Tjeerd van Andel

I knew "Jerry" as the author of the classical paper on "Sediments of the Gulf of Paria", which he co-authored with Henk Postma - who also happened to be at Scripps this year as a visiting scientist. Jerry had also been very active in the API 1951 Gulf of Mexico project with Francis Shepard.
In 1961, Jerry was a relentless pipe smoker and seemed very moody. The reason was simple: his Dutch wife and four children would be sitting on one end of the beach with her new boyfriend, and he at the other. In addition, he had grown impatient with the classical "Landbouw Hoogeschool" of Wageningen, Holland geology, grainsize - and heavy mineral analyses .
A drastic change took place during the Christmas vacation. He came back as a very happy man in January 1962, having just married Roger Revelle's secretary !
I benefited from this getting a (well-deserved!) A+ for my 22 page termpaper on "Sediments of Organic Reefs and Atolls".

The new seafloor-spreading hypothesis also came very timely for Jerry: he went on to more fame as Principal Investigator in the Deep Sea Drilling Project, and authored a fine little book:
"Tales of an Old Ocean"
I once - jokingly - asked Jerry to request that Dutch be accepted as one of the two required foreign languages at SIO. He grew indignant and said that passing the reading test for French and German was so simple that I would not have to do any preparations. Most other students were Americans and some took more than a year to pass these tests. After Jerry's "encouragement", I took the two exams in one week without any preparations and fully agreed with him.