Memories of Walter Pitman, by Jim Hays
Walter Pitman was a friend, colleague and collaborator. We became friends as graduate students in the early 1960s and remained friends for the rest of his life. I remember Walter as a kind-hearted man who, above all loved Lamont, and repeatedly thanked his “lucky stars” that he ended up here. He often told the story of his arrival at Columbia with the ambition of earning a PhD in physics, only to be told by Polykarp Kusch, a Nobel Lauriat in the Physics Department, that he would be better off setting his sights on a degree in geophysics. Kusch referred him to Jack Nafe, a Geology Department professor. Jack Nafe encouraged Walter to spend the better part of a year at sea working as a technician running the Vema’s magnetometer. This turned out to be a life changing experience for Walter and one that he often recalled with pleasure and pride. By the end of the cruise Doc Ewing had made him Chief Scientist and the study of ocean floor magnetic anomalies led to a distinguished career to which he made many important contributions.
Walter was an urbanite and delighted in the excitement of urban life. His fondness for New York City, its restaurants and museums, especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was well known to his friends. Walter also developed considerable skills as an artist and excellent paintings by him hung from the walls of his apartment. He once said if he hadn’t become a scientist he would have been an artist.
While his science focused on physics and what can be learned about earth processes using physical techniques, the world of wild nature was of less interest to him. I recall having lunch with Walter at the Turning Point, a Piermont restaurant with an upper porch overlooking Piermont’s store-lined main street. Behind the stores, on the far side of the street, is a service road. On this occasion, as Walter and I were having lunch, I looked across to the service road and there to my surprise ambled a bear. I turned to Walter and said “look Walter there is a bear”. He looked at me skeptically as if to say “... tell me another one” but I persisted urging him to look. Walter finally relented and turned his head toward the service road. He looked startled and turned back to me and said “you’re right, there is a bear and it’s loose”.
One of Lamont’s many attractions for Walter were scientific discussions over lunch in the cafeteria. It was such a discussion that led to a paper we wrote together in 1970. I had been thinking about close of Cretaceous mass extinctions and wondering if the withdrawal of the epicontinental seas at that time might have caused a climate change that had ecological consequences. Walter was measuring ocean floor spreading rates and their effect on oceanic ridge volumes. We speculated over lunch one day if such oceanic ridge volume variations could have caused the advance and eventual retreat of Cretaceous seas. Walter went back to his office and made some preliminary calculations that showed they could. His part of the paper has held up with time while my part hasn’t but what was important to Walter was the mixing of ideas over lunch.
For most of his career he taught at Columbia, both in the Geology department later Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, as well as in the School of International Affairs. He was keenly interested in education and served for years as an undergraduate advisor.
During my last visits with Walter at the nursing home in Riverdale we would sit on the terrace overlooking the Hudson River and he would look down-river to the Manhattan skyline and talk about the city where he had lived for most of his adult life and where his daughter Amanda still lives. Then he would turn and point up-stream and say ”. …. beyond that point is Lamont, how are things at Lamont?”