents, and nobody could use anybody else's keypunching. It was an absolute riot at the Steering Committee meeting! People were absolutely livid. Well, most of them didn't . . . .

Sarah:
Somebody should have seen that one coming a mile away . . .

Ken:
Well, you know, as I said it was early days in computers and the instructions were--for the most part--written by palynologists, not by computer people. Joan Stough is the one who prepared--did the major work preparing the initial set of keypunching instructions. And you know, to everyone's credit, you handled these things--there was no way you could make a rule for everything right off the top, so people just handled these things the best they could when they came up, not thinking that down the line there would be a problem.

Sarah:
That somebody else in another office was handling the same problem, but in a different way.

Ken:
Yep. So I, as the Unocal representative, made a proposal. I said, "Guys, I'll tell you what I'm willing to do. An offer you can't refuse. I will take all of this keypunching that everyone has done, and I will standardize--under 2 conditions. One, that the format is the Unocal format; and two is that nobody ever deviates from that format again without my permission." As you can imagine, they accepted! With alacrity! (Many chuckles!)

Sarah:
I would think so!

Ken:
So we put all of that together. In 1974, at the end of the Steering Committee meeting Charlie Upshaw abruptly resigned as Chairman, and designated me as his successor. Everyone went along with Charlie's designation.

I can relate a humorous incident, not a part of the Steering Committee, but which is associated with my involvement in Palynodata. At Unocal we, of course, had to budget each year for the sponsorship fee, and when this item got up to Dick Crog (the Associate Director for Research) he would call me up to his office. We had this annual session, which was very frustrating for him (several chuckles!) . . .

Sarah:
What about for you?

Ken:
Very easy for me. (more chuckles) Dick had 2 questions every year. The first was, "Ken, this Palynodata thing; how long is it going to go on?" I would say, "I don't know, Dick." (chuckles) "For a long time." Dick, of course, as a manager, wanted to be able to project an end point for this project. Dick would roll his eyes and look at me and say, "Well, what would we do if anything happened to Gerhard Kremp?" I would say, "Dick, I have no idea." (more chuckles) More eye rolling! But, every year, to his credit, he signed off on the budget item.

Well, when I took over Chairmanship of the Steering Committee my first major initiative was to drive this database toward public access. I knew that that was Gerhard's dream for the database, and I felt that we should share this information with the palynological community as soon as we could. It was not easy! It took a year for the Committee to share the data sheets (containing the abstracted information) with anybody--even with Gerhard who had put them together. A year later the tapes with the digitized information were cleared for release by the Steering Committee, but the Director General of the Geological Survey of Canada thundered that this was not in GSC's best interest, so that was cut off.

In 1977 the people in Unocal Research management decided that my involvement as Chairman of the Steering Committee had gone on long enough, and that I should step aside, so I did. Don Oltz of Texaco took over as Chair for 2 years, until he went into Exploration Management at Texaco--at which time I was back at the head of the Steering Committee again. In 1980 I sent out a memo to the Committee that recommended sharing of the tapes with digitized data--with Gerhard at the very least--and the Committee approved that at the Steering Committee meeting in October of that year, but there were still a couple of members who said that, while they agreed, their management still had questions and objections. So we elected to have the people in favor of it circulate their reasons for that to the other people to be passed on to their management to try to get it approved.

In 1981 I proposed that the datafile be made publicly available to interested palynologists for a fee, and we were looking at options of how we could do that. And again, thinking back to 1980 and 1981, the state of using these kinds of things remotely was pretty grim. You didn't have the high speed access fiber optic cable that you have now that the Internet uses. You had the telephone line, and instead of having a 56.5K modem, you had 1200 Baud modems that were very slow. And you had to hook into a computer center somewhere where they would maintain the file online, and that was very expensive. So, it was a real problem. We looked at Service Bureaus, we looked at over half a dozen different places.

Come 1982, I was invited to give a paper at a data handling symposium at NAPC III in Montreal, and I gave a paper on Palynodata. As I got up to give the paper, there was essentially a mass exodus from the room. There was one fellow in the audience who stood up and said, "Where is everyone going? This is one of the most important papers and concepts in the entire symposium; why are people leaving?" I have no idea who this was, but at least there was one other person out there who saw the potential benefits of databases such as this. By June of 1982 there was agreement to license the datafile to some company that could provide access, and Kremp was to be the licensor. Again, we were on the horns of this dilemma--we were a loosely assembled committee essentially that was handling this. There was no formal business entity so we could not legally contract with anyone to do anything. So the solution to that was incorporation, which was suggested by one of the Unocal patent attorneys, Dan Farrell, when he looked at this.

In 1984 we had done a demo at the ICP meeting in Calgary using Boeing Computer Services, and in 1985 we finally found some people who appeared they could deliver. The episode that generated this opportunity is quite humorous. The group was MCRB, a computer service bureau in North Hollywood. We were in touch with them because of a relationship I had formed with a salesman named Nick Pagan, who had been at DataTen in Orange County and one or two other service bureaus in the area, and who had in each case contacted me to see if I was still interested in making the datafile publicly accessible.

Nick was an ex-Marine fighter pilot, very colorful character, had been to Top Gun, had flown a substantial amount of captured Russian military aircraft, told some incredible stories, one of which occurred while he was stationed at El Toro (Marine base in Orange County). Nick was a hot pilot, and one day his squadron informed him that they had bet another squadron that he wouldn't fly through the blimp hangar at El Toro. Nick said, "Oh, come on guys." But they insisted that he had to try it, so Nick went out in his F4. He's out over the orange groves west of El Toro, and he said he got on the radio and asked the tower if the blimp hangar was open. They replied in the affirmative. Then a few seconds later El Toro tower came on again and said, "Why did you ask if the hangar was open?" (many chuckles!) Nick said he went radio silent; he could see that the doors were open, but that they were trying to close them. He said he barreled straight for the hangar and flew right through and out the other side. The tower contacted him and ordered him to return to base, he was met by the "Follow Me" truck, it took him right up to the "old man's" office, and he was escorted in to see the Commandant of El Toro. The man said, "Son, you just bought yourself a ticket to Korea", and he was shipped out straight away to Korea.

Anyway, Nick came down and brought a couple of people with him. One was a very bright young programmer--I've worked with him a lot, both then and since then--named Jeff Dunham. As with every service bureau and services supplier I had spoken with concerning making the datafile publicly available, I would tell them, "Guys, I'm going to lay out the structure of the datafile for you; it's going to look very simple to you, but it's not. It's really complex because of the way we need to handle the data and how we want to be able to do retrievals." Unfortunately, most of them thought they knew more about this than I did, and most came to grief when they tried to produce a searchable database for a reasonable price.

After the meeting Nick had told me that they would get back to me later that day with a verbal proposal. When Nick called he said, "Ken, I've got a deal for you. We'll build the database and the retrieval software on "spec" for $15,000. If you like it, you take it; if you don't like it there's no charge." I said, "That's a great deal; start now." It was only later that Nick told me that during the meeting Jeff Dunham had leaned over and whispered in his ear that "this is a piece of cake, I can do this in 3 weeks." (much laughter!) MCRB spent between $100,000 and $200,000 putting this package together, and they sucked it up big time. Nick laughed when he told me the story about how Dunham had gotten him involved in that.

You may recall, Harry, that in January of 1986 we went out to test this software out with the users manual; the reason this sticks in my mind so vividly is that as we were working there someone came into the room to inform everyone that the Challenger Shuttle had blown up on launch. Everything just stopped! And that was only a few days before I headed out to London for my 25 month ex-pat assignment. The 2 years that I was gone Harry was kind enough to step in as President of Palynodata, and we had conversations from time to time about what was going on. MCRB put the datafile up online, it was publicly accessible in early 1986, but it was taken down shortly thereafter because it cost Palynodata $1,100/month to keep it online and we weren't getting sufficient usage to justify that cost.

Sarah:
Now, when you say it was online, you're not referring to the Internet, so in 1986 what did online mean?

Ken:
Online meant that the magnetic tape or disk pack was mounted on one of MCRB's drives so that it could be accessed through their mainframe computer if the user had a PC by which they could connect via a telephone line somehow, or an IBM terminal that would mimic a PC. They would pay communications charges plus whatever the charge was for the search time.

By 1988 we had managed to make it publicly available again, and Al Traverse was the first subscriber. Unfortunately, the grant he was using to do his searches was running out and he was unable to make maximum use of the datafile. In 1989 Jeff Dunham found a way to take this software package off the mainframe (its only possible method of access up to that time) and make it compatible on PCs. By that time PCs had evolved to the point that their hard drives were large enough to contain the software, and the datafile itself existed on an optical disk. So you had to have an externally connected optical drive, but you could run searches of the datafile from your own computer--you no longer had to connect via a phone line to somebody's mainframe computer. Two companies actually opted for that method: Mobil and ARCO. They paid almost $14,000 each for the rights to the software to do that.

I demonstrated searches of the datafile using the optical drive system at the AASP meeting in San Diego in 1991. That netted our first two licensees: the Swedish Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum in Chicago. Peter Crane of the Field Museum had come by and looked at the system, and was absolutely sold on it the moment he saw what it could do. At the time he was working on a research paper with Mary Dettman on Cretaceous floras, and he returned to Chicago and started the paperwork to buy the system.

From 1992 to the present has seen a slow erosion of corporate support as industry eliminated their in-house palynological staffs, but at one time or another we had 13 different companies and the Geological Survey of Canada as sponsors, and at one time or another we have had 22 licensees of the datafile. The only serious problem in this interval arose because a licensee elected to make the datafile public on a web site--free of charge.

Sarah:
The whole datafile . . . ?

Ken:
The whole datafile!

Sarah:
Wow!

Ken:
It didn't stay up long because Merrell Miller and one of his computer people at Amoco discovered this, and we were able to run . . . we looked about for some way we could make sure that this was exactly our datafile. I found that, in one document, we had an uncorrected error in the spelling of Aquilapollenites. I said, "Run the search both places for occurrences of Aquilapollenites using this obscure spelling. It showed up in both retrievals, so we knew we had 'em.

Sarah:
Wow!

Ken:
A little bit of pressure from legal counsel on the licensee's management, and the illegal datafile came down. We retrieved the datafile. That was the only serious incident violating any confidences or the licensing agreement. I hope that the datafile continues to exist and grow, but it's chancy because the support just isn't there. The market, so to speak, is speaking. It would not have remained viable as long as it has were it not for the dedication of Blair Parsons in Halifax who continually updates it with information from new documents every year. He's a fantastic young man, but he has a family and I think it's a question of how long he's prepared to hold on.

Harry:
Now, I don't know of another discipline in paleontology that has this sort of database. Are you aware of any, Ken?

Ken:
Nope, not to my knowledge. There's been some talk, as there is from time to time, of incorporating this in other major initiatives at the National Science Foundation or that sort of thing. Martin Farley alerted John Wrenn and me of one of those opportunities earlier this year or late last year, and we responded with the information they were soliciting, but we have not heard anything further. So, it's tough.

Harry:
Soon after you arrived at Unocal you attended the founding meeting of the AASP. I believe it would be interesting if you described your recollections and issues of that historic meeting of our society.

Ken:
Well, I had been at Unocal 2 months when this meeting took place, and I certainly had no inkling when I traveled to Tulsa at the Pan American (later Amoco) lab what would eventuate from this meeting. As you can see if you look in the front part of any AASP Directory, there were 32 people at the founding meeting: 28 were industrial palynologists--preponderance of Amoco, of course, since the meeting was at their lab--3 academic (Bill Sarjeant, Al Traverse, and Jim Urban), and 1 from a Geological Survey (Colin McGregor, GSC). When I got to the meeting, the only 2 people I knew were Al Traverse and Steve Hopkins. Steve had been Glenn Rouse's grad student at the time I arrived at UBC, but left palynology not long after the founding meeting.

The leaders in the meeting very soon developed to be Charlie Upshaw, Al Traverse, Jim Urban, and George Fournier. Those were the people who carried a major share of the discussion and provided a major part of the input. The major issues were: did we really need a society--that came up in the affirmative that they felt they did because this emerging discipline needed a place for people to assemble and talk over the results of their studies. The other 2 issues were the name of the society and the emphasis it should have.

I guess the thing that engendered some of the most colorful episode was the name of the society. There were 2 names really in contention: AASP, obviously was an industry favorite, and SNAP (Society of North American Palynologists). Traverse was a strong supporter of the latter, and it was my choice as well because it seemed to be more inclusive than American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists. And, if fact, the first time we voted on the name SNAP won. Then, for some reason which has never been clear to me, we voted again and AASP won. And with that name came, at least the implied, emphasis. The thought was that we would do everything we could to encourage academic and survey palynologists to join, but as I'm sure you recall, Harry, we had a difficult time getting a lot of academic people involved. And you may recall that you and I wrote an open letter to AASP about this subject. Nevertheless, AASP succeeded far beyond anybody's expectations.

I was amused in retrospect because, in my discussions with one of the people there, I said that I thought that one of the reasons I thought it would be good to have our own society was that we could then have our own journal so that people could publish strictly palynological articles. But I was informed in no uncertain terms that there were plenty of places palynologists could publish--we didn't need another journal. As it turns out, we had one from almost the very beginning--either Geoscience and Man at LSU, or our own with Palynology.

Sarah:
Ken, since there was some opinion among early founding AASP members was that we didn't need another journal, how did Palynology evolve?

Ken:
The society had its first annual meeting in Baton Rouge in 1968, and Louisiana State University became sort of an early central focus because of the first annual meeting being held there and the number of short courses that George Hart organized at LSU to benefit palynologists and update them on new things. It was probably a rather logical extension then that AASP began publishing in an annual issue of the LSU Geological Department's publication Geoscience and Man. That worked well until the mid 70s, and I recall that the year I was President of AASP, at the mid-year Board meeting some problems had developed (I cannot now recall the exact nature of those problems, but I believe they involved getting what we wanted either in terms of quality or numbers of things). But I do recall that Rick Pierce was the Managing Editor at that time, and Rick recounted at length the problems he had had and discussion on the Board ensued as to what the solution might be. One of the things that came up, of course, was a journal of our own. What should we call it? How simple can it be? Palynology. And it was with the Board's approval and at my direction that Rick called the editors at Geoscience and Man and told them that we would be withdrawing our materials. We then hooked up with people at Hart Graphics in Austin, TX; Bob Clarke managed this process following the untimely passing of Rick Pierce. That's how Palynology came into existence.

Sarah:
Having been part of AASP since its inception, are there roads not taken which you wish had been pursued?

Ken:
I think that AASP's initial concept as a place for palynologists to meet and discuss the discipline was terrific, and it succeeded perhaps beyond our wildest expectations. I think--in retrospect, and this is not something you could have foreseen at the time--that perhaps the discipline might have been better served had we more quickly affiliated ourselves with one of the major geological societies to put ourselves in closer contact with working geologists so that they perceived the value of biostratigraphy in general and palynology in particular. I think the time to have struck on this was the time when stratigraphic palynology may have been close to its zenith, in the late 70s to the early 80s. However, we didn't do that. Whether it has adversely impacted the discipline no one can say for sure. In my personal opinion, I think that a number of jobs and positions might have been saved had we earlier conveyed to working geologists the value that palynology could bring to their work.

Harry:
Ken, your zonation of the Middle Jurassic section in the North Sea was a seminal study for Unocal. I know, for example, that it tripled the zonal resolution that was available from contractors at the time. Can you tell us how the study was structured, and about some of the field help you received from British geologists and palynologists?

Ken:
The whole thing arose in early 1975 when the London office put in a request for our help. They had sent a key well in one of their offshore blocks--samples from that well, core samples not cuttings samples--to 3 consulting groups. Those 3 groups had come back with 3 different age datings; furthermore, none of these age dates agreed with the geological concepts that our geologists had for that area. I looked at the samples after our lab in Brea had re-prepared them, and the age dates I was able to provide made geological sense to our geologists in London. The follow-up was with several more wells--"can you look at this well?", "how about looking at this well?" All of this hung together in a cogent story.

However, the literature on dinocysts--which was the microfossil type we were going to have to use--was a little sparse in the mid 70s. So we proposed that Research do a study of the Jurassic to try to produce a finer subdivision and a better stratigraphic picture for that area. London accepted that project, and we began feverishly to plan for a field season to collect materials. We were able to get that field season under way in August and September of 1975. We sampled the entire Jurassic section from selected sites in England and Scotland. I have great memories of 2 sections in particular--both on the south coast of England, in Dorset and Devon.

One is the classic Kimmeridge section exposed on the coast of Dorset, which is dicey to collect in places because of the tide problems. So we were quite careful which parts of the section we collected at certain times. Very humorous episode happened one day while we were out there. There were 4 of us: Beris Cox, Richard Melville (who had at one time been the Assistant Director of the British Geological Survey), Dick Dingwall and myself. As we were proceeding along the beach we heard this huge roar, and as we looked back in the direction of this roar part of the cliff face came down. And as we looked to see the cause for this, we saw this British warship sitting out in Kimmeridge Bay had fired a salvo into the cliff face. Why, we had no idea. But along the top of the cliff was this National Footpath, and there were people walking up there until this happened, and you then saw these people scurrying away from this spot. We never figured out why the salvo had been fired off.

Harry:
It didn't get into the papers the next day?!

Ken:
Not that we saw.

Harry:
I guess that investigative reporting came later! (many chuckles!) This must have been pre-Watergate!

Ken:
I guess so. The other collecting that was absolutely spectacular was that of the Lias, which is exposed starting on the Devon coast. The section was described by Lang around 1921--in painful detail, beds of a few millimeters thickness. And Richard Melville who collected that with me had Lang's whole manuscript there, and we moved through the entire section sampling Lang's beautifully described section. Richard would read off what was next, we would identify that, I would sample it, then move on. It was an incredible experience.

The BGS did a marvelous thing for us. They had pursued a corehole program for acquiring samples from parts of the section not exposed in outcrop, and they allowed us into their core storage to discretely collect material we would otherwise not have had.

I can't leave this without talking about the personalities, particularly Richard Melville. A British aristocrat, Public School, talked to me at length of the burden of being a part of the aristocracy. Things that you just absolutely had to do--you were bound to do them. When we would come in from the field in the evening, Richard was always the first in the pub and always bought the first round. And he never left the pub in the evening without buying the last round, and offering to buy a round for the Governor's wife if she wished. That was a part of his duty!

It was also great that he knew the location of the best pubs and the best bitters in southern England, which we tasted--and he was a walking textbook of English History. Every place we went he recounted episodes that had happened in English History at this or that point. Absolutely fascinating! All of the people who accompanied me in the field took me to every possible historical site that was close to where we were collecting so I could see as many of them as possible.

The day that Richard and I were set to go down to Devon to collect the Lias, Richard had agreed to come by the hotel to pick me up at 3pm. A little past 2pm I was down in the hotel lobby trying to make a phone call back home--unsuccessfully, as it turned out--and I see Richard come into the hotel lobby. He waved, and when I went over to him he said, "I realize that I agreed with you for 3pm, but I came by a little bit early so perhaps we can stop by one of our English treasures--I'll show you Stonehenge on our way to the south coast." So, we were able to spend an hour or two at Stonehenge, and this was before they had closed it off--you were able to get into the inner circle of stones and go anywhere you wanted. The only thing around it was a single-strand, barbed wire fence to keep the cattle grazing nearby out of Stonehenge. But that was the kind of person Richard was, and I kept a close association with him until his untimely passing in 1993.

By 1977 we realized that we needed some infill sampling in parts of the Jurassic, and I was able to arrange with Roger Neves of Sheffield University to go into the field with me. He brought along his graduate student at the time, Jim Fenton, who later was--and probably still is--the Chief Palynologist at Robertson Research in North Wales. Two things were Roger's penchants, one of which I knew nothing about prior to that field season, and one that was also a favorite of mine: the one I knew nothing about was 16th Century coach inns, and Roger put us in one of those as Bed and Breakfasts every chance he got. The second was that Roger, like me, was a Carly Simon fan. So we ran across the countryside with Carly Simon tapes playing on the tape drive in his Range Rover. That was a marvelously interesting and useful field season with Roger and Jim. We pretty well completed our collection and the British Geological Survey reckoned that Unocal had the finest collection of the British Jurassic outside their own.

Harry:
Well, that certainly showed in the results that you achieved there, Ken.

Sarah:
Later on you were transferred to London to apply your work in the British and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea. How important was the transfer to the successful utilization of your work? What were the major applications now that the story can be told?

Ken:
Well, it was clear once I was in London how important the transfer, and being in London, was. I had worked with the people in that office remotely from Brea, and of course the time difference made conversations and chats difficult. And it's so much easier when the fellow who has a question can walk down the hall into your office and say, "You know, I've got this little question about this; is there anything you can tell me about this?" Much simpler to interface with them and it put me within striking distance of our offices in The Netherlands and Norway also.

I remember one afternoon that I saw and held 2 of our geologists' feet to the fire trying to explain a sedimentary sequence. They drew it up one way, and I said, "Sorry, guys, it won't work that way; you've got time lines crossing if you do that." We sat for a good bit of the afternoon working on that problem until we had worked out a satisfactory geological explanation for what the biostratigraphy was showing. Could never have done that remotely from Brea. Just wasn't going to work.

It's also important to be in their office and get an appreciation for the problems they face. You couldn't have done that from the Research Center--you had not idea what their problems were. Once you're there they talk to you and you see what problems exist and how you might be able to work into, and be a part of the solution to, those problems.

There were 2 major applications that had a monetary impact. In one, Unocal was set to earn a share in a block in the North Sea by proving that a drilling well had reached a certain horizon in the Jurassic. The alternative was that Unocal could earn that share by drilling a second well at a cost of about $11 million. Contractors were unable to "pick" the horizon, but we were able to pick it using the research work we had done in the Middle Jurassic.

Harry:
To date the TD or total depth of the well?

Ken:
To inform the well site geologists when they had reached the agreed horizon that would earn Unocal a share of the block. Samples were actually flown from the North Sea to Brea, they were prepared over night by our lab techs, and the slides were on my desk at 5am for study so that I could let them know as soon as possible that the horizon had been penetrated.

But the most marvelous achievement of all was due in no small measure to a very bright and capable young geologist in our Norway office named Nowell Briedis. Nowell had been to the Research Center several times, and had participated in the Clastics Field Seminar that Research ran. He had gotten acquainted with the people at Research, and had gained an appreciation for what biostratigraphy could do. Nowell approached me when I was in London about re-evaluating and adding on to the work we had done already in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.

The reason this request arose at this time, there was a field that Unocal was going to try to develop with our exploration partner. Unocal wanted to place a less expensive platform, a floating type platform, in position from which to do development. The partner wanted to use the standard "Concrete Hilton", a much more expensive type of platform. The problem existed because the reserves in the field seemed "iffy", whether it was worth going ahead with development work if the more expensive platform was used. Nowell wanted to make one last attempt to see what we could resolve about the area.

The sedimentary model being used at that time showed that there was plenty of sand in the area, but it seemed like 80% of the sand package was "tight" and not very productive, and only 20% was a clean sand and a good reservoir. With those ratios, the economics were "iffy"--certainly if you had to put an expensive platform in place. So we did a re-evaluation, looking at wells we had looked at before--only in much more detail--and added more wells and information to that. And in the end, with Nowell Briedis re-interpreting the sequence stratigraphy and me doing the palynology, a new model emerged. That new model inverted the "tight" : "clean" sand ratio, so that now 80% of the reservoir appeared to be "clean" sand and 20% "tight" sand.

The partner agreed with the new model and development was begun. After I returned to Brea I learned that Unocal had sold their interest in this field for $250 million. So, instead of being prepared to walk away from this field, palynology saved the company from walking away and put a chunk of cash in their pocket. Very, very satisfying to do something like that, and as a by-product to convert a geologist in the London office from someone who initially thought they knew all they needed to know about a certain area to someone who began coming to me asking, "What can you tell me about 'X'", or "What can you tell me about 'Y'"? To see that attitude change when you've produced some results is really gratifying.

Sarah:
Did you ever find out whether your interpretation was correct?

Ken:
It was initially . . . we went to the partner's offices and I laid out all of the work, and there was considerable original resistance. By the time we left their offices, they had bought the re-interpretation of all but one well--and a few weeks later they called the London office and said that they agreed on that last well also. Not that I couldn't have been wrong, but these people finally saw some of the things I had seen and were able to go along with them.

Harry:
The basic difference . . . perhaps you could explain . . . the ammonite zonation of the North Sea, which your palynological zonation mimicked, turned up or was based on the fact that there were a number of unconformities through the section that you could recognize palynologically, but which were difficult to see stratigraphically? Was that the basic problem?

Ken:
When I went to collect initially, I tried to make sure I had a sample in every ammonite zone and subzone. But, as I found out and came to rue later, I think the dinoflagellates--had I collected at even closer intervals in each subzone--would have beaten the ammonite zonation. I thought that, particularly, after I had finished studying the Callovian, where you can match the ammonite zonation, but there's so much additional there that if you had had more samples . . . but at the time I collected I had no inkling that we could even approach the resolution of the ammonite zonation. I mean, approaching the ammonite zonation was the ultimate if you could do that.

The other thing is that, I think a lot of people did not recognize the amounts of missing section and unconformities in the North Sea. Typically, you could get contract work done that would find you a little bit of most stratigraphic intervals; but, when I finished with my work it appeared to me that there were often sizeable gaps, and it was something we were able to exploit because of this research study, that others just . . . and to the credit of Unocal they gave the time to pursue this close interval, intensive research project. I talked to a consultant who had done a lot of work in the North Sea, and asked him how many samples he looked at per day while constructing his framework. His reply was that he had had to work through 10 or 11 samples each day. Contrast this to my sometimes spending several days on a single sample, so Unocal gave me the time to gain an advantage that some other people had not had. The other thing I did was to mount selected dinocyst specimens and look at them under the SEM, and when the SEM studies were completed we would invert the cover slip containing the coated specimens on a slide and look at the same specimens under the light microscope. This gave you a solid, confident feeling at the light microscope that you knew what you were looking at, that you understood the morphology of these things. Also, at the light microscope you would get the internal structure that could help you even further. When I set up my zonation, most of these things I used in my zonation were unpublished forms that had never appeared in the literature.

Sarah:
And the Jurassic is famous for its incredible diversity of forms, and its really strange looking dinoflagellates, with different paratabulations and different morphologies, things that just, you know, are really so useful if you know how to apply them.

Ken:
Perhaps the most exciting part of the whole thing was starting in the Bajocian, or the Aalenian depending on which stratigraphic scheme you were using, and moving up slowly through the Middle Jurassic and seeing the explosion in dinoflagellate evolution. Every time you moved up an ammonite zone you saw an increase in the number of genera and species--the tremendous experimentation that was going on, the niches that these things were occupying. It's just absolutely magnificent to see that. I had the privilege of just watching that evolution take place in the Jurassic. Fascinating! Forms coming in that nobody had seen before--at least hadn't published before--the first time some of them were published were in the paper by Neves, Fenton and Piel on the Bajocian-Bathonian.

Harry:
I remember that John Ellice-Flint, the Exploration Manager of Unocal UK at that time, and is now the Managing Director of the Australian company Santos, Ltd., wanted you to publish your Jurassic work so that it would become the standard Jurassic zonation for the North Sea. But, I know Research Management guarded the company's technical competitive advantages closely so that idea never materialized. I reflect back about how forward-thinking Ellice-Flint's position was--perhaps that's why he's now a Managing Director and we're still palynologists. What comments do you have about the importance of foresighted operational management, such as Ellice-Flint provided, to the development of industrial palynology?

Ken:
Industrial palynology, I think, burst on the scene in the late 50s and early 60s, again I go back to what I feel is the importance of the seminal work by Kuyl, Muller and Waterbolk that caught everybody's attention as a tool. I think, in some cases, the companies were adopting a sort of "we gotta have a bomb" attitude, like Tom Lehrer expressed in one of his comedy records in the 60s about nuclear proliferation. Somebody else has got palynology, we'd better have it too. I think this led, in some cases, to the overselling of palynology as a tool in companies. I know that happened in Unocal early on, and that when you came in, Harry, you had a difficult time selling this because of the earlier unfavorable experience. You had a lot of correcting to do when you came on the scene there. Some cases, this is because palynology was so new, perhaps people didn't understand that it had limitations as well as advantages.

I found operational management generally receptive to tools they could use to improve their "bottom line". But, it's so critical as to how this is sold to them; if you set up expectations you cannot keep then you're going to fail, and the retribution is going to be severe and quick because they are going to get rid of that due to the budgets they have to stick to and the new tool has to be productive. I think that sometimes, as graduate schools spun up in the 60s to turn out palynologists to satisfy industry demand, many of the graduates of course obviously came out with a strong research orientation, rather than a deadline-focused approach. I know that I did, and I'm thankful that people like you (Harry) and Cortez Hoskins at Unocal pointed out what you had to do to be successful in that kind of environment. I think there were people who went into industrial positions that didn't have the benefit of that counsel, and I think that is why palynology has suffered in some instances.

Positions in management are largely occupied by geologists and geophysicists, and I think that we all know how important it is for them to have had exposure to the true capabilities of biostratigraphy during their university training--and also, how few of them get it. Probably an even worse problem now than in the past. John Ellice-Flint was one of a kind. He was an extremely perceptive exploration manager, he was very aggressive, very bright. I don't know whether you recall, Harry, the first visit we made to the London office and the exploration manager saying to us, "One of our young geologists, John Ellice-Flint, would like to talk to you". John launched into a discussion of a problem he had, replete with seismic sections hung on his wall, and I was struggling to keep my head above water 2 minutes into that discussion. Just an incredibly bright young man with exploration.

John Ellice-Flint was the linchpin for my transfer to London. Without him it never would have happened, and means that Unocal would have ultimately walked away from a field that they eventually sold for a nice chunk of cash. So, it's just impossible to underestimate the need and the benefits for informed operational management.

Sarah:
You did publish one article on North Sea dinoflagellates with Roger Neves and Jim Fenton. Will you tell us a little about that collaborative process?

Ken:
Well, it's a little bit embarrassing, really. I had very little to do with that paper . . . it came about because Jim and Roger and I had been in the field together, and the first thing I knew about this is a copy of the initial manuscript came into my mail basket for comment. That rolled home without much input--and certainly no hard work--on my part save for what we did in the field. I was blessed my association with these gentlemen.

Harry:
Another significant service you performed for palynology was spearheading the search for funding for the AASP Chair-in-Palynology at LSU. You were the first person "from the trenches" so to speak to get a large grant from Unocal. I remember your success there and previous grants that were granted at that large level were restricted to our CEO, Fred Hartley. So that was a huge achievement, and I also understand that you were instrumental in getting the large Exxon grant approved. Can you give us a little history on how you accomplished all that?

Ken:
At Unocal, again, I had a couple of advantages going for me. I understood that the process was, that when you eventually brought this to the decision-maker, that person was going to inquire of the managers below him and troops in the trenches what they thought of this. So the first thing I did was to build grass-roots support in our operational department in Ventura, up through the managers and the Vice President--everybody I could get my hands on, domestic as well as international. And they all came on board. Some to my surprise, but they all came on board. I had a presentation in which I discussed why the Chair was needed, why it would be of value to Unocal, etc.

Then, the 2 big advantages: the fellow who was in charge of Foundation gifts was a man named John Imle, who was President of Unocal at the time, but who had been the Vice President of the International Division when I was in London. So I knew John on a first name basis. The other advantage was, after I talked with John, he called his right hand man in (I've been struggling to remember this man's surname, his first name was Clyde; I'm sure you remember him, Harry). Clyde was, like me, a University of Oklahoma grad, so 2 good old OU boys got together, Clyde said, "John, this is something we need to do", John told the Foundation Unocal needs to do this, and the $100,000 from Unocal rolled home.

I don't know how instrumental I was in the process at Exxon. I know that, again, I started with the "troops", and of course they were easy to bring on board. They set up the meeting with the decision makers and I went down and made my presentation. When the meeting was over the troops were ecstatic; they said it was a done deal, and fortunately it turned out to be just that.

Harry:
My "spies" at Exxon told me that that was the thing that sold it--that they were having problems before you came and supported what was going on there.

Ken:
Perhaps it's sort of like "the prophet being without honor in his own town". (Chuckles!) We saw this at Unocal many times--the outside expert always knew more than we did. (more chuckles)

Sarah:
You were one of many that took Bill Evitt's dinoflagellate short course at Stanford, and later co-authored a paper with him on Nannoceratopsis. How important was your association with Bill to your professional work?

Ken:
It provided an incredible boost to my career to gain the understanding I did from Bill's course, and from the association on the paper. I had worked with dinocysts a bit in the Gulf Coast for a couple of years before Bill's course, on a project with our Gulf Region people trying to make some sense out of the dinocysts in that area. Mostly everything there was Gonyaulacoids, as I'm sure you appreciate Sarah and Harry, so I had very little experience with Peridinoids. So I got a good acquaintance with Peridinoids, plus building on the Gonyaulacoid knowledge in Bill's course.

It was an eye-opener to the greater world of dinos. As both of you know, Bill is a marvelous teacher, so completely in command of his subject, yet relaxed and for a man of that accomplishment to be able to utter the words "I don't know" is exceptional. You don't find many people that have that amount of confidence that . . . because we had people in the course--such as Evan Kidson and Wayne Brideaux--who had seen a lot of dinocysts already, and some forms they spoke about that Bill had not seen. He wasn't afraid to say, "I don't know; sorry, I haven't seen that, but let's talk about it." He had excellent teaching materials and I can't imagine that he wasn't an inspiration to everyone who had the privilege of going his course.

Not long after taking his course I started my Jurassic studies, and can't imagine I would have enjoyed the success I did on that project had I not taken Bill's course. And, as I mentioned previously, I spent a lot of time--Unocal gave me a chance to look at a lot of these things under the SEM. I had seen what I thought was a considerable variation in Nannoceratopsis gracilis at the light microscope. It appeared there were several sub-types in that species, so I decided that the best way to try and resolve this was under the SEM and to take that knowledge back again to the light microscope. Well, one day as I was looking at these things, I just rolled my chair back from the SEM because what had appeared was the first instance of a paracingular archeopyle that anybody had ever noticed. Nannoceratopsis formed its archeopyle by losing either 1 or 2 cingular paraplates. I also confirmed some of the other morphological differences I thought I had seen at the light microscope, but with this new type archeopyle I knew where I needed to go.

I had spent several weeks studying these things, these things from the SEM, and I called Bill and I said, "You know, I've got some interesting stuff about Nannoceratopsis I'd like to show you. Can I come up?" He said, "Sure, come on up." I sat down with Bill and, within 10 minutes he was telling me things I hadn't observed in looking at these things for a couple of weeks. One of the most gifted and incredible observers I have ever seen.

Sarah:
Oh, that is for sure.

Ken:
And so we talked about that. I asked him later, after the paper had been published, I asked Bill what he had thought when I first called you and told you about this. He said, "Well, I figured you had something very interesting, but I never dreamed it was this." (several chuckles) I'm still awed by the fact that Bill Evitt was junior author on that paper, and that when we presented the paper at the AASP meeting in Phoenix Bill sat in the front row of the audience and used a laser pointer to point out the features as I read the paper.

Sarah:
I remember that.

Harry:
Yes.

Ken:
The man is just incredible in my estimation--no one quite like him.

Harry:
I think the only way many of us less observant palynologists can hope to level the playing field just a little bit is by using the SEM. (several chuckles) Bill really never needed to use an SEM for the work he has done.

Ken:
Well, he had done a lot of work previously on dinocyst evolution for things that were similar to Nannoceratopsis. He was missing this one piece, which fit beautifully in the evolutionary series of things.

Harry:
Interesting.

Harry:
Toward the end of your career at Unocal you were one of the first palynologists I'm aware of to venture into the practice of sequence stratigraphy. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Ken:
It was sort of like a bolt out of the blue. The manager of our geological group came to me one day and said, "Ken, I'd like to send someone from the biostrat group to an operational office to do some sequence stratigraphy; are you interested?" I had been to a couple of sequence stratigraphy seminars and sessions--one we had had in-house and one that was given by Peter Vail at a meeting in Houston. So I knew the basics of sequence stratigraphy, but had never actually practiced it myself.

So, I was assigned to work in the Bakersfield office in the San Joaquin Valley of California, under a veteran exploration manager named Jack Kowalski who was an absolute joy to work with. Probably rightly, there was always some skepticism in an operational office when they got landed with some guy from Research who was going to come and work in their office for a while--on their kinds of projects. And I suspect that they said, "Well, OK, let's give Ken an area over here that we've pretty well passed on as an exploration project. Let him do his thing, and pretty soon he'll wander back to Research and he'll be out of our hair."

They bought 12 - 15 seismic lines from Western Geophysical--it was old data, 60s vintage I think, the displays we got were on 24"-wide sections so everything was compressed and it was hard to see a lot of detail. But I hung these sections, one-by-one, on the wall and one of them I looked at--boy, here's an interesting feature; looks like things are "rolling over" here, with resultant downlap on top of it. Maybe this is interesting, so I went and got Jack to have a look and asked him what he thought about the feature. He thought it was pretty interesting and suggested that we get the section re-processed at Research. So, we had that line and the intersecting seismic line at 90 to it sent down to Research to have them look at the data and see if they could bring out more detail. Now, that's the kind of thing that can be fudged, because you can make almost any section look almost any way you want with the right kind of processing. But I talked at length with the people at Research about the re-processing, as well as the geophysicists in the Bakersfield office, and that wasn't done. We just obtained a better, and larger scale, display of the data.

When the re-processed sections came back I hung them on the wall and the feature looked even better than it had on the old stuff. So I began working with this section as the key, picking the downlaps and onlaps, and trying to find sequence boundaries on this section. Started the work on migrated seismic sections and, after several months, I had "tied" the markers from section to section on all of these sections around the study area. At this point I called Jack in to look at the results, and asked him what he thought. He looked at the ties all around the area and said, "Well, that's good. Now do the same thing on the unmigrated sections." (several chuckles)

So, it was back to the raw seismic again and I tied everything together on the unmigrated sections. The feature emerged, in my estimation, as a multi-level "play" in that area--a sequence strat play. My projections of the oil in place in those features, from comparison with similar style plays in the San Joaquin Valley, were possibly a billion barrels in place. It's a huge play--2/3 of a township in areal extent when you look at the whole thing. When I had it all together and talked with Jack about it, he said, "If I had a drilling budget, I'd drill it." He said he was sold on it. He felt there was one potential problem--we couldn't see the seal at the top. But he said, "There's no way you're going to see it on this data. It's either there or it's not, and I don't think it's an issue because this thing is so big. The issue just goes away because of the pure size of this thing."

There were other issues that other people tossed up, such as, you don't have sufficient permeability there. But, had I looked at wells that had been drilled in the adjacent areas to equivalent depths, and I could demonstrate plenty of porosity and permeability at least that far or further in the section. So that wasn't really an issue I thought. The big issue came down to the fact that this was the time that Unocal had decided there was no more oil worth exploring for in California. We're going to explore in the Caspian Sea. The Soviet Union had collapsed, there were all of these big glitter domes in everyone's mind in that area, unstable politically, but they were going there. And they could not be bothered with anything in California. We made a presentation to the Chief Geologist and his staff that came up to review prospects, and their eyes just glazed over. They just didn't want to hear it--that was it. The whole thing folded.

Harry:
Kowalski couldn't sell a buy-in from another company even . . .

Ken:
I don't' think he was even authorized to do that. Unocal said, "We're outta here--you guys shut it down." Tragic!

Sarah:
Which of your investigations or publications do you consider to be the greatest contribution to your discipline?

Ken:
Well, that's pretty easy. First of all, I don't have very many publications, and I think that without doubt the Nannoceratopsis paper with Bill Evitt is the best thing I've managed to turn out because it not only has stratigraphic implications but it also has evolutionary implications in the development of the dinocysts.

Sarah:
What would you recommend to a young person today who has an interest in a career in palynology, and especially one who might have an interest in oil exploration or in industrial palynology?

Ken:
Well, I think it's very clear that the days of the pure specialist in industry are over--they ended 15 or 20 years ago. And it took a while for the full effect of that to take place--the job losses in industry, which were also due to some other economic factors--before that was really recognized. But I think management in some of the companies are beginning to perceive that--because they have integrated palynologists and other biostratigraphers in teams--that those disciplines are providing a value-added to those teams. From some of the conversations I have had, there are discussions going on periodically in those companies--how do we address our needs for these kinds of people in the future? So, I think there are going to be some jobs--certainly nothing to match the 70s or early 80s.

To prepare themselves for that kind of career they will have to be broadly capable geologists with some special knowledge in biostratigraphy or palynology. They will be working on a team, but they will have to understand the disciplines of the other people on that team also, because if they don't they will be ill-equipped to meld their biostratigraphic data in with this other data and they will be hard pressed to understand what's most important for them to focus on so that their contribution to the team is important and recognized, and produces some value-added. No longer do you become a palynologist and just do palynology in a company--you are a team member and a data integrator now.

Harry:
Looking back on your career, what do you consider the most important palynological developments of your time?

Ken:
Well, I've referred several times to Kuyl, Muller and Waterbolk's landmark paper which first focused attention on the potential of palynology in petroleum exploration. The resultant expansion of jobs in industry as companies hurried to try and use that new technology. This was followed by universities gearing up to produce palynologists for this burgeoning market.

I think that palynology would not have gotten nearly as far as it has were it not for the seminal work of Bill Evitt which brought dinocysts into the scene and made palynology a dynamic force in the marine environment. That added another increment of jobs, both in industry and in academia.

I think the formation of AASP, which provided a forum for discussion in this expanding discipline, got palynologists together and spawned the formation of similar societies worldwide. I think, in retrospect, that it probably would have been wise had we affiliated with a geological society to put us in closer contact with geologists who were the ultimate consumers of the information we provided.

The explosion of publications in palynology in the late 60s and into the 70s, which provided an ever-increasing amount of data to be utilized.

And, finally, the improvements in processing techniques which put ever-improved samples under the microscope for the palynologists to look at. I think we all know that the palynologist is only as good as the samples he is looking at, and I've seen that first hand in my experience. People that must deal with poorly prepared samples produce substandard results. The better processing techniques got us on the road to seeing things more clearly and not missing things that would otherwise have been missed.

Sarah:
Who were the most influential palynologists of your time? And why?

Ken:

At the top of my list . . . I'd break this down into 3 different areas: Research, Leadership, and Teaching and Training.

In Research, at the top of my list is Bill Evitt because of the work he did with dinocysts, opening the door to the use of those microfossils. I think of L. R. Wilson for much of his early pollen work and his early work on thermal alteration of organic matter that was key. I think that, without the dinocyst systematics produced by Graham Williams and Judy Lentin, Bill Evitt's work would not have been as completely and fully utilized as it has been. For an early appreciation of dinocyst life cycles and ecology, and how that fits into the picture, the work by David Wall and Barrie Dale was monumental.

From the Leadership standpoint, I think that I had the opportunity to see up close--as many people may not have--the leadership ability of Charlie Upshaw. Whether or not one agrees with the early direction of AASP, Charlie was a dynamic leader in forming AASP and was one of the early Presidents of the society. And always there to provide input to the society, and I saw the same thing on the Palynodata Steering Committee during his tenure as Chairman--Charlie was a terrific and thoughtful leader.

In the area of Teaching and Training, Gerhard Kremp who was responsible for Palynodata and who turned out many, many students who found their way into industrial palynology. Al Traverse, for the students he produced and the nomenclatural and taxonomical work he has contributed, his international presence, and the authorship of 2 books. Aureal Cross, again, a man who trained a large number of palynologists, one of the pillars of integrity in the scientific community. I have talked with Aureal a great deal and I've heard him espouse fervently that you produce your own work, you don't take credit for anything anybody else did, you give everybody credit for everything they did, because that only graces you all the more. And Aureal was equally at home in both paleobotany and palynology. I put Bill Evitt in the this group also because of the number of dinocyst specialists he produced. Charles Downie, responsible ultimately for a whole generation of palynologists, or 2 generations of palynologists, in the UK. And, again, you couldn't leave L. R. Wilson off this list because of the number of students he produced.

Harry:
Ken, do you have any concluding comments?

Ken:

From a chance invitation by an Oklahoma University professor to join a field trip in 1957, through a 25-year career in Industrial Palynology, it was an incredibly interesting and satisfying journey. I'm grateful for the privilege of practicing palynology during what I believe was the golden era of palynology--an interval when there were at one point over 30 universities with graduate programs in palynology, when palynological research flourished in both academia and industry, when the quickened pace of palynological research provided a limitless display of fresh and exciting new ideas, and when new palynologists found jobs waiting at the completion of their training.

I owe what success I enjoyed to the individual efforts of several people. The guidance and philosophy I received from Glenn Rouse, under whom I completed my PhD, framed much of my research career. Glenn was a constant source of encouragement and inspiration, was always available when needed, and his attitude toward graduate students was exceptional and unique--Glenn treated them as equals. If his research had produced a new idea, he would invite them into his office and float the proposition--with an open invitation to shoot his ideas down if you could. It made for several lively give-and-take sessions.

The unequivocating standards of my colleagues at Unocal Research produced an environment which, while encouraging the highest quality research, left unsaid the obvious corollary that anything else was unthinkable. The mixture of younger with more experienced researchers provided the former with the wise counsel needed to avoid most of the pitfalls.

In particular, I could not have arrived at my Middle Jurassic zonation without the support and encouragement of my manager, Harry Leffingwell. As I was finishing one of the stages Harry sat down with me to discuss one of my range charts, for which I had adopted a somewhat conservative approach. The chart included quite a number of unpublished forms which I had described during my research, but for which I lacked the confidence to assign a firm range. Harry asked me whether I felt that these forms were really distinct enough to recognize on a consistent basis, and when I answered in the affirmative he encouraged me to go with my best instincts and assign firm ranges where I felt they were merited. This encouragement from a respected research colleague and manager was a key to the work I was able to produce.

I've been away formally from palynology for 11 years, but the subject has never left my mind. Palynology will always occupy a special place in my heart.