Walter Clarkson Pitman III
1965 was the year that I discovered the United States, through Marshall Kay, by attending Bob Jastrow’s Goddard Conference on Continental drift. Marshall took me up to Lamont and introduced me to Walter Pitman who spent several hours patiently showing me and explaining the details of Eltanin 19 and its implications for the evolution of the oceans. I was transfixed by the science and the simmering excitement of Walter. Thus began my forty four year friendship with a man in whom were rolled up the best traits of humankind; sympathy, empathy, and love for his fellow man, kindness, patience, loyalty, generosity, forgiveness, curiosity, honesty, principled, seriously cleverness, profound originality, humour, and simply being great fun to be with. He was a gracious, polite, and undemanding man who I never heard say a bad word about anyone.; he always thought the best of people. He had a big brain that he used for great science and to help others. He had, to my knowledge, only one weakness. He was unable to pass a candy store without purchasing and consuming a large Hershey Bar. His love of a Dewars and soda was only slightly less. He had the curiosity and courage to switch from what he described as an office life in a Brooks Brothers suit working his way up the building floors, like Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment, to technician on a Lamont research vessel.
Over the years, I derived enormous pleasure from our giving dozens of three-day courses around the world, mostly to petroleum and mining companies, on tectonics and sedimentary basins, with which we incorporated one week field trips. We visited many exotic places in various seasons of the year and indulged our love of skiing and my love of cricket, which Walter found boring and incomprehensible (John-how can you have a game that lasts five days; the English are a seriously weird race). I teased Walter on his skiing style learned on the Dartmouth Skiway, which we entitled “the water-closet crouch”.
My times staying with him in his apartment on Claremont Avenue in New York were a joy. We spent a lot of time walking the City, visiting not a few bars and pizza joints, spending much time in art galleries and museums, eating at Henry’s on Broadway and Tony’s Italian Kitchen on 79th, and evenings at the Met. Walter’s kindness and generosity were expressed in the number of twenty dollar bills that he distributed to down and outs on the streets of New York. We discussed almost everything that we humans worry about. Walter was a dedicated New Yorker. One afternoon he said stop John, close your eyes, listen and smell; I will never forget the completely distinctive sound and smell of New York. In the culinary arts, Walter was a genius at the “Meatloaf” for which he must have had hundreds of variations, and a multitude of fish recipes for which we bought at the wonderful Fulton Street fish market. We enjoyed our morning run on the Westside running track; I was very quick over a quarter mile while Walter was a measured distance runner. He caught me at three quarters of a mile then steadily pulled away. As I finished the prescribed two miles, he was sitting on a bench reading the New York Times. He would smile and mutter about hares and tortoises. However I paced myself, I could never beat him over two miles or longer. This may be a parable for the way in which we did science.
In 1970, I could no longer resist the intellectual pull of the United States. I came to Albany and had a wonderful University and family life in which Walter played an avuncular role with our children Ann and Jonathan. Working with Walter on a wide variety of projects was a productive delight; we both valued data as sacrosanct, and ideas tested by kinematic modelling. We worked in the early 1970’s, with Bill Ryan and Jean Bonnin, to explain the Mesozoic-Cenozoic evolution of the Alpine orogenic system. Walter and I spent some ten years thinking about sea level change and concluded that apart from the big fast changes by the accumulation and melting of ice, sea level change is a very complicated random walk caused by the interference of a large number of tectonic mechanisms against a background of changes caused by long term variations in sea floor spreading rates. Bill Ryan and Walter subsequently investigated catastrophic sea level change in their brilliant analysis of the Noarchian Flood in the Black Sea. In our work on the Pennsylvanian basins of the continental United States Walter did all the backstripping and thermal modelling.
Walter educated me in so many ways and taught me two fundamental truths about the United States of America, which are “for all its faults, and in spite of its occasional extreme political aberrations, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court always pull the Nation back to the central ground, and that the US is still the best place in the world to do science, to bring up a family in freedom, to fail, and to succeed, With Bill Ryan and Celal Sengor, Walter became one of the greatest and truest friends of my life. I can close my eyes, see him in “The Chair” and hear his measured tones saying” John, what do you think about….? As did many others, I loved him deeply, find it hard to think of him as departed, mourn him, think of him a lot, and will remember him always as a great scientist and human being full of love and inner peace.
John Dewey
Oxford
March 2020