Walter Pitman was part of the cohort of graduate students at Lamont Geological Observatory in the early 1960; a cohort that included me and many of the others who contributed to this tribute to Walter. Walter worked as a marine tech aboard the Lamont research vessel Vema before becoming a student and so was quite knowledgeable of the at-sea experience and also of the founders of Lamont. I got to know Walter when we were on the Southern Ocean research vessel, Eltanin cruise 20 in 1965. I remember he was often covered with grease as he fixed the air gun, which needed fixing a few times per week, on the Eltanin fan tail, where like the bow experienced near zero gravity as the ship pitched in the Southern Ocean waves.
It was on that cruise that a large Wandering Albatross hit the wire as I was towing in the mechanical bathythermograph (BT) near the ship’s fan tail. The poor bird was caught (killed) where the wire was linked to the BT. Walter, who was fixing the air gun, helped me bring in the Albatross, with the gear on the fan tail, as the weight was too much for the BT winch to bring it in. The Wandering Albatross had an 11.5 foot wing span, a record. I heard that albatross is at a museum in Wellington NZ.
After the cruise, back at Lamont, I remember when Walter came into my office, very excited, to show me a geomagnetic record, collected during Eltanin cruise 19, on which Walter also participated. On the light table he folded the paper record over to show the symmetry of the wiggles of the magnetic anomalies centered at the Pacific Antarctic Ridge or Mid-Ocean Ridge (MOR) in the South Pacific Ocean. It was a clear sign of sea floor spreading from the MOR. See: https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/events/plate-tectonics and https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/walter-pitman-smoking-gun-plate-tectonics. I said, unaware of the conflicts about of the validity of sea floor spreading theory in the early Lamont days, (after all I was just a physical oceanographer) ‘of course, what else would you expect’.
I stayed at his apartment near Columbia the night of 9/11, when the Columbia University garage where my car was parked, was locked. We had lots of wine.
Walter was a wonderful compassionate person, sharing, helped others. He set a high standard for Lamont researchers. He was a member of a Lamont society of retired (or should be retired) researchers, known as the OFC, who lunch (or more recently Zoom) together the first Wednesday of each month. He always had many stories to tell.
Arnold L. Gordon