Three Stories about Walter Pitman, by Roger Buck
Since Walter loved to tell stories I’ll share a few little anecdotes about him. The first recounts a pithy evaluation of Walter’s work I heard several years before I met Walter. One summer while I was a graduate student I did an internship at the old Field Research Lab of Mobil Oil in Dallas. I worked for a wonderful fellow named Bill Burke whose background was in experimental atomic physics. Bill had worked for several decades doing carbon-14 dating but had recently been tasked with starting a group to model rifting and basin development. My job was to teach him about the tectonics of rifting, by writing summaries of all the recent papers in the field, while he was trying to study stratigraphy on his own. One morning I came into Bill’s office to find him in an uncharacteristically dark mood; he looked up from his reading and drawled “Goawd daaaamn it Roger, I can’t make heads or tails of the jargon these stratigraphers use, but this guy Pitman - I can understand him.”
Starting ten years later, when I was fortunate enough to have an office next to Walter, we would often go to lunch where I got to hear some of his famous sea stories or about new data supporting the Black Sea Flood. He would listen to my latest ideas about continental extension or magmatic diking at spreading centers. Walter was very encouraging if he thought the ideas made sense. But if my arguments got too involved he would give me a serious look and say “it can’t be that complicated, the Earth is simple.”
The last story relates to the way Walter chose a very different path from that taken by his conservative, anti-FDR father and that Walter had flashes of brilliance even as he was going down hill. On Election Day 2018 I went over to see Walter at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale after stopping off at to cast my ballot in Nyack. We went outside and enjoyed the view of the Hudson and I answered Walter’s questions about how things were going at Lamont and he asked me several times who the director was. As I was pushing his wheelchair down the hall someone who worked there, and who clearly liked Walter, asked him if he had voted. Walter had not voted, but he was registered to vote there, so we headed to the polling station. I was allowed to fill out his ballot after I read out the names and party affiliations. Walter always picked the most liberal candidate and when we were almost done he smiled and said, “my father is spinning in his grave right now.”