Ben Oostdam's Autobiography: 1960-1963

page 45

back at SIO July/Dec., 1962

Already before the Dec.5 exam we had corresponded with Hawaii where Ted had worked against Inman sending a student (me) to UH to complete an SIO PhD. Remember, he had a severe grudge against Inman, and >< (conversely).
Also, the project had ran into some problems; I had had the good idea to try and locate offshore sand deposits by seismic profiler and had half agreed with George Shor to go for that; Moberly liked that proposal better than some of my others, but nothing came out of it till years later others did it. Anyhow, Herb and I performed hours of work on the Hawaiian beach data to help prepare the paper Shepard was to present at GSA in Houston in November, 1962.

Arnold Bouma

We also did attend the SIO seminars and got to be good friends with Arnold Bouma (of the well-known "Bouma Sequence" in turbidites) , a Dutch post-doc. and former student of Kuenen's, who spent about a year at SIO with Shepard, van Andel, Inman and Curray. Thus it came about that 4 or 5 of us got a CA state car to drive to Houston to attend that conference, of which my clearest recollections are meeting Eugene Shinn, Cyril Galvin, Vernon Henry, John Hoyt, Maynard Nichols and Dan Stanley, and attending Well's illustrious presentation about coral growthrings as dating method.

Gene Shinn

We also decided that- since we were that close- we'd go by New Orleans first. Entering New Orleans about 16:00 I asked my neighbor if he could loan me some money since I only had 2 dollars. It then came out that we were all strapped for cash; I then had a sudden brainwave and stopped at a Post Office to send a telegram to my Bank in California - which was still open because of the time difference - and had them TT some $ 200, which we easily spent that evening and night...the next morning we decided to go by the Coastal Research Group of LSU in Baton Rouge, where we met James Morgan, Sherwood Cagliano, James Coleman, Bruce Thom and several others (possibly including David Smith - my future boss from 1963-5). Strange to think that as of time of writing (Dec.2002), Arnold Bouma is still working at LSU !! Anyhow, we must have made it safely back to California probably thanks to the State Credit card - because at that time none of us held personal credit cards yet.