July 30, 2024
Early Life—1931-1949. I was born into a middle-class American family at the beginning of the Great Depression. My mother and father already had two daughters, four and six years older than I. Although without regular employment during part of the Great Depression, my father worked odd jobs, making enough money accompanied by much scrimping to keep the family with food and shelter. I do not remember being deprived in any way during what must have been grim times for my parents. I was a much loved and protected child. At the end of the Depression, both parents got jobs and were able to buy a house.
Both of my parents were born in eastern Oregon. My father’s family were of Scots background, born in Canada. My mother’s mother had been born in Missouri and came to Oregon by way of Elko, Nevada. My maternal grandfather was born in Indiana in 1854. His Quaker family moved westward, finally he and his three brothers came from Kansas to the West Coast in the1870s.
I was born in Portland in 1931 and was greatly influenced by living in a supportive family in a lower middle-class American suburban neighborhood. I was a healthy, intelligent boy who felt secure in both my family and schools. I learned ways to excel in schoolwork and satisfy my parents’ expectations and was sure enough of my abilities to socialize with my classmates. I was quite independent, if sometimes lonely. I worked as a paperboy and did odd yard jobs for family friends.
My world expanded from house to neighborhood, from family to school. And from bike and public transportation I got to know the larger city and nearby neighborhood. And with family auto trips, I became acquainted with western Oregon and the Cascade Mountains. My awareness of the wider world came from reading newspapers and listening to the radio. Especially significant world events became important to me through following the battles and troop movements of the Allied Forces during WWII as shown in Life Magazine and in the short news reels that accompanied the weekly movies that I attended. In 1939 my parents took me to the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island and on as far south as Tijuana. After WW II, we toured the great national parks of the West.
I also remember van Loon’s Geography and his Story of Mankind. I was given an atlas by my mother, and I copied many of the maps. After the war, I tried to collect road maps, which were given free at gasoline service stations. It was, I believe, the interest in maps and foreign places that I developed during the war that helped set the course of much of my life.
I took a major break from elementary school and neighborhood friends when I decided to go to an all-boys’, technical high school. After taking classes in foundry, blacksmith, pattern making, carpentry, and electric shops, I chose ‘technical radio,’ because in addition to ‘shop’ we could take a complete academic program that prepared one for college.
Upon graduating at the top of my class, I chose to attend Oregon State College (now University) in Corvallis.
Young Adulthood—1949-1955. I had hoped to become a science or chemistry major because I had liked chemistry and physics classes best in high school. But at Oregon State, introductory chemistry lectures were large and impersonal. Labs consisted of set experiments taught by assistants in windowless, smelly rooms. My physics professor was dull and uninspiring. Calculus was done by rote. I did well on assigned problems but never understood what the subject was about.
I also took several geology and geography classes whose instructors simply repeated what was found in the textbooks. However, unlike the dull texts of most of my classes, I found the geology and geography texts to be interesting because they gave me a vocabulary that I could use to describe the natural world around me. Also, they used maps, which continued to intrigue me.
Academic life at Oregon State was a great disappointment. None of my classes nor instructors had intellectually stimulated me. I discussed this disappointment with some of my fraternity brothers and found that several of them agreed with me. My English composition and literature instructor was the only professor that, had aroused my intelligence. She recognized my frustrations and suggested that I might find the University of California, Berkeley, to be stimulating. I and two fraternity brothers took the Cal entrance examinations and applied for admission. We were all accepted and moved to Berkeley in the fall of 1951. (One buddy received a PhD in Philosophy and taught at the University of Colorado. The second received a degree with Clark Kerr and went on to a distinguished business career.)
University of California, Berkeley. I needed to complete a bachelor’s degree in two years beyond the two that I had finished at Oregon State. To do so, I had to consider how to finance the greater expenses of being an out-of-state student ($200/year), how to complete two more years of ROTC, which I wanted to do to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in the Korean War, and how to complete the University requirements which were much greater than those at Oregon State.
The finances were satisfied by being accepted into the Signal Corps unit of advanced ROTC. During my first year in Berkeley, I lived off my summer earnings as a desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge. With my two buddies from Oregon, I lived in very inexpensive rental rooms where we prepared and ate our meals. During most of my second year I lived in a room in a private home on College Ave. for $15/month and had my meals provided in exchange for cleaning bathrooms in a group-housing building. And to finish all requirements of classes, at the end of the second year, I borrowed $500 from my parents.
Because I needed to satisfy Cal’s greater course requirements, I needed to enroll for 21 or 22 credits each semester. Including finding a major. I focused on my childhood interest in maps and the interesting geography and geology textbooks that I had read at Oregon State. After an intensive study of the University of California Catalog, I discovered that I could major in geography, a university academic field that I had not known existed. My first meeting with a faculty member in the fall of 1951 was with the undergraduate advisor of the Department of Geography, John Kesseli. Professor Kesseli was a tall, gangling, lean man with a full head of wavy, silver hair. His gruff, heavily accented German-Swiss voice was accompanied by piercing blue eyes.
I arrived at his office several days before the fall semester began. Professor Kesseli asked me where I had attended college my first two years. When I replied, Oregon State, he said in his distinctive accent, “Corwallis? Why didn’t you stay? We don’t want you here!” I was greatly taken aback because my decision to come to the University of California and to major in geography had been the most important decision I had ever made. I became upset, somewhat angry, and replied “I left Oregon State because I didn’t think it very stimulating and that I thought that the University of California would be. I am going to stay, whatever you think.” Professor Kesseli broke into a big smile and said, “Well, OK! Let me put you through your paces.” It was obvious that he wanted students with spunk and who would question the teacher’s authority. Professor Kesseli did “put me through my paces” in his classes in map reading and geomorphology. He practiced the Socratic method of teaching and one had to be prepared to answer his penetrating questions without hesitation. I responded well to his methods; they truly involved me directly in the learning process. Through a growing mutual respect, he and I became good friends until his death.
I did not realize when I chose my major that the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, was the most distinguished geography department in the country. Its chairman, Carl Sauer, was honored throughout the world. HHHis classes, The Conservation of Natural Resources and The Domestication of Plants and Animals as well as The Geography of Latin America, were truly inspirational. They offered me the intellectual stimulation that I had not found at Oregon State. Each course was a carefully thought-out story that was founded on a consistent philosophical background. Professor Sauer had gathered the evidence that underpinned his ideas from broad readings in geology, history, anthropology, and archeology. He synthesized the evidence with sound speculation and great verbal skill. He was not highly theoretical as was the fashion in most social sciences. Instead, he wove stories about the ways objects and ideas were geographically distributed and ordered historically. His stories were the most thought-provoking of any I had ever heard. I kept the notes of his classes, written as close to word for word as possible so that I could later reflect on his ideas. I still have those notes. (If someone would like to see them, I have digital copies available.)
Erhard Rostlund, who taught courses in introductory cultural geography and the geography of the United States and Canada, was a large, white-haired Swede who had a heavily accented voice. He had been a seaman who came to an academic life in middle age. He was kind but always nervous before each class. I was one of his teaching assistants. From him, I learned that teachers, even in very large classes, could take individual care of students. I still remember the detailed comments he made on written assignments. Sometimes his comments were longer than the student’s original paper. He introduced me to studies in soil erosion, deforestation, fisheries depletion, and regional variations within the United States and Canada. Professor Rostlund recommended that I read Aldo Leopold’s new book, The Sand County Almanac, which may be thought of as the first popular account of ecology. It was the first book, other than textbooks or atlases, that I felt compelled to buy with my limited finances.
John Leighly taught climatology, meteorology, cartography, and the history of American geography. Professor Leighly was the most traditionally scientific member of the department. From him I learned about the processes that create weather and climate and the ways in which map projections are derived. A brilliant man, but an extremely dull lecturer, John Leighly was precise in his speech and writing. The careless use of punctuation or of ‘which and that’ did not slip by his scrutiny. When I was his TA we liked to talk about current events. He was a gracious host to the students from his classes, which he often held at his home on Arch Street. (Carl Sauer also lived on Arch Street.) He led me to respect the care for accuracy that a good teacher must have.
The fifth professor in the Department of Geography, James Parsons, taught a field class that took its students all over the San Francisco Bay region, some place new every Saturday. “Parsons” or “Jim” as we called him had started as a journalist. He carried with him throughout his life the curiosity about everything he saw or read. Field trips with him were constant discovery. Professor Parsons stopped frequently, often precipitously, whenever he saw something that struck his interest. He asked class members questions about what they saw; and he asked strangers who part of the local scene what they could tell us about the place. I learned from him that every place is interesting and that curiosity and lack of inhibition in asking questions will contribute greatly to understanding the world. Later, as a married graduate student, my wife and I became close friends with all of his family, house-sitting their home in the Berkely Hills on several occasions.
Truly my choice to study geography at the University of California transformed my life. I found intellectual stimulation beyond my wildest expectations. I found extraordinary teachers and bright student colleagues. My fellow students were as interested as I in learning about the world, especially from the perspectives of geography
The Cal campus was also stimulating The Department of Geography was in Giannini Hall, the home of Giannini Hall, part of a complex of three classical buildings mostly associated with the School of Agriculture. These buildings were sited on a knoll above the north branch of Strawberry Creek. Giannini Hall contained the office of the Dean of Agriculture and had a spacious foyer and wide halls, although the Department of Geography was tucked into a small suite of offices at the back of the building on the second floor and was usually accessed by a back stairway. I remember the lacey Olive trees near the entrances and an extraordinarily beautiful gingko tree, which, each fall, precipitously dropped its brilliant yellow leaves in a perfect golden circle on the deep green lawn that sloped away from the building.
The spaces I traversed or used in Berkeley and the larger San Francisco Bay Region made me aware, for the first time, of the ways in which extremely great wealth could be concentrated in public buildings and spaces, in large homes, in well landscaped neighborhoods, and in huge commercial structures in dynamic business districts. When I was an undergraduate student, no freeways or large shopping malls existed in the Bay Area. San Pablo Boulevard was the main artery through the area connecting Sacramento and the north to San Francisco. Berkeley was linked to San Francisco and Oakland by the ‘F’ Train. And San Francisco, ‘The City’, was accessible by bus, car, and the interurban train over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (which I had first crossed shortly after its building) and by the Southern Pacific ferry between the Oakland Mole and the Ferry Building in the City.
Army Days—1953-1955. In June 1953 I received my Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army Signal Corps. While I was travelling to basic officers’ training at Fort Monmouth, N.J., the Korean War ended. After training, I was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, which at that time was mainly shuttling troops back and forth between the United State to Asia. I requested a more demanding assignment and because I had a top-secret intelligence clearance, was sent to SHAPE (the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe) headquarters in Paris, France. I was to be a communication officer attached to an American Army Signal Battalion. However, I was assigned to supervise the Signal battalion’s motor Pool and mess hall. I had a wonderful time in Paris and on trips to Normandy, Rome, Oslo, and Germany.
Graduate School at the University of California—1955-1960. I was discharged earlier than planned because the Army was being rapidly reduced in size following the end of the Korean War. Not having made plans for my life after the Army, I returned to Berkeley and inquired about getting a master’s degree in Geography. I was eligible for the GI Bill, which could pay for most of my education. I found an apartment in a private home on Summer Street in which I lived by myself for most of the next three years. It was within walking distance of the campus and had good views of San Francisco Bay.
The classes that I needed for my program did not start until fall. My advisor and friend, Professor John Kesseli suggested that I enroll in an eight-week, field course offered by the Department of Soil Science. The class consisted of six or eight students, who majored in soil sciences, and Professor Frank Harradine, who had experience both as a teacher and as part of the massive field study that surveyed the soils of California. We traveled hundreds of miles throughout California, from the Klamath Mountains in the north to the deserts east of San Diego, from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada. Every day we stopped many times, dug 4-5-foot-deep holes with a soil auger, and recorded detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the soil, the specific geomorphic and geologic conditions of the surface and surroundings, the climate, natural vegetation, and the land use of the site. We recorded additional information from road cuts, made cross sections from the mountains to the coast, and systematically categorized each recording from the nearly 500 stops we made.
On weekends or during brief respites from the field we organized our notes and records into reports that reflected our understanding of how the diverse soils of California could be grouped into meaningful geographical suites. The soils field course was the most important class I have ever taken. It let me see how I could combine systematic visual observations of the natural (physical) world with a series of categories from many different disciplines. And it demanded intense focus of the body/mind in its execution. It required an understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that were impressed through land uses by agricultural, forestry, and urban institutions. The experience taught me that every spot in the world, from an area with a diameter of a few inches and only a few feet deep can be interesting and is related to an expanding network of material and ethereal worlds beyond.
The three years from the fall of 1955 through June 1958 were the most stimulating years of my life. With the background of my undergraduate years as a foundation, I was poised to discover the richness of ideas that the faculty of the University of California had to offer. Graduate seminars, classes, and interactions with other students stimulated me more than I had ever before experienced.
Courses. With more time to experiment with courses outside my major, I took classes in several different departments. The study of nomadic societies of Asia was given by Wolfram Eberhard in the Department of Sociology, who was later to become a member of my dissertation committee. Professor Eberhard was German by birth and education but had taught in both Turkey and China before coming to the University of California. He studied and did research on the social characteristics and history of nomadic societies throughout Asia. My research paper for his class was a study of the origins and spread of equestrian nomadism in Central Asia. It was the first time I had had to use sources written primarily in German.
A seminar by economist, Paul Taylor, most well-known for studies of rural area of California and the Mid-west which he visited with his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange, gave insight into the changing ways of rural America.
From Anthropology Professor George Forster, I took a class that compared cultural practices that had originated in Spain with those that had been transformed in Latin America. The course was a great introduction to understanding ways in which cultures can be modified by powerful, new political and religious forces, especially as seen by the receiving culture. The class stimulated my interests in Latin America, which remained dormant until my retirement some forty years later.
A course by Professor John Rowe, at the time the leading archeologist of Andean culture, introduced me to the ways an archeologist may look at the world. Although he gave some emphasis to the beginnings of civilizations in the Old World, I remember more about his reconstruction of former Andean civilizations from intimate knowledge of found artifacts. Unlike several of my other teachers, Professor Rowe was little prone to speculate about possible links between found objects; instead, he introduced me to a way of looking at physical evidence, strictly in and of itself, without speculating how it might relate to other objects that were not directly linked to it physically.
Courses in other departments of the University introduced me to the natural world. Probably the most stimulating to me at the time was Professor Hans Jenny’s course in the factors of soil formation. Hans Jenny was native to Switzerland. Having taken the summer soils field course, I was eager to learn more about how the great diversity of soils was created. The course fixed in my mind the fundamental importance of soils as major ways of focusing interests in mineral, organic, climatic, geomorphologic, and human worlds. As a focus soils link the cultural and physical worlds directly. Professor Jenny was stimulating not only in his theoretical genius but also in his field studies of the soils of the north California coast.
Less stimulating, but highly informative, was Geology Professor Norman Hinds’ seminar in geomorphology. His approach used current, basic geologic literature, which helped me fill in ideas I had been first exposed to as an undergraduate. In the 1950s, geology was very conservative and had not yet exploded with newer geophysical and technological understandings.
My graduate class in plant ecology given by Professor Herbert Baker was exciting in the ways in which it explored the emerging concepts of the interrelationships among plants, animals, soils, water, and climate. And in a practical sense, my plant taxonomy class given by Lincoln Constance made me collect, identify, and then classify plants that grew in the nearby California countryside. In the process I became aware not only of plant identification methods, but also of ways in which plant species, genera, and families were connected through the processes of evolution and local plant ecology.
Within the Geography Department, I was excited by the research seminars in which I participated. The first seminar that I took was offered by Professor James Parsons. It explored the many ways in which early ‘native’ farmers cultivated crops using the periodic shifting of fields (milpa agriculture) which could maintain long-term productive farming communities. Many of the seminar’s participants investigated a particular cultural group or region to try to understand the local farming processes and their effect on the land. I researched the great variety of terms that were used to describe this form of agriculture. Because shifting field agriculture has been widely used, many techniques have become associated with it, often with unique names to describe its sophisticated methods in different parts of the world. I learned to explore the stacks of the library of the University of California in my search of ethnographic and agricultural literature. Because every search led to a discovery, I came to love this form of library research. The love remains today.
One of Carl Sauer’s seminars explored the processes of plant and animal domestication. The American Geographical Society had recently published a series of his lectures about the origins and dispersals of domesticated plants and animals. These lectures, based on the limited archaeological and ethnographic evidence then available, were highly speculative. They outlined the possible geographic centers of domestication and the geographic routes by which domesticated plants and animals were diffused to new areas. They provided a geographic perspective to the topic which students of the seminar might expand.
Each member of the seminar chose a particular plant or animal to follow from its possible site of domestication to its current distribution. I chose to investigate the domestication and keeping of honeybees. I followed the record of beekeeping through ethnographic literature that depicted or described beehives and the uses of honey and beeswax.
The second seminar that I took from Professor Sauer dealt with pre-Columbian transfer of plants, animals, and other objects between the Old and New Worlds. Because I was doing research on West Africa in preparation for field work, I was allowed to look at the links from both South Asia and the Americas to West Africa. The seminar was important for me to explore the ideas about the long distance spread of objects, ideas, and peoples. It introduced me to the evidence of possible theoretical connections between places and of the limitations of fitting evidence to theory. Carl Sauer’s fascination with geographical interpretations of cultural origins and diffusions has also become a fundamental approach to my understanding of cultural geography. To map the geographic location of objects or ideas at various historical moments and to subsequently interpret their distributions is for me one of the fundamental ideas of geography.
John Leighly’s seminar focused on some of the emerging ideas that connected oceanography and climatology. Although I was unable to follow some of the geophysical processes, I became aware of the processes of short-term climate changes and their relation to ocean currents, temperatures, and salinity. The ideas also informed technical details I had first heard about in Sauer’s classes about longer term climate changes, especially Pleistocene changes in sea levels and shorelines.
In some ways Professor Kesseli’s geomorphology seminar on the processes of hill slope and valley formations was one of the most important to my academic career. This focus on geomorphology and later, my master’s thesis on a geomorphologic topic were major reasons that I received my first two university teaching positions. John Kesseli had translated excerpts from a German geologist’s newer approaches to understanding how land surfaces and landforms were modified. Walther Penck’s entire book had recently been translated just prior to the seminar. The members of the seminar (including Yi Fu Tuan, Campbell Pennington, Bill Denevan, Don Vermeer, and others all of whom became important geographers in the coming decades) studied Penck’s ideas on the ways in which the forms of hill slopes are related to base levels, i.e. the level to which streams were eroding adjacent lands. These ideas were in large part revolutionary at the time. They did not support the dominant ideas of the ‘aging’ of landscapes from ‘youthful valleys’ through to ‘old age’ plains. I had never seen how these earlier ideas could be anything more than descriptive and a part of a not very adventurous geology. Thus, when a possible way of explaining (not simply describing) most landforms surface features was made available to me, I “ate it up.”
A seminar on the beginnings of American environmental thought given by Clarence Glacken was fundamental in introducing me to the roots of the environmental movement that only later emerged. Clarence, new to the geography faculty, was one of the humblest, kindest, and gentlest men that I have known. He was fascinated by the wealth of environmental ideas that were to be found in the early Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the subject of my seminar research. The ferment in the early days of the United States extended to thought about humans’ relations with nature. Professor Glacken’s monumental work, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, followed the earliest environmental thought in the Western world up to the beginning of the 19th Century. During the 19th Century environmental ideas began to explode, going in many directions. The beginnings of this explosion in America were addressed in the seminar. I returned to these ideas many years later when I developed a course that explored late 19th and early 20th Century environmental thought.
The years 1955-1958 formed the intellectual base for most of the years that followed. I became part of the traditions focused on 1) ecology and evolution; 2) cultural and natural history; 3) the making of both cultural and natural landscapes, and 4) the cartographic representation of geographic distributions from the scale of a house or building with its surrounding fields or neighborhoods to worldwide patterns of distribution of both cultural and natural phenomena.
Teaching. The graduate seminars and courses provided many of the ideas and approaches that I used throughout my academic life. They introduced me to unending pathways to follow with enthusiasm and pleasure. The other major part of my early graduate student days was as a teaching assistant in introductory courses in physical and cultural geography. These basic classes brought home to me the fundamental factual bases of academic geography. They stood me in good stead as a teacher. Throughout my years of teaching, I especially enjoyed teaching introductory cultural geography.
Cartography, as practiced in the 1950s was largely a pen and ink, hands-on method of making maps. Although I have always had a love of reading maps, I had little interest in making cartographically beautiful maps because they demanded patient, meticulous use of liquid ink and clean paper, which I seemed to find many ways of smudging. Nevertheless, I was a teaching assistant for both John Leighly and John Kesseli, when they taught the upper division class at Berkeley. I learned a great deal from them about how to understand and make maps.
Field work—Jamaica. A major part of the graduate program in geography at the University of California was to do field work in a foreign country. The idea behind this was that a cultural geographer must broaden his perspectives beyond those of America. Fortunately for me, grants to study abroad were relatively easy to get. Carl Sauer oversaw grants to Caribbean countries that were supported by the US Office of Naval Research. The grants did not need to relate to the Navy’s operations. I was offered a summer field grants to study karst (limestone) landforms in central Jamaica. I knew little about limestone formations but studied the literature intensively. Little had been written about Jamaican limestone topography, so I approached the study naively.
Because I was imbued with ideas about slope formation as related to base levels, I tried to apply the ideas I had learned in Professor Kesseli’s seminar. The base levels of the karst features were the underground streams. Although I was only partially successful in understanding tropical karst topography I was able to organize the results of my observations into a master’s thesis. Probably more important, I learned how to work by myself in a foreign country.
Social Life as a Graduate Student—1955-58. Several of my colleagues and I met almost daily for dinner at the university cafeteria. David Harris, Elinore Magee (Barrett), John Beattie, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Fox formed the regular core of the group although not everyone attended every day. David Harris, Elinore Magee and I started the geography graduate program at the same time. Yi-Fu Tuan had started the program a year earlier, David Fox a year later. John Beatty was a beginning graduate student in English History who later received a PhD at Cambridge and taught at the University of Toronto.
David Harris is English and had received an undergraduate degree from Oxford University. Yi-Fu Tuan, from a nationalist Chinese family had also received an undergraduate degree from Oxford. His initial emphasis at Berkeley was geomorphology, writing a dissertation on pediments in Arizona. Elinore Magee had an undergraduate degree in Economics from Berkeley. Later she wrote a dissertation based on field work in the Balsas River basin in Mexico. John Beattie and David Harris stayed at the same house and became friends through that connection. We were all within a year or two of the same age and were united by our interests in the ferment of ideas at Berkeley in the late 1950s and by the congeniality we found over dinner and many Friday night sherry parties and weekend meals at a couple of local bars. Although we went our separate ways as we individually met other people, for me, this group and other friends at the University were the primary ways in which I initially connected to a rich academic social life.
In 1957, Elinore Magee introduced me to her roommate, Elizabeth (Beth) Rodman (McGehan), who had worked with her at the Bank of America. Beth had graduated from Mills College, in Oakland with a degree in English Literature and had just been accepted to enter the Boalt School of Law of the University of California. She often joined us for weekend activities.
Besides this closely linked group, University of California geographers were bonded by the generous gatherings of Professor Jim Parsons and his wife Betty. They opened their home at the top of Berkeley Hills to numerous parties on holidays and when entertaining visiting eminent scholars. Clarence and Mildred Glacken also held yearly social gatherings for all graduate students in geography. Occasionally Erhard Rotund and his wife Esther also entertained local geographers. And a sumptuous yearly party, given by Anna Marie and Adjunct Professor Edwin Loeb was always anticipated. The secretary of the department, Westher Hess and her physicist husband Bill regularly invited small groups of geographers to their home. These social bonds strongly reinforced the intellectual strengths of the Department of Geography.
Fieldwork in Angola and Dissertation Research. In June 1958, Beth and I married. I had just received my MA degree, passed my doctoral examinations, and had been given a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study in Angola. I prepared for field research focused on land use among the indigenous peoples of southwestern Angola. I had chosen the area in the tradition of 19th Century explorers: to look for a place that was little known to most of the world. The Cal Library had few books on Angola.
For me the most interesting account of Angola was a geomorphologic and natural history study by a German, academic, Otto Jensen. Through his writings and those of the South African geologist, Lester King, I could understand how the landscape surfaces of Angola developed. The planalto of southern Africa, which has been relatively geologically stable for long periods, has hill slopes and plains as described by Walther Penck and which I studied in John Kesseli’s seminar. Further, because King’s views had worldwide implications, I was reintroduced to the ideas of continental break-up. Those ideas had earlier been sketched out for me by reference to the ideas of Alfred Wegener, who recognized the similarities between continents and had written a much-maligned book, The Origins of Continents and Oceans. This study as well as the description of the uni-familial species, Welwitshia mirabilis, which grows in the Namib Desert, further whetted my appetite for going to this little known part of the world.
Because of the limited available knowledge at my disposal, I thought that Angola would be a good site for geographic exploration. I applied for and received a grant of $5,000 from the Office of Naval Research and by selling my car we raised $6,500, supplemented by my GI Bill college payments that had to last us from the time we left Berkeley until we returned a little over a year later.
We travelled by plane and train across the United States and by boat across the Atlantic. We landed in Lisbon, where we found a pensão, which served us as a base while I looked for an inexpensive way to get to Angola, studied Portuguese, and visited the governmental offices where I hoped to find assistance for my research in Angola. Because Angola was still a colony, I also had to get special governmental approval to stay in the country
The least expensive way to go to Angola was on a small, aging passenger ship, O Cuanza. The thirty-five ordinary, as opposed to deluxe first-class cabins had a small porthole, a wash basin with fresh water, and bunk beds. Two toilet rooms, separated by gender, and one bathroom with saltwater showers served the first-class passengers. The toilets leaked and the lighting sometimes did not work.
At a maximum of 15 knots, the ship took twenty-one days to go from Lisbon to Luanda with stops at Dakar and Pointe Noire. We landed in Luanda, the capital city and most highly organized place in Angola. Luanda had several paved streets, a beach front promenade with patterned mosaic sidewalks, a la Rio de Janeiro, several hotels and restaurants, and other three and four story buildings,. The center of the city was largely Portuguese. Most Africans lived in the shanty town that ringed the city. In addition to being the center of government activity, Luanda was an export/import trading center.
Through shipboard companions, we found a Jeep which was to take us to southwestern Angola. It had to be repaired several times. After a couple of weeks, I become a person with a legitimate reason for being in Angola when I was recognized as a professional researcher by O Instituto de Investigacão Scientifica de Angola. The Institute arranged contacts and lent me a vehicle with driver and camp boy. We met them in Nova Lisboa, and they accompanied us throughout our time in Angola. In addition, they lent us camping equipment, not only for our own use, but cooking utensils, camp beds, and camp chairs as well. We travelled south on dirt roads because, other than in five towns, only 16 miles of paved road existed in a country the size of Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, and a part of Idaho.
The official assigned to help us, Cruz de Carvalho, introduced us to officials in the government outposts in southwestern Angola. He was based in Nova Lisboa and knew most officials in southern Angola. He thought that I should carry out a written survey and use questionnaires in my project. After arriving in Sá da Bandeira (now called Lubango) I realized that I would be unable to carry out either the research that I had planned or the research that Sr. Cruz de Carvalho thought I should do. I developed a new research plan that depended primarily on my own direct visual observations. I had noticed that each tribal group that we had visited had distinctive house types, field patterns, storage facilities, and cattle corals. I visited, sketched, measured, and photographed farms, buildings, and settlement patterns within each tribal area. As well I sketched cross-sections of the surrounding natural landscapes. See my dissertation, Patterns of Settlement in Southwestern Angola.
By far the greatest aid was given me by Padre Bernardo Keane, a long-time catholic missionary at Chiulo. He asked his catechist to show me good sites to visit and to interpret between the native language and Portuguese. His mission, which included four medical nuns, treated me with care when I developed the local form of malaria.
We camped where water was within walking distance. In the dry season, the water sources were widely spaced. All water for cooking and drinking as well as for washing body or clothes had to be both filtered and boiled. This became the unending task of my wife, Beth, and the camp boy, Pedro. We usually camped in the same spot for several days while I visited and mapped nearby settlements. Every two or three weeks we headed back to Sá de Bandeira for rest and recuperation.
Although sixty years have passed, impressions and memories of my experiences in Angola remain strong. Probably the strongest is my introduction to cultures in which traditional rural practices still existed and which had been only indirectly influenced by colonial intrusions. Jim Parsons’ seminar gave me perspective. Paul Taylors’ seminar introduced me to the plight of desperate people. This was a Third World area with few modern goods or services. More importantly, the area showed the deterioration of local traditional activities because many men were forced to work in Portuguese enterprises. Most local native connections with the world were limited to agricultural products—sorghum, millet, maize and cattle—that might be exchanged for kerosene, padlocks, machetes, and other minor bits of hardware.
The brutality of the colonial Portuguese authorities was evident—beatings, jailings, and even killing of native men—and closely guarded comments of many resident Portuguese. Eventually, I was firmly, but politely, asked by the Governor of Huila Province, to conclude my studies quickly and leave the province. The reason may have been that an African from Southwest Africa (now Namibia) who spoke English had been caught in the province. He was said to have asked for “o señor, doctor Americano.” I, being the only American in the province must therefore be the man he was seeking. During a time of anti-colonial unrest elsewhere in Africa, Portugal did not want outside agitators to stir up revolutionary thoughts in the native population.
I saw the disparity at all levels between Portuguese colonials, private citizens or governmental officials and the native population that lived in southwestern Angola. Despite the Portuguese claims of a policy of assimilation of educated Africans to citizenship, it was largely meaningless in southern Angola, where Portuguese education was largely unavailable, even if desired, to the African population. Social and economic power lay with the colonial Portuguese and political power lay with the home country through its colonial tentacles. Economic development in Angola was very limited.
With great relief Beth and I left Luanda for Lisboa on O Mozambique, a much newer, faster, and larger passenger ship than O Cuanza. On our way home, we visited Professor Parsons and family in Seville, sailed on to London where we visited our friends David and Helen Harris and then to Cambridge to visit John and Susan Beattie. I had enough material to write a dissertation, if not theoretically important, at least descriptive of a little-known part of the world that was poised for radical changes as colonialism was replace by civil war and eventually by a highly corrupt new nation state.
Early Teaching Days—1960-1969. After we returned to Berkeley from Angola in the fall of 1959, I began writing my dissertation. During the winter and spring of 1959-60, I looked for academic employment and found a one-year temporary appointment as an instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon where I was introduced to full-time teaching. From the fall of 1960 until the fall of 1963, I taught at four different universities: the University of Oregon (1960-61); Michigan State University (summer 1961); Dartmouth College (1961-1963); and University of Wisconsin (summer 1963). My strongest memories of this period are of constant preparation for classes. In addition, I finished writing and editing my dissertation. The settings for this activity were pleasant campuses set within pleasant small cities or towns.
University of Oregon–1960–1961. My first appointment at the University of Oregon was as a one-year replacement for Forrest (Woody) Pitts. Because I could teach geomorphology, introductory physical geography, and the geography of Africa, they excused my lack of experience in Pitts’ specialties: economic geography and the geography of Asia. With late night cramming and early morning outlining and assembling of my notes, I was able, barely, to present nine different lectures each week and an extension class.The writing of my dissertation was largely passed over for the year.
My departmental colleagues, Clyde Patton, Carl Johannessen and Fritz Kramer had received their PhDs at UC, Berkeley. They, as well as Gene Martin, a PhD from Syracuse University, were all very supportive. Sam Dicken, the Head of the Department, was on leave, but had set the tone for the heavy teaching loads. The academic society within the department carried on the spirit of the Geography Department at Berkeley. That spirit was reinforced two years later when I rejoined the department and Edward Price, also a Berkeley PhD, became the Department’s new Head. Indeed, this was the epitome of an ‘old boys club’ which prospered when applicants for jobs were few, universities required professors to have a doctorate, and very few US universities offered PhDs in Geography.
Two PhDs from Minnesota next joined the staff–Everett Smith and William Loy; two from Wisconsin–Patricia McDowell and Patrick Bartlein; three from Chicago–Alex Murphy, Shaul Cohen, Ron Wixman; one from UC, Berkeley, Peter Walker; and one from University of Washington–Cathy Whitlock, as well as several shorter-term faculty.
Because my original appointment at the UO had been for only one year, I secured a two-year appointment as an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. To pay for the move to Dartmouth, I found a summer teaching job at Michigan State University, where I taught an introductory course and the Geography of Africa.
Dartmouth College 1961 to1963. We settled in Norwich, Vermont, which is across the Connecticut River from Hanover, New Hampshire, the site of Dartmouth. After a difficult year in Africa and with the pressures of starting to teach and earn money to finance our moves, we finally, at age thirty, felt we were on the path to a good, fulfilling life.
Dartmouth College, during the early 1960s was an all-male school, almost exclusively for undergraduates. Well-financed and endowed, Dartmouth was the most isolated of the Ivy League schools. The student body was chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the country. Every student was fully capable of undertaking a rigorous academic program. As an instructor, I could demand and expect all my students to perform well. Students took two courses each semester as well as some short-term classes. I found the academic schedule ideal. Several went on to PhDs, including
My new colleagues had taught at Dartmouth for many years. Al Carlson and Van English had received his PhD from Clark University. The head of the department was Bob Huke, with a PhD from Syracuse University. Bob was a gregarious, generous, enthusiastic teacher and organizer. In addition to the regular staff, two temporary positions were held by Donald Lynch who was finishing a dissertation on the USSR at the University of Washington, and Peter Fielding, a New Zealander, who was a PhD candidate in economic geography at UCLA. Don has long taught at University of Alaska; and Pete finished his teaching career at University of California, Irvine.
During both years I taught at Dartmouth, Clyde Patton urged me to return to a full-time faculty position at the University of Oregon. The first time he asked, I said ‘no’ because I was enjoying teaching and was finding a comfortable niche in both the local academic and village life. By the second year, my feelings about Dartmouth College had changed. Although the Geography Department was a democratic community, the College administration was highly autocratic. It was dominated by old Dartmouth graduates who assumed the air of being superior to other people. These elitist ideas were directly opposite those of the democratic, open academic community at the University of Oregon, where the faculty in open meetings discussed and directed the curriculum, the academic standards, and other problems of the University. With sadness in our hearts, we decided to leave the good life of Vermont and New Hampshire and return to the bustle of Eugene and the University of Oregon.
To pay for our return trip, I accepted a summer teaching job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The teaching schedule was light; the University’s faculty apartments were pleasant; and we joined some of the younger geographers of Wisconsin in the happy dinner parties, picnics, and summer life in southern Wisconsin.
University of Oregon 1963–1967. I settled into teaching courses in geomorphology and introductory physical geography until Anke Neumann, and later Bill Loy, was hired to teach these classes. I continued to teach the geography of Africa and cultural geography until I retired years later. Ed Price and I developed an upper division sequence in cultural geography that became the mainstay of my teaching career, later merging with interest in ideas focused on environment.
Amadu Bello University, Nigeria–1967–1969. In 1967 I was asked if I would like to teach at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. I saw this as an opportunity to learn about a different region of Africa and to improve my knowledge of African geography. Recently, the Southeastern Region of Nigeria had seceded from the Nigerian federal government, declaring itself the independent nation of Biafra. This precipitated a civil war which was largely fought in the southeastern part of the country. Zaria and most of the Northern Region was not a battlefield. Ahmadu Bello University was the first full scale university in Northern Nigeria. It had been created by merging several existing academic, research, and other facilities in Zaria and Kano. Founded in 1962, it was still a small university in 1967. (Today, it is the second largest university in Africa, only the University of Cairo is larger.)
We lived, essentially, a colonial life that was left over from the British ways. Most of the faculty were expatriates. The curriculum was patterned after a British model. The restrictions imposed by the Nigerian Civil War were minimal, although shortages of goods, travel restrictions, and monetary exchanges were difficult. I enjoyed teaching well-prepared students, who came from all regions of Nigeria, except Biafra.. The geographers were extraordinarily excellent, especially at doing fieldwork.
When the University was not in session, I travelled to several parts of northern Nigeria, doing research to see how northern Nigerian cities were laid out on the ground. I also did research in the archives in Kaduna, where I discovered plans and official documents that described the layouts and factors that created the British colonial towns located adjacent to the old, walled, traditional cities. I also walked the walls, streets, and pathways of the urbanized area of Zaria; and I talked with officials of the old city of Zaria, the merchants of the commercial centers, and other residents of other parts of the urban center. I was able to piece together a topographic history of the contemporary urban area of Zaria and of several other cities of northern Nigeria. My study, Planned Urban Landscapes of Northern Nigeria, was one of the initial publications of the Ahmadu Bello University Press in 1977.
We returned to the United States in 1967. On the way we stopped in Florence where I visited the building in which one of the world’s earliest (1657) scientific societies had met. It was filled with the artistic and sophisticated scientific instruments of the time. And when I came out, photographers were interviewing people about their impression of the moon landing which had just happened. I could not but reflect on the juxtaposition of my recent experience in Zaria, the science of 17th Century Florence, and the technological marvel of men walking on the moon. From Zaria to Florence to the Moon—it was mind boggling! (I subsequently wrote ‘The Diffusion of Scientific Societies” in the APCG Yearbook.)
University of Oregon—1969-1980. The atmosphere of the University and the nation differed radically from what it had been two years earlier. Discontent with the politics of the Vietnam War was rising to fever pitch. I scarcely recognized the attitudes and thoughts of my colleagues and students. Protests, demonstrations, near riots, sit-ins and teach-ins were the norm at the University. And, in April 1972, the ROTC building was burned, streets were barricaded, and the National Guard surrounded the campus. Often teaching classes took back seat to discussing national concerns as they played out on the campus.
Upon return to Eugene and the University, I immediately became involved with both University and local planning issues. I was made chairman of the Campus Planning Committee. The University of Oregon was developing a plan to directing its physical expansion. And the Eugene-Springfield area had just unveiled its 1990 Plan, which was to guide its development for the next 20 years. The 1990 Plan addressed several elements of great general concern to me: population growth, resource use, nuclear power, and citizen participation in decision-making. I was particularly concerned because it incorporated a transportation plan (the Eugene/Springfield Area Transportation Study or E-SATS) that proposed building a network of freeways that was denser than that of Los Angeles. Fortunately, the City and State ran out of money to support the proposed freeways.
I was also a supporter of the citizens group that opposed the building of a nuclear plant by the local public utility. Four possible sites for a nuclear power plant were identified within fifteen miles of Eugene. Fortunately, a ballot measure which limited the utility’s authority to construct nuclear power plants in Lane County was successful.
The campus planning committee which searching for an architectural or planning firm to develop a long-range plan for the campus. After interviewing several nationally recognized firms, we chose “The Center for Environmental Structure” which was led by Christopher Alexander. Alexander and his colleagues developed The Oregon Experiment, in which specific ‘patterns’ were to be used as guidelines for the ‘users’ of new or altered buildings. The ‘patterns’ are physical descriptions associated with events at all scales from details such as presence or absence of light and shade to concerns with the form of neighborhoods. Their studies resulted in “The Pattern Language”, a widely used book used by planners and architects. While working with Alexander and his team, I came to realize the ways in which cultural landscapes at all scales can be analyzed and described in terms of quality. He changed the way I look as a geographer.
Gradual Transitions—1971–1976. In 1971-1972 I was granted a sabbatical leave to complete my manuscript on northern Nigerian urban landscapes and to do research on traditional African house types at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. The Urquhart family moved first to Highgate in London. And because of the high costs of living in London, we moved to the village of Burtersett in Wensleydale, North Riding, Yorkshire. We enjoyed the life of the village and the walks in the Yorkshire countryside.
Academic Responsibilities—1972-1994. Upon my return to the United States, I became Department Head in which capacity I remained until 1975 and again in 1979-80. Nevertheless, I continued to teach all my regular courses as well as serve as the Program Chairman for the Association of American Geographers for their national meeting in Seattle in 1974. In 1979-1989 I was president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. I also continued my interests in neighborhood, city and campus planning issues. Possibly my most important activity was helping establish an Environmental Studies program. My last fourteen years on the faculty of the University of Oregon were elaborations of many of earlier activities: administration of the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program; teaching and the evolution of courses in environmental geography; teaching introductory classes in geography and graduate seminars in environmental studies; supervising master’s theses and doctoral dissertations; doing research and giving presentations on the evolution of the landscapes of Eugene/Springfield and of the Willamette Valley; and dealing with issues of local urban and campus planning.
I was chair of the Environmental Studies program from 1980 to1982 and again from 1990 to 1993. I and other concerned faculty members gave time and effort in establishing an interdisciplinary master’s degree program focused on environmental concerns.
During the years before my retirement, I was the principal dissertation advisor for fifteen PhD candidates. [David Smith, Richard Fusch, Gary Klee, Deidre Malarky, William Preston, Clark Hilden, Susan Reynolds, Henry Lawrence, Hershal Stern, Jerry Williams, Morris Uebelacker, Babara Craig, Elizabeth Keeler, Gary Cummisk, and Lincoln DeBunce] and chief thesis advisor for ten master’s candidates in Geography and was on the advisory committees for eleven Environmental Studies master’s candidates. Although working with these students was very demanding, it was also extremely rewarding. Their research was fascinating and my close personal connections with them were gratifying. Their research enriched me intellectually and their personalities enriched me emotionally.
My most satisfying classroom teaching came through the gradual refinement of three upper division and graduate classes in cultural geography. Geographic Landscapes was focused on the ways in which humans have created the physical settings in which they work and live. Environmental Alterations focused on the negative impacts that humans have on the natural world. The course I called Historical and Contemporary Views of Environment focused on the ideas and attitudes that major thinkers, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, have had on recent environmental thought. These three classes are firmly based on the cultural geography I learned at Berkeley. I also continued research interests in the historical development of the physical and cultural landscapes of Eugene and the Willamette Valley.
I continued my interest in planning public spaces. I was the major advocate for maintaining a Greenway along the Willamette River. In opposition to the City and University of Oregon, I spoke and prepared evidence at over a hundred hearings against their proposal to build a research park, which would fill an open space that had been scheduled to be an ecological study area and sports fields. I lost at every level. Today, 2024, forty years later, none of the proposed Research Park that I opposed, has been built.
Retirement. In the thirty years of my retirement, I have travelled extensively in Latin America and Spain, renewing the interest I first had on a graduate field trip to Sonora, Mexico. And Carl Sauers lectures on Latin America have remained with me throughout my life. Three extended trips to Spain, in particular Sevilla and Galicia, have been interspersed with travel in Oaxaca and other Mexican destinations, to Ecuador, Peru, and to Bolivia and Brazil with Dan Gade. I went to Oaxaca with Stan Cook, ecologist son of S. F. Cook, who was a colleague of Carl Sauer. We were trying to locate the sites of photos that his father and Sauer took on their trips in western Mexico. Stan Cook and I also traveled as ecological tourists to Chile, from Patagonia to the Atacama. For several years I went camping in the American Southwest with Charles Martinson, a PhD from the University of Oregon, now a superb naturalist and photographer of native plants.
I continue to write short essays and give presentations on environmental disruptions and ways of thinking about the Earthly predicament within which we now live. Many of these thoughts are available in my Environmental blog—alurquhart.com. They follow the summary of my ways of thinking that I presented in my book, ‘Culture & Nature—A Personal Crisis’
At 93, I am beginning to slow down. But I remain a geographer, loyal to my roots in Berkeley geography.