Wednesday, May 13, 2009

R.I.P.

I was reading a recent copy of the alumni magazine that I get from Boston U. and keep stacked on the back of my toilet when I came across the sad news that Barry Cameron, one of my former geology professors, had died.

Of course, I know that they will all die sooner or later, and given the age differences most likely before me. Some quite likely may have died already. On a long enough time scale, everyone's life expectancy approaches zero. But this news was not what I was expecting to read and was not on my mind as I sat there reading. Like back in my student days, I wasn't really thinking much about the mortality of others.

Barry's obituary in the alumni magazine was written by a young undergraduate from the School of Communications who had obviously never met him - he left BU shortly after I graduated and probably before his memoirist was born. Her obituary mostly covered his resume, but she did at least try to inject a personal note, saying that "he was known for engaging students in his research projects," a safe bet for virtually any professor, especially in geology. I'd like to recall him a little more personally than that.

To be brutally honest, stately, plump Barry Cameron probably wasn't the most popular professor in the B.U. geology department of the 1970s. There was the youngest faculty member, Duncan Fitzgerald, "Funky Uncle Dunky," "The Wreck of the Duncan Fitzgerald," a coastal geologist and a student of the infamous Miles Hayes - if you took courses with Duncan, you got to hang out at the beach for your field work and cruise around in boats. There was my major professor, Dee Caldwell, the son of author Erskine Caldwell (although you quickly learned not to bring that name up in his presence) - a quirky, dry-humored hydrogeologist who led notoriously boozy glacial geology field trips up in Maine - we once climbed Mount Katahdin together with major hangovers. And then there were the enigmatic Egyptian mineralogist Mohammed "Ed" Gheith, and the scholarly professor of petrology, structural geology and other mind-bending courses, Art Brownlow, the most academic and senior of the staff.

And then there was Barry. He taught paleontology, stratigraphy and sedimentology, the so-called "soft-rock" courses that weren't as sexy as the hard-rock science of Drs. Gheith and Brownlow, but required learning for careers in petroleum geology. He cared passionately about the subject, though, as well as the Paleozoic, so-called Trenton limestones of upstate New York, and he led us on these bewildering field trips to look at one nearly-identical limestone outcrop after the other down the length of the New York State Thruway. This being the 70s, we carried CB-radios in our vans on these trips, and his well-chosen "handle" was the "Limestone Cowboy."

But most notoriously, Barry smoked these awful-smelling little Parodi cigars. They grossed us all out, and their scent lingered in the basement hallways of the graduate students' offices for hours. You always knew when Barry had been by just by the lingering sickly-sweet aroma of Parodi and after an hour in his presence, the smell would cling to your clothes for days.

But he was an easy-going and unassuming man, not at all pretentious, and thus an easy target for our cruel little jokes. But our teasing overlooked that he was also one of the kindest and most generous of the faculty, willing to spend countless hours with his students until they finally "got" what they hadn't understood before. But in the shallowness of our youth, we mistook his generosity of time for a lack of anything better to do, and vowed that we'd never become so strangely single minded.

Barry did his graduate study at Columbia University under Marshall Kay in the early 1960s. His Master's thesis was on the paleontology of the carbonate platform off the northeastern side of the Bahamas. Having studied the modern carbonates of the Bahamas, he was well prepared to address long-standing concerns regarding the nature of the lower Trenton Group of northwestern New York and southeastern Ontario. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he documented the depositional environments of the lower Trenton and the nature of the contact between the Trenton and the Black River Groups. He also documented the paleoecology of the Rocklandian, Kirkfieldian, and basal Shermanian stage limestones. "Limestone cowboy," indeed.

Even though he wasn't my thesis advisor, he was my undergraduate academic advisor, and immediately after I graduated, Barry gave me my very first job in geology - assistant teaching the Geology Summer Field Camp, an outdoor course required for all geologists that I had just taken the summer before. The picture of him above was taken during this course by one of the undergrad students who wrote the words "buffalo smiling" on the back - some now long-forgotten in-joke. But as I look at the picture now, I'm surprised to see that the Barry of 1979 was a man younger than I am today - the idea that someday I would actually be older the Barry never occurred to the self-involved graduate student.

Whenever I thought of the name "Barry Cameron," which wasn't often as I embarked on a career that eventually brought me down to Georgia as he left for Acadia University in Nova Scotia, the words "Parodis," and "limestone cowboy," and "buffalo smiling" would come to mind, and I know now that he had heard all of our little jokes behind his back and didn't mind, still selflessly endeavoring to train us for careers with Exxon and Amoco, at universities and geological surveys, for regulators and consultants. He was kind and sweet and gentle, and hardly any of us took time away from our self-involvement to really appreciate him.

Dr. Barry Winston Cameron passed away on August 16, 2008.

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