The candor of a friendship
I first met Walter Pitman long ago, in 1980. It was during a visit to Lamont with my wife Rita. I had just been awarded with a one-year scholarship to study magnetic anomalies in the Red Sea, supervised by John LaBrecque. At that time, Walter was already a superstar in the firmament of the founding fathers of plate tectonics.
When we arrived he was just then starting one of the first studies on what would become a fundamentally important theme, global sea level change: another great intuition on what are the key processes that govern the planet. He was once again innovator and forerunner of studies that would involve, even up to today, hundreds of researchers.
Walter was a very special person. We would meet every day and during pauses, typically coffee breaks, we would chat, very soon becoming friends. We were all like a big family, in Walter Pitman’s “magnetism” department, with John LaBrecque, Steve Cande and the many researchers that frequented it.
I can still vividly recall Walter’s second daughter, Amanda, who would often come to Lamont with him. We soon started to see each other out of working hours, during the weekends, often in his New York apartment, sometimes at our place. The evenings were always pleasant and relaxing. I fondly remember our first Thanksgiving together, in his apartment with all his relatives and a big turkey placed on the center of the table.
Walter was not only a great scientist, as evidenced by his numerous great scientific contributions, but he was truly a great and unique man, with many qualities that are rarely found just in one person alone. Not only for his acute intelligence and great ability to synthesize difficult scientific concepts, but he was a most generous man, profoundly honest and with an absolutely uncommon vitality, always smiling and always ready with an easy joke. He was an acute observer, enthusiast and curious towards all new things, and it was just so pleasurable to spend time with him.
He was famously known for his great and disinterested generosity, which often concretized not only with psychological support to his students, but at times even economical if needed. Not only his heart was open and generous, but his house too, as he loved to be surrounded by friends in the “Pitman Hotel” as he called it, his house, which he would graciously open if somebody needed to stay in New York. He had so many friends that loved to spend time with him that the Pitman Hotel needed to be reserved months in advance! Another well-know story about Walter’s generosity is about a homeless man that stationed himself on Broadway, near Walter’s house. Walter always treated him as a friend, almost as if he adopted him, and every time he would meet him he would help him. After some years Walter met this same man again, dressed in a much better way. The man invited him in a small shop to offer Walter an ice cream: that shop was this man’s dream activity that he built with the generosity of people like Walter.
After our first visit in 1980 we came back to Lamont for a longer stay from 1989 to 1991, as I was following a Master’s of Arts program at Columbia University in marine geophysics. This time with firstly our son Rodolfo and then Costanza who was born there. Walter was more than a friend to us, he was family, and he became Rodolfo’s and Costanza’s “adoptive” uncle.
Walter came many times to visit us in Bologna, in Italy. During one of his trips, around 1995, Rodolfo set up and “interview” with him, which we recently found on an old cassette tape, and Walter gladly played along.
A very fond memory is a long trip that we did in Central Italy, to show him the non-touristic but beautiful side of Italy.
He was enthusiastic to visit places like Urbino, with its court from the Renaissance, or Gubbio, a city still frozen in the Middle Ages.
Ours was a beautiful friendship that will forever bring warmth to my heart. To me, Walter represented all the positive values that make the Unites States a great country: strength, honesty, selflessness, intelligence and determination.
We lived our friendship with candor. Walter was an exceptional man even in every day’s normality.
(Nevio Zitellini)