Henry Dorman - Session III

Levin:

This is the 16th of June, 1997. And this is a continuing interview with Jim Dorman. This is in Memphis, and I’m Tanya Levin. We left off yesterday. We had just gotten to where Ewing had blown through Galveston and back to Houston, telling you about the move. When did the rest of Lamont find out about this? Did they all find out at the same meeting? One large meeting?

Dorman:

No. I don’t know if there was a large meeting about this. Dr. Ewing had met with people from the Galveston medical branch in his office at the Palisades prior to his trip to Galveston. I think two men from Galveston had gone up there to talk with, Andrew Suttle, who had become a Vice President at Galveston. We ran into Andrew Suttle when he was assistant to President Earl Rudder of Texas A&M. This is the man’s name I couldn’t think of yesterday. But in the meeting in the Palisades they had simply explored the idea. I’m not sure who got the idea first. I think that meeting had taken place only a month or a few weeks before his trip to Galveston. When he came back from Galveston obviously he had spoken with President Blocker who was a dynamic guy and being the senior college president of Texas could get things done. He wanted to start a geophysics group at Galveston, and he thought Ewing would be the best person to do this and it would be a terrific way to get things started. And he was right. We moved in about a month and a half later.

Levin:

So there were actually negotiations before Ewing went to Galveston?

Dorman:

Yes.

Levin:

Did the people at Lamont, [Walter C.] Pitman, [William F.] Ryan, hear about these negotiations or only after?

Dorman:

I don’t know. They may not have heard about it until afterwards. After all, it was just in the exploratory stage before the meeting at Galveston. Dr. Ewing was due to retire. He was approaching 65 years of age. Let me see. The meeting was in May of 1972. If you’d shut it off a minute I think I’ll look up the date. There’s no doubt that the meeting in Galveston took place in May, 1972 because we moved to Texas and became staff members on July 1, 1972. We actually moved into our house in Clear Lake on August 8.

Levin:

Ewing was approaching retirement. Before that were there any heir apparents that were coming up that people were talking about as successors to Ewing?

Dorman:

Well, I imagine they were. Being an administrator they didn’t talk to me about it. Come in. [Door opens] They didn’t discuss it with me because I was a member of the lab administration. I was a right-hand man of Maurice Ewing. Those discussions took place off camera as far as I’m concerned.

Levin:

You didn’t hear any of the rumblings?

Dorman:

Not really. I’m sure there was a concern because Maurice Ewing was a strong leader, and he had been in a leadership position for many, many years at Lamont. I’m sure everyone was concerned about the future of the lab. Dr. Ewing would have preferred to pick the next director himself. But I don’t think that the senior staff wanted that to happen.

Levin:

Did he mention people that he wanted to nominate?

Dorman:

Well, I’m sure he would have nominated Joe Worzel as the next director. But the senior staff may have had other ideas. There were other issues involved also. There was the issue of the University budget and government funding. At that point, Dr. [William J.] McGill had proposed through his administration that Lamont would be required to provide more money to the University, help balance the University budget. [Knock on door] Come in! [Door opens] Excuse me.

Levin:

So the University budget?

Dorman:

Yes. If I’m not mistaken the University actually confiscated some contract money at about that point. We had a meeting about this at Lamont Hall. When we were told what the University was going to do. I’m not sure if it was told to us by a University representative from Low Library or whether it was just passed on by some member of Lamont who had spoken to them. Maybe Arnold Finck would remember. I remember talking with Gary Latham about it immediately after that meeting, and it seemed to us at the time that the University was going to sweep up a good deal of money in a contract that Gary had, I believe, that was budgeted in the proposal, in the contract for scientific work at Lamont. We were just astonished that this would happen. We thought it was because either the vice presidents didn’t understand the nature of a government contract or maybe Dr. McGill didn’t. Dr. Ewing scheduled a meeting with Dr. McGill. I know that he was very concerned about this. I told him that once he had this meeting everything would be cleared up. I had faith in the University presidents, that they got appointed president because they were men of wisdom and understood how to manage things in the long run. But after the meeting with Dr. McGill I never heard what exactly was said, either on the subject of the misappropriation of funds or on the subject of the directorship. I imagine both topics came up. There was no adjustment on this contract business, and very shortly after that was the trip to Galveston.

Levin:

Why do you think the senior staff really did not want Ewing to propose the next successor?

Dorman:

I imagine the senior staff wanted to have a voice in the selection of another director.

Levin:

Ewing might have proposed Joe Worzel. But didn’t he have plans to bring Worzel with him? Did Ewing have a plan of —

Dorman:

The financial situation and anything else were things that helped to crystallize his ideas. And the Galveston opportunity fell in his lap perhaps at that time. He asked not only Gary Latham and myself but several other people at Lamont including Joe Worzel to go to Galveston to start a new geophysics group there, to be the nucleus. We transplanted the lunar seismology experiment and contract from Lamont to the University of Texas at that time. That was at the request of the principal investigators with the agreement of everyone at Lamont who was working on it, except the engineers who were not involved in the data analysis but were involved in other things by that time at Lamont. They had worked on the design and building of the prototype unit and so they felt a little bit left out of things, although they had other jobs to do at Lamont by that time.

Levin:

The engineers weren’t invited?

Dorman:

They weren’t invited to join the group in Galveston.

Levin:

Were there just certain people that Doc selected to be invited?

Dorman:

Yes, evidently. There was no general invitation to the staff as there was in the case of the proposed Texas A&M move, you know, five or eight years earlier.

Levin:

Do you know why this was?

Dorman:

No, no. Like I say, as an administration person, I was a little bit isolated from a lot of the discussions. First of all, I had been at Lamont since 1951. I was an old-timer. I worked with Doc Ewing personally on many, many things. That was a different situation than most of the other, younger people at Lamont. We simply decided to transplant the lunar seismology program. It was a good contract base with many years to run. A good base of support to start our group in Galveston. We invited a few more people to join up with us from Lamont. One that I recall was Tosi Matumoto came to Galveston at that time. By that time I believe Yosio Nakamura was still employed by General Dynamics. We had rented him as a consultant on the lunar program more and more. I don’t think he was ever a Columbia employee. But he joined the faculty at Galveston very shortly afterwards. I think he did that by resigning from General Dynamics, the aircraft maker in Fort Worth, Texas. He worked on non-destructive testing of aircraft parts by ultrasonic methods. He had patents and a lot of expertise in the field of ultrasonic testing of materials.

Levin:

It’s interesting that the seismologists went mostly. Do you know why it was mostly the seismologists?

Dorman:

Well, we were obviously available in the sense that most of our work on the lunar program was already in Texas. As I say we had established a computer lab in the huge, white warehouse building behind the seismology building, near the marine biology lab. We had a new PDP 15 computer, a lot of tape racks. We were accumulating all of the magnetic data from the lunar seismographs. But things were getting rather tight in that lab. We had a small staff there. We had a lady who was manager of that lab, a person with digital computer skills. She stayed there full-time, and we went back and forth to Houston on the various missions. When it came time to move we got a great big moving van, and we packed the entire lunar lab plus the contents of our offices into the moving van and sent it right down to Galveston. Gary’s office was in it. My office was in it. Maybe we had some of Doc’s stuff in it. I can’t remember. Dr. Ewing sent most of the contents of his office by — the books and papers off of his shelves, notebooks and so on — U.S. Mail, book rate. Packed it all in small packages, and he had calculated this was the cheapest way to send all his stuff to Galveston. Probably was. With book rate, just tied with string, why the stuff all went down there by the Post Office. It was delivered day after day; the Post Office came in with packages for Dr. Ewing. So the move occurred probably in July or so, maybe late June.

Levin:

Were people like Den [Dennis E.] Hayes, Sykes or even Maurice’s brother, John Ewing, were they not invited?

Dorman:

I don’t know. Well, I believe Dennis Hayes was invited. I’m sure Doc spoke with his brother about it.

Levin:

Why do you think they chose to remain?

Dorman:

I don’t know. At one point I thought Dennis Hayes was going to join us in Galveston, but he didn’t. I’m sure he decided not to. I don’t know what Lynn Sykes felt about it. Lynn at that time was head of the seismology program. Jack Oliver had left the year before. Lynn asked me if I would stay at Lamont. I’m sure he was serious about it, but I said no. I had made my decision, and I thought I wanted to work on the lunar project. And I would go down there.

Levin:

Do you think that was really the reason why Latham and Landisman and Worzel, at least Landisman and Latham, wanted to continue the work on the lunar project?

Dorman:

Mark Landisman was not involved in this. Landisman had left for the University of Texas at Dallas a number of years earlier. He was a faculty member at an institute in Dallas. The University of Texas. Started a graduate school of geophysics, molecular biology and a couple of other things at Dallas. Which gradually they integrated backwards into an undergraduate program and became a unit of the University of Texas general campus in Dallas. But at the time Mark Landisman went there in the early ‘60s it was a graduate school of geophysics and molecular biology and one or two other things. But Latham and I were involved in the move. A month or two later, Tosi Matumoto was involved in the move. Yosio Nakamura joined up with us by resigning from General Dynamics. He had been deeply involved in the lunar project all along as a consultant from General Dynamics. Because he was a seismologist by trade. He did his graduate work at Penn State in the early ‘60s. I do remember one meeting that concerned the financial transactions there. Basically the confiscation of Lamont contract funds. A group of senior staff people, not including Dr. Ewing, went to the campus to talk with a provost, not [Jacques] Barzun but another man who I don’t remember his name. We’ll find that out. And a couple of vice presidents. I remember that we sat around a table in Low Library and talked about this. This was our senior staff attempt to convince these fellows that what they wanted to do was not really legal or ethical as a way to handle government contracts. We felt that Columbia had promised to use them in such and such a way when they accepted the money and that they were changing their minds unilaterally simply because they were the people in charge of the cash register.

This meeting did not go well at all. I remember when we stood up to leave, why one of these men came across with a big smile to shake my hand and I just turned my back and walked out of the room because I felt this whole thing was a fraud on the government. It damaged the reputation of Columbia as well as Lamont, in the way the contracts were being handled. So that was a disaster. The man was the provost, I believe. He was from the humanities department. I can’t remember his name. I’d recognize it right away. But Dr. Ewing’s meeting with President McGill was later than that. This was prior. So I sort of pinned my hopes on Dr. Ewing’s meeting with President McGill that once they had talked this thing over face to face, why there would be an acceptable solution. But there wasn’t. I don’t know the details of the accounting. My contracts were not involved. I had no contract that was in the middle of this. I believe Latham did. So a person like Latham or Arnold Finck could tell you about this. I’m not sure Columbia would want to hear this in the Oral History program.

Levin:

They want the truth to surface. Having this grant be taken was very disappointing. What else do you think added to Doe’s wanting to move? Did he have a choice at this point? Was he allowed to continue after retirement?

Dorman:

I’m sure he would have been appointed professor emeritus. But I’m not sure he wanted to stay at the Observatory as a professor emeritus without authority. Or not knowing what the future administration would be at the Observatory. And also he had proposed several times before to make affiances with other universities and especially to go back to Texas. In the Texas A&M plan, Doc [Ewing] was to become the dean of earth sciences at Texas A&M, I believe. Texas A&M was a lot different in the early ‘60s than it was the ‘70s and ‘80s. It did not have a large, distinguished school of earth science with five departments. It had a meteorology program which still trains a lot of weathermen in a Master’s program, or at least at that time. It’s sort of like Penn State in that respect. It had a geophysicist or two. Peter Dehlinger in the department of geology. But Doc was being asked to organize a more comprehensive earth science, geophysics program. Texas A&M had some competent geology professors who were experts on Gulf Coast geology and so on. But that looked like a great opportunity to Doc in the early ‘60s, and it was. As I say, I don’t know all the reasons it fell through. The meeting I had with Earl Rudder and Andrew Suttle and a physics professor there in Washington was just a small part of the whole development. The actual plans were made by Dr. Ewing with the administration of Texas A&M. That was where he announced this, at a meeting in Lamont Hall and invited the staff members to get involved at least part-time in Texas A&M. That Texas A&M and Lamont would share vessels and ports and become sort of a single institution. This would have been under Dr. Ewing’s general supervision. And so the new Texas plan, I think, looked good. Because it looked like the resources of the University of Texas would be behind this thing, and in fact they were.

Levin:

So you weren’t concerned about trying to find a boat?

Dorman:

We didn’t have a vessel at Texas at first. But there was a gift from Cecil Green. I remember the meeting, and I remember myself thanking Cecil Green and telling him that he had done a great thing for starting a new geophysics group. That was some months after we organized the program at Texas that we got that boat.

Levin:

How was the program organized?

Dorman:

I was working on the lunar program pretty much full-time. We moved all our stuff into the so-called Unit D building in Galveston, a small hospital building which was empty when we got there. We set up our computer. It was a general purpose computer. We could use it for almost anything, including lunar seismology. We put all our lunar data tapes in the building, and we started working. We each had a hospital room for an office. We started working on the lunar program while Ewing and Worzel were devoting most of their time to building an oceanography program. Several people joined us. Archie Roberts came down from Alpine Geophysical. Archie was a former Lamont person who had joined up with Alpine Geophysical as a founder of the Alpine Geophysical Company which was initially based in Alpine, New Jersey. Archie was an experienced marine engineer, MIT graduate who had been working on marine data acquisition equipment for all his career at Lamont in Alpine. So Archie came. Also Steve Lieber, another Lamont person who had been a Navy electronics technician in the ‘50s or ‘40s and jointed Lamont, I suppose in the ‘50s somewhere. And he was basically the brains behind a lot of the electronic technology that was built for the Verna. And Steve joined us in Galveston. I don’t recall where he came from. But he did a great job in getting equipment together to go on the Ida Green. He and Archie were in charge of the survey equipment.

Archie was mostly working on streamers and air guns, and Steve was working mostly on electronics. We received gifts from several oil companies. There was a Texas Instruments marine survey digital seismic system, digitizing system, that had been used on oil company survey vessels. I can’t remember the model number. It was not a new unit when we got it, but I think we had two of them and they worked very well. We received streamers as gifts. So we were just about ready to start surveying, and did. In fact, the ship made a few cruises in early ‘73. I remember where the ship left Galveston for a major expedition in the South Atlantic in September or October. While the ship was en route from Galveston to Brazil, the price of diesel fuel went up from 25 cents a gallon to 90 cents a gallon. This was the first oil shock in October of 1973. So that puts a peg in my mind on when we got the Ida Green. It was early in ‘73, mid ‘73, something like that. The ship was made ready for seismic profiling just before it left for Brazil. The reason fuel oil went up was because of the oil shock which was the basically OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] taking control of oil fields and prices in the Middle East and nationalizing oil companies and so on. That happened in late ‘73.

Levin:

What did you find that was different in Texas? You had the same leader, but how did it compare to operations at Lamont.

Dorman:

In Texas he left things pretty much to us. He wasn’t actually retired, but I sort of felt that for him it was like a let-down in the sense that he would not be involved in the next generation of geophysics.

Levin:

Because you didn’t have graduate students?

Dorman:

Well, we had graduate students very shortly that came from the University of Texas at Dallas. We had a graduate student, David Dumas, who was actually enrolled at Rice University, but Latham and I became his thesis supervisors. Our group attracted a lot of interest from the University of Texas at Dallas, the same graduate school of earth science that Mark Landisman had joined a number of years earlier. They sent students to Galveston while they were still enrolled at Dallas in degree programs. David Dumas’s doctorate was actually awarded by the University of Texas at Dallas, and he did all his research, both on his Master’s degree and his doctorate, at Galveston.

Levin:

So what exactly was Maurice [Ewing] feeling about the transition?

Dorman:

He believed that the University of Texas should have a large-scale earth science program. There was a very distinguished department of geology in Austin, Texas. He and Dr. Worzel were appointed to that faculty very shortly, to the Austin, Texas, geology department. He felt like Texas, especially after the oil shock, was a university that should have an all-around geophysics program. So he was very optimistic because Texas being an earth science state, and the University of Texas being an earth science university, he was sure that the whole thing would sort itself out. But, of course, moving a group from one university to another on a month and a half notice is almost unheard of in academic situations. Things usually take years to gel in academia, right? Or to happen. Actually, in a way it did take a generation to gel at the University of Texas. But I remember that Bob Boyer, who was chairman of the geology department at Austin, called me in one day. He said, “What would you think if Mio Backus became a faculty member here?” And I said, “Wow, that would be great.” Mb Backus was the chief geophysicist of Texas Instruments or Geophysical Service Incorporated, a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. He was a well-known person in exploration geophysics, one of the leaders in the field.

He had decided to resign from Texas Instruments and go to the University of Texas at Austin as a faculty member, and he did that. And he’s still there if he’s not retired. Was a very effective group of people working on seismic signal processing problems. That was the area that the University of Texas geology department was most interested in, was oil exploration technology. That was Mio’s field. At first I don’t think they really were that interested in marine exploration and world tectonics except for a few faculty members. Because it was still a fairly typical North American geology department which was focused on the geology of the continents rather than the geology of the oceans. In ‘72 the plate tectonics revolution had come in, but the University of Texas had not taken part in any of the ocean exploration up to that time. So I think they were just sort of mildly interested in the Galveston group. Maybe a little apprehensive since Ewing was a world star and had landed in Galveston practically before they realized anything was afoot. Galveston was a university campus. It was a medical branch. Truman Blocker was an M.D. The obvious way for the University of Texas to assimilate this group was to integrate them with the geology department at Austin. So that took a couple of years to sort all that out.

Levin:

Was Ewing disappointed that he wasn’t able to start right away and that everything wasn’t well formed when he got there?

Dorman:

I don’t know. We really didn’t discuss that. There was some talk at the very beginning that we might be able to use the Vema for some Texas expeditions in collaboration with Lamont, but that never happened. I think there was a premature announcement that that was going to happen. I don’t think that came from Dr. Ewing. I think it was somebody on the Texas Board of Regents or something that said something that was just not cast in concrete, it was just an idea in the talking stage. But the Ida Green initiative gave us what we needed in Galveston. The group was very successful. We became the first geophysics group in a university to use a multi-channel streamer and air gun in surveying. This was an old oil company technique, but it was used for basically earth science tectonics exploration of the oceans.

Levin:

So the oil companies had developed the air gun?

Dorman:

Oh, yes. Well, the air gun was developed sort of at Lamont by Lamont people in the early or in the 1950s. The air gun, you would have to ask air gun experts, like Bernie [Bernard] Luskin or Archie Roberts, but the air gun, if I’m not mistaken, was patented by Bolt Associates of Connecticut. The president of the company at one time was Bernie Luskin who had been an engineer. He was an electrical engineer and had been on the Lamont staff in the ‘50s. So and Archie Roberts came to Galveston because of his knowledge of air guns. I mean, we wanted him there because of his knowledge of air guns and how to use them. Because he had been working with air guns at Alpine Geophysical. So we had the equipment of a commercial marine survey vessel, and we used it for studies of deep sedimentary ocean basins, subduction zones, midocean ridges, trenches and so on. We used it for ocean tectonics studies, which was something oil companies did not do in those days. This put the Galveston program off on the fast track. We gathered some people who were interested in this. Joel Watkins came from the University of North Carolina, had no experience really in marine seismology but a pretty fast study. He became a key member of that program. Richard Buffler came from Shell Oil Company, I believe. Also interested in the Gulf of Mexico stratigraphy. He’s probably the world authority on Gulf of Mexico stratigraphy, and he’s still working with the group in Texas. They are now located in Austin. Shortly after I left the University of Texas in 1981 they transplanted the whole group from Galveston to Austin which was an idea we had proposed before we left. But there were so many people that bailed out into the oil industry in 1980 and ‘81 that I think the University got the idea that they really should move this group to Austin, integrate it into the geology department more tightly or they would lose it in Galveston. In Galveston we had nothing but medical scientists to talk to. There wasn’t really a mathematics department. There wasn’t a physics department. There wasn’t a geology department or anything down there.

Levin:

Did that make it difficult?

Dorman:

Oh, sure. Intellectually, sort of isolated from other earth scientists, other physical scientists and so on. It was better situated in Austin, and they’re still there.

Levin:

Did you or Ewing retain ties to what Lamont was doing? Were you still trying to get collaboration with them or with other institutions, perhaps Woods Hole?

Dorman:

Both Ewing and Worzel had old ties with Woods Hole, even going back further than Lamont. Because that’s where they worked during World War II, and I think maybe at that time they had even had houses in Woods Hole, although they didn’t go there very much. I’m not sure when Doc sold his house in Woods Hole. Ties with Lamont were very deep because of the fact that they were the founders of Lamont. At that point collaboration with Lamont was not close because they were working on one thing and we were working on another. We were busy a marine seismic program at Galveston. It was ahead of Lamont at that point in the sense that we were using a multichannel survey vessel, and they weren’t. That’s the way it was in 1973 and ‘74. Lamont rectified that situation shortly by using their matchless resources. But it really wasn’t a competitive situation. People always wonder about competition between institutions in earth science. Well, the answer is, there are so many things to do in earth science nobody is really duplicating anybody else’s work. But there were a number of breakthroughs or advances made at Galveston during that period, and they were not done in collaboration with Lamont.

Levin:

When you look back on your Lamont years, what factors particularly enabled Lamont’s success?

Dorman:

I think the isolation from the Morningside Campus was a very important factor. First of all, there would never have been the space on Morningside Campus to do what we did at Palisades. The competition for floor space and basically for outdoor space, too, would have been just incredible. It would have stunted the growth of a geophysics program on Morningside. It couldn’t happen. Another thing was that the seismic observatory at Palisades was much better than the seismic observatory would have been in Schermerhorn because of the subways. Plus the room factor. If we could have used all of Schermerhorn Hall it might have been fine. But the Psychology Department was upstairs, and there was a lot of geology space and so on in the building. The University could not have provided the physical facilities. The second factor was another item of isolation, basically. We were allowed to grow at our own pace by our own wits. Being one of the few institutions in the marine geophysics field in the 1950s, why, there was no other place for the Navy to put the money, and the Air Force, too, in terms of seismology. We had some brilliant people who invented the ways to spend money effectively in earth science. This would be seismology and marine geophysics. The Navy and the Air Force jumped at it because there was no other place to make that kind of progress. Of course nowadays there are many, many institutions with very bright people.

A lot of people learned by watching Lamont and a few other institutions that were in the game in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The isolation from University procedures was beneficial. Doc [Ewing] was like the president, vice president, the dean and the provost of Lamont all rolled into one. He made a lot of wise decisions in which way to go. A lot of people helped him do it. There were many very bright people working there, came there, were attracted there. One night, I think it was just after Neil Opdyke had joined the Lamont staff, Doc and I were sitting in a restaurant in Washington, having dinner. It was during an AGU [American Geophysical Union] meeting, I think. There were two people in the next booth, and they were talking about what a great find Neil Opdyke was for Lamont. How did they get such good guys? Because Neil had come there and started a very high visibility program, was doing great work, getting great results. This was the way it went. We just listened to this thing. [Laughs] Listened to these two fellows telling each other how good Neil Opdyke was and what a great job he was doing at Lamont. I don’t know who it was. I don’t even know if we knew at the time who it was. Somebody at the AGU meeting. Jim Heirtzler is another example. He came out of New York University with skills and a physics degree and geomagnetic micropulsations. He had worked for a famous professor, Korff. K-O-R-F-F. At NYU. He was a good physicist. It seemed as though this was a good way to put the geomagnetism program on the fast track. Up to then, it had sort of been started by amateurs in physics and magnetics. Bruce Heezen’s magnetic profile across the Atlantic came in earlier years. It was well exploited by Bruce. But the program needed a physicist who understood the acquisition and interpretation of magnetic data. Jim had experience in all these areas. So he joined the staff without a faculty appointment. He never did have a faculty appointment with Lamont. But just because it was a growing group, and he knew that there was a great opportunity there for professional advancement.

He’s the man that I met first in Helsinki. Dr. Ewing introduced me to him at the IUGG [International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics] meeting. Because he had just joined the staff maybe a week before. So isolation and enough funding to grow the institution 15% a year, and a flow of good people who wanted to come to Lamont. Or good people who finished their graduate work at Lamont and did not have to leave. You weren’t fired just because you got your degree. I remember when Chuck [Charles] Officer that he was leaving Lamont and going to, I think Rice University. Chuck was a fast track graduate student. He finished his graduate work, his doctorate, I think in three years at Lamont. Just about a record for all time. But Chuck was not a guy that let any grass grow under his feet. He did a lot of work 9 to 5. Every day he went to the movies with his wife in the evening. He didn’t study all night like a lot of graduate students. But he got everything done in three years. He was a very smart, very bright guy and finished and moved fast. And he came out of Doc [Ewing]’s office. Doc couldn’t understand why anybody would want to leave Lamont. Doc was very disappointed. Maybe he was upset. I didn’t ever discuss it with him. But Chuck told us that Doc had tried his best to keep him at Lamont. Not a whole lot of people left, you see. There were many others who stayed. Jack Oliver was one. Frank Press was one. Frank stayed for — Doc was willing to let Frank go to Cal Tech because he had been appointed director of the seismo lab which was a prestige position in geophysics. A distinguished institution, distinguished laboratory. He was the successor of Beno Gutenberg, probably the most famous seismologist of the time. In a situation like that, Doc was glad to see a Lamont graduate move on to other things. But many people stayed on the staff for quite a few years. Jack Oliver, Charles Drake. A number of people. Jim [James] Brune stayed. I stayed there, of course. So did Manik Talwani. Wally [Wallace S.] Broecker. Paul Gast. Several others in geochemistry. I could probably make a pretty long list.

Levin:

We’ve certainly covered a lot. Is there something that you feel that we haven’t covered yet that you want to say?

Dorman:

Gosh. Not really. There’s really nothing that I expected to talk about that we haven’t talked about. I didn’t give this a whole lot of thought before you came. Because things are pretty busy here. But I might think of something in the next hour or two hours or two days. I don’t know.

Levin:

Okay. Well, then. Thank you very much for this last session.

Dorman:

Yes. You’re welcome.