Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Foose, Richard

Richard M. Foose, Samuel A. Hitchcock Professor of Mineralogy and. Geology, emeritus, died November 26, 1994. He was 79.

"Pete," as he was known, came to Amherst in 1963 as a full Professor with tenure, replacing George Bain. He came here with a well-earned reputation for starting up Geology Departments. Pete retired in 1986.

During the decade after he arrived, our Geology Department was indeed revitalized. The department was awarded several National Science Foundation matching-funds grants that resulted in refurbishing old and creating a new classroom, laboratory and office space. Grants were awarded for undergraduate research, and it became mandatory for all seniors to do a thesis. In 1965, the department received a fourth tenure track position.

Pete Foose organized spring field trips for Amherst students, including many who were not geology majors. These encompassed such varied topics as the geologic history exposed along the canyon of the Colorado River in 1966, and on the coral reefs, the beach erosion, and the bedrock geology of Bermuda in 1968, of Tobago in 1970 and again in 1971, and of Tortola in 1984. Advanced students working under Pete were encouraged to publish their thesis research in professional journals. The most important topics included the buried Connecticut River channel east of Mt. Warner (today an important aquifer) and a Jurassic-age volcanic neck near Mt. Tom.

Pete taught for more than 35 years at the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association (often called YBRA), the geology field camp in Montana, and encouraged all our majors to attend. Pete was elected Councilor of the YBRA in 1951 and retired two years ago. He was President of YBRA 1985-87, and was the inspiration behind the gift by Dr. Porteus Johnson (Class of '28) to build the "Amherst Cabin". In town matters, Pete was 10 years on the advisory board of the Lawrence Swamp Technical Advisory Committee for discovering, developing and protecting our drinking water supply.

In his 23 years of teaching here, he was committed to Structural Geology and Geology 11. In addition, though, in the late 1970s, he developed a course entitled "Geology of the Ocean Basins" which caused him belatedly, and perhaps reluctantly, to become convinced of the efficacy of plate tectonics, and in the early 1980's he developed another new course, "Geology and Public Issues" that integrated his 40 years of practical experience in engineering geology with student interest in environmental problems. The latter course was nearly always oversubscribed.

Pete developed his personal relationships with students through frequent invitations to his and Dottie's home; they never forgot a name. She made the best Baked Alaska ever. On the matter of his dealings with students and their problems, he could be quite rigorous, though always optimistic about improvement, a quality some only came to appreciate after they had acquired greater maturity.

Pete's scholarly focus at Amherst was structural geology, but his 50+ publications include a wide variety of topics. He was an expert on landslides, tunnels and dams, landfills and water resources, surface collapse in limestone terrane, and mineral resources such as iron, aluminum, and manganese. He wrote an article (with John Lancaster) on Amherst's Edward Hitchcock. He became enthusiastically involved with a fascinating undersea treasure hunt with Warren C. Stearns (Class of '62), and in order for the team to find the 1641 wreck of the Concepcion, he was instrumental in designing the first hand-held undersea magnetometer.

After graduating in Chemistry from Franklin and Marshall College in 1937, Pete taught Chemistry at Northwestern University for two years, and then joined the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. While at the Survey from 1939 to 1946, he mapped geologic quadrangles, he developed information on the State's mineral resources, he completed a Ph. D. in two years at Johns Hopkins University under the direction of the world-class structural geologist, Ernst Cloos, he served as the Pennsylvania Survey's chief of strategic mineral investigations during World War II, he was Geologist for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (7 railroad tunnels were converted to vehicular traffic under his watchful eye), and he was consultant to mineral exploration companies in South Africa and the Ryuku Islands. During this time he also became an authority on predicting landslides. Any one of these assignments would have been a full-time job.

In 1946, he left the Pennsylvania Geological Survey to found the Department of Geology at Franklin and Marshall College. There he assembled a strong group of faculty and over the next 11 years, they developed a rigorous program, unusual for its day, of requiring not only a great deal of fieldwork but also chemistry as background for geological studies. Quoting from Donald U. Wise (one of Foose's students at F & M, who later became a Professor at F & M, and for 21 years has been a Professor of Geology at UMass): "Pete had a very practical approach to everything and instilled a confidence in all of his students that they could do almost anything they set their mind to. He made it almost a religion to look out for his students in terms of jobs and graduate school." While at F & M, Pete spent four years as Geologist for the Military Geology Branch of the U. S. Geological Survey. He won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Rangoon, Burma in 1950 and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to Stanford University in 1955-56. And it was in the late 1940s that Pete began a life-long consulting relationship with the Hershey Foundation of Pennsylvania. For more than 42 years he was involved with their problems related to building foundations, sanitary landfill sites, water pollution, and surface collapse. In 1955, he got an NSF grant for the study of structural geology of the Beartooth Mountains, Montana; this resulted in his most quoted publication on the origin of those mountains.

Though Pete left F & M in 1957, his influence lingered, and in the 1980s that school and Amherst were two of the top three colleges in the United States in numbers of graduates in Geology moving ahead to complete a Ph. D. program. The third was Williams.

In 1957 Pete Foose joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI). There he created the department of Earth Sciences and was its first chair. Most of his assignments with SRI led to study in western Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South Africa, Morocco, central and southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and the Hawaiian Islands. The exhilaration of travel was a fringe benefit he greatly enjoyed, especially with his wife Dottie. During his time at SRI, he was Consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in 1959 he served as a member of the technical working group at the discussions with the Soviets in Geneva on nuclear testing. In 1960 he testified before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the U.S. Congress. He developed friendships with Soviet geologists that carried through into the 1980s. He left SRI in 1962 and accepted an NSF senior post-doctoral fellowship to study the role of vertical tectonics in crustal deformation at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Technical Institute) at the University of Zurich. From there he came to Amherst College.

Pete was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geographical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a distinguished lecturer for the American Geological Institute five times. He prepared more than 50 unpublished _ consulting reports for some 20 corporations in the U.S. and abroad. He was associate editor with the American Institute of Mining Engineers and with the American Geological Institute. He gave the keynote address at a NATO symposium on the "Geology of the Mediterranean Basin" in 1982. In 1984 he was invited to participate in formal meetings of the 27th International Geologic Congress in Moscow, USSR.

Pete Foose brought to Amherst College a wide and varied professional background, as well as a keen interest in the development of undergraduate students. This combination enabled him to attempt to reestablish geology at Amherst on a level commensurate with the College's long and distinguished history of the subject. We salute his distinguished career and his many achievements.

Respectfully submitted:

Duane W. Bailey    
Edward S. Belt, Chair    
Gerald P. Brophy    
John Lancaster    
James G. Mauldon