In Memory of Clemens A. Nelson, 1918 – 2004

Clemens Arvid Nelson, professor emeritus of geology, died after a brief illness on March 3, 2004, in Bishop, California, at the age of 85. Clem was a renowned paleontologist specializing in trilobites, meticulous stratigrapher and participant in refining the Early-to-Middle Cambrian boundary, superb field geologist and author of geological maps, dedicated and inspiring teacher of both his students and his colleagues, and friend and helper to everyone in need.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on November 26, 1918, Clem was the only son of a family of six children born to Swedish parents Arvid and Olga Nelson. He studied geology in his home town’s twin city of Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota and obtained the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941 and that of Master of Science the following year. Clem then worked briefly for the United States Geological Survey. That institution and he seem to have agreed with each other, because he continued his connection and kept producing impeccable geological map quadrangles under the Survey’s imprint throughout his career. Late in 1942 he joined the United States Navy and served throughout World War II until his discharge at the rank of Lieutenant in 1946. He immediately returned to his Alma Mater as a student and half-time Instructor.

Early in the Summer of 1948, Clem had almost finished his doctorate and was recruited for the post of Instructor and Lecturer by Cordell Durrell, chairman of the Department of Geology at the Los Angeles campus of the University of California. His employment was to start with the Fall semester. At that critical time Clem’s mother died, and the thesis was not finished in time. The UCLA Department came through with the job anyway, and Clem started teaching. His thesis “The Cambrian Stratigraphy of the St. Croix Valley” (a region straddling the Minnesota-Wisconsin border), was accepted by the University of Minnesota in 1949. Portions of it saw publication in 1951, in the Journal of Paleontology.

Promotions at the University of California were, and still are, granted only slowly and after painful scrutiny. On the occasion of Clem’s proposed advancement from Instructor to Assistant Professor in 1949, his chairman, still Cord Durrell, mentions in a letter to the University President that despite a heavy teaching load the candidate had started field work to re-investigate the Type Middle Cambrian Section in the Inyo Mountains of California, where no new work had been done for over fifty years. This must have impressed President Sproul, because Clem entered the Tenure Track as Assistant Professor, Step I, in the Fall of 1950. Tenure and Associate Professorship came in 1958 and Full Professorship in 1964.

Some professors must, beyond their teaching and research, also become administrators—Clem was chairman twice from the Fall of 1966 to that of 1969, and again from 1970 to 1972. From 1975 to his retirement in 1987 Clem served as Undergraduate Advisor, guiding and inspiring his department’s younger students to navigate the bureaucratic maze of formal requirements and prerequisites to those requirements, but also, and more importantly, to learn and to enjoy learning. He also took many generations of undergraduates to the crowning course of their curriculum, “Advanced Field Geology,” run from a field camp on either the eastern or the western slopes above Owens Valley near Big Pine, “God’s Own Country” as he used to call it. He made them work long, hard days, and most of them loved it. Clem was a wise and fatherly advisor to the students he led to their Master’s and Doctor’s degrees.

Clem held rather progressive views on many social issues—though the original motivation probably came from his wife Ruth, Clem was an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, long before it was widely adopted or “politically correct.” His was one of the earliest voices that set us on the path of equal opportunity for women students and faculty, a long tradition of which the UCLA Department of Earth & Space Sciences is justifiably proud.

Clem and Ruth came to the Owens Valley in 1987, after his retirement from UCLA. Ruth died in 1989, but Clem stayed active in the geology of eastern California and was a remarkable source of support for younger generations of geologists working in the White-Inyo Range. For many years he led interested parties on trips into his favorite country, especially Poleta Folds and Papoose Flat. Clem kept up on new research and often asked, “Did you see that new paper by so-and-so?” in a tone that led one to believe that he was skeptical about that particular paper. As he aged he was less able to get off trail or up into the high country of the White Mountains, but he was always willing to take a drive and point at things from the roadside. He showed keen interest in any new results, whether they be mapping, geochronology, or structural geology. His maps truly inspired generations of geologists to work in eastern California.

A gathering of family, loved ones and friends was held for Clem on Sunday, March 28, 2004, at the University of California White Mountain Research Station in Bishop, California. Clem is survived by three sisters, his children James, Jack, and Peggy Nelson, seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Donations in honor of Clem’s name and his love of education may be made either to the “UC Regents, C.A. Nelson WMRS Fund,” White Mountain Research Station, 3000 E. Line Street, Bishop, CA 93514—this fund has been established to support student research in the early Earth’s history of the White-Inyo region; or to the UCLA Foundation/ESS “Clem Nelson Summer Field Scholarship Fund,”—these should be sent to UCLA Earth & Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567.

Memories of Clem Nelson Shared

Many friends and colleagues sent expressions of condolence and appreciation for Clemens Arvid Nelson (1918-2004), both to the White Mountain Research Station and to the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences. Presented here are some of their recollections that have been shortened, slightly edited, and put into more-or-less chronological order.

George Gryc (United States Geological Survey, Menlo Park) got to know Clem as a fellow undergraduate at the University of Minnesota:

We lived across town in St. Paul, Minnesota and we went to rival high schools—Clem to Johnson and I to Humboldt. Clem loved and played baseball. I have the impression that Clem’s family was very supportive of his going to college but of modest means and standing, as was mine. We became friends, and both of us commuted with our lunch bags to the University. Although the costs were then low in comparison with today, so were available funds. Different from resident students, for us family and neighborhood friends continued to be a large part of our daily life. Clem and I had a lot in common, and we were good friends through undergraduate and graduate days.

Clem was an avid and intellectually curious student. His interest in geology was developed and grew at the University. Perhaps Dr. John Gruner’s month-long Black Hills field course started Clem’s love for the field. You had to supply your own transportation, and fortunately I had managed to buy a Model A Ford Roadster. So Clem, fellow classmate Paul Hesse, and I took the Model A to the field. It was a great field car; good clearance and visibility, but a little crowded for three. Clem and I were field partners. We took turns on the plane table that had to be protected from friendly antelope who liked to rub on the tripod. The $12.00 to replace one tire strained our finances, but it was a great summer.

As graduate students, Clem and I ventured out one more time in the Model A. Clem was to do a sedimentary analysis on a pre-Cambrian conglomerate in the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in northeastern Minnesota, where I had just spent a the summer mapping for my Master’s thesis. I had mapped the reservation that summer, so I knew where to go for the best exposures. I was still in good shape and led Clem off at a fast pace, crashing through the brush. He later described that experience as trying to follow a bull moose.

Pete Palmer (Geological Society of America, Boulder) joined Clem at Minnesota as a graduate student in the late 1940s:

When I first met Clem, he and his wife Ruth already had several children, and he used to kid me about still remaining single. We both spent our lives working on Cambrian geology and had frequent contacts over the years. Clem did his Ph.D. on trilobites from the Upper Mississippi Valley, starting under the guidance of Clinton Stauffer and finishing under that of Charlie Bell. I continued as a paleontologist, but Clem’s real love became field work. He made his major contributions to mapping and stratigraphy involving the rocks of the White-Inyo region, however, and established the formational nomenclature for the Lower Cambrian of that region that is still in use.

Clem was always available to take colleagues, visitors, and participants in geological conferences on field trips to demonstrate the Lower Cambrian stratigraphy of western Nevada and California. Clem was guiding me and, I believe, Pete Rose on a tour of Lower Cambrian localities and drove us down a hairy, steep one-way jeep track in Nevada’s Silver Peak area, when we told him to drive carefully, considering the 17 dependents we had between us.

In the late 1960s riot years, I had grown a bushy beard (it lasted 9 months), and Clem had put on a bit of weight and given up his customary crew cut for a curly marcelled hairdo. In the exhibit area of a GSA meeting, we happened to stand side by side and only recognized each other by our badges.

Anthony C. Runkel (Chief Geologist, Minnesota Geological Survey, St. Paul) had only one opportunity to meet Clem personally, on a class field trip to Death Valley:

Even though the meeting was brief, it was clear that Clem’s capability for world-class research was equaled by his ability to teach. Clem made a substantial contribution towards understanding the Cambrian history of Minnesota and the surrounding areas. Under the tutelage of Charlie Bell in the late 1940s and early 1950s Clem produced a dissertation and contributed as sole or joint author on several publications that remain the most influential geologic syntheses of Cambrian rocks in the central part of North America. In fact, most of the stratigraphic contributions made by Clem and his fellow student Bob Berg continue to be used by mappers at the Minnesota Geological Survey to this day, a testament to Clem’s and his colleagues’ advanced thinking.

Don Carlisle, an emeritus professor at UCLA, found Clem to have actually preceded him in the Geology Department and talks about “Some good reflections on a steeper hillside:”

When Clem arrived at UCLA in 1948, a year earlier than I, almost all of the Geology faculty—Jim Gilluly, Cord Durrell, Bill Putnam, John Crowell, Joe Murdoch, George Tunell, Dan Axelrod, Willis (Parkey) Popenoe, Milton Bramlette and “the General” Ulysses S. Grant, III—were squeezed onto the top floor of Haines Hall on North Campus. It was a collegial and friendly place, and there just wasn’t much more room to be found at that time; Royce, Kinsey, Haines, Moore and Murphy Halls, Powell Library, and the Gyms were about it. The big gully running north-to-south through the whole campus was just being filled—much to the annoyance of some botanists and ornithologists—and Dickson Court east of the Flag Pole was still a stand-alone bridge.

In 1949, Clem and I were given adjacent half-offices and we shared our one telephone through a little square hole in the wall between. Maybe that was somehow symbolic; or had it been planned by John Crowell? As new lecturers, we did our share of TA work as well as teaching in undergraduate courses, but the field courses were a principal focus—in the Fall of 1949 we had seventy-seven (yes 77) students with four faculty in 102A, eighty-four with five faculty in Fall ’50, only sixty-three in Fall ‘51. With instructors like Jim Aitken, Dan Axelrod, Max Carman, Warren Hamilton, and Jerry Winterer, as well as John Crowell and Clem, there were lots of debates about details in wilderness areas—like those around the Encino Reservoir, now Woodland Hills, for example.

And as new faculty we were immediately recruited into Summer Field. In the summer of 1950, there were fifty-five students and five faculty under the exceedingly strict direction of John Crowell at the abandoned Mount Hope mining camp near Eureka, Nevada. We had a great time. In summer 1951, we moved north to the adjacent Mineral Hill Quadrangle with Clem in charge. That was a big operation with fifty-one of our students and another ten that we had invited from Pomona College—we didn’t like small numbers. Everything including the cookhouse and eatery as well as our own housing had to be erected under canvass. All supplies had to be brought in regularly by our camp manager in our own truck. Students had to have arranged themselves in groups of four, provide their own vehicles for transport to Nevada and within their own field areas—selected by lot—and somehow acquire shelter at our campsite, whether in tents or by wood and tar-paper. Clem did an absolutely marvelous job. Sure, many of the students were war veterans and happy to have a chance to learn and look forward to a good positions in the oil industry or elsewhere, but the cost to them was significant, including the opportunity-cost of lost summer employment. They wanted value and a reasonably enjoyable experience as well. Clem’s dedication, sincere interest in the students’ welfare, and a forever-sunny disposition made the whole thing work.

More than that, Clem was clearly central to the mapping of this pristine area with its strikingly different stratigraphic facies and a great, poorly-understood, overthrust fault. He was the paleontologist who had to teach not only the students, but also most of us who had forgotten what little we had ever known about Paleozoic animals, how to recognize the fossils, and how to use them as stratigraphic markers in a thick sequence of look-alike carbonates. He did this for three successful years.

Even more, as all of us have come to recognize, Clem was no slouch as a structural geologist either. I remember that I was quite convinced at one time that we were dealing with only a single thrust. Clem suggested there were two, but he didn’t push it. He was right! The evidence for that really came to light when, after many years when each of us had been stalking different game—different places, different parts of the world, different minerals—that Clem and I decided to just go back and straighten out a few kinks in our earlier mapping, reflect a little about the structure, and get Mineral Hill irrevocably concluded. It was Spring, my hay-fever was awful, but a truly remarkable thing happened. We got onto those ridges with considerable physical effort and—I will swear it—in those years that we had been away, perceivable topographic uplift had occurred in that very part of the Basin Range Province. Tectonic deformation and uplift, I maintain. And if you don’t believe it, go see for yourself. We found those side-hills distinctly steeper than they had ever been when we were younger! Thanks, Clem!

Gerhard Oertel came to teach at UCLA in 1960, and soon learned to appreciate his senior colleague:

Clem educated not only students, but also his colleagues; he did so at the daily lunch table, during departmental field trips, and most intensively as collaborator in joint scientific work. For a series of summers, I investigated the evidence for the internal deformation of the granitic Papoose Flat Pluton in the Inyo Mountains, work that would have been impossible without Clem’s help both in the field among the outcrops and sage brush and amid maps and field notes in his office. He also never resented a long drive to pick me up whenever a field traverse of mine ended far from my vehicle, say at the foot the eastern Inyo Mountain slope in Saline Valley. A friendly face and an ice-cold drink were certain to greet me at the precise meeting point.

It is an honor, but also a considerable burden to be chairman of an academic department. Faculty have two incompatible desires with respect to their department’s administration, they each want everything to run according to their own preferences, no matter what colleagues think or say, but they also want faculty meetings to last no more than an hour. Clem was chairman twice from the Fall of 1966 to that of 1969, and again from 1970 to 1972. His style of herding the faculty was as little dictatorial as is humanly possible short of complete chaos. We paid for that liberality by faculty meetings which often stretched into dinner time.

Wayne Dollase, another emeritus professor at UCLA, arrived in the Fall of 1966, when Clem was Geology Department Chairman:

In those early days the entire faculty regularly ate together in a 4th floor lunch room. I remember lively discussions which now and then had Clem at their center. Clem would often assert something and then offer to bet a nominal amount with anyone who disagreed. The disagreement might involve a sporting event, or some bit of geologic history, or simply trivia. He was once telling a story involving identification of a particular species of pine, and thinking his description in error, I called him on it. He immediately wanted to bet me that he was right, so we shook hands on a one dollar bet. This time I turned out to be correct and Clem, laughingly admitting that he had remembered incorrectly, cheerfully paid me the dollar.

Bill Schopf was hired shortly after I was, but was proposed for tenure earlier than I. Clem, as chairman, called me into his office and was obviously concerned that I not read some negative message into Bill's promotion occurring before mine. Though I had no problem with the timing, I was touched that Clem had such consideration for his junior colleagues.

Another event of the early days was the annual Departmental Picnic. This get-together always involved a baseball game often organized, and certainly participated in, by Clem. I recall that he was frequently the pitcher in these contests, and a highly competitive one at that. His baseball participation in his Summer Field course was equally fierce, especially when the game was against the “Santa Barbarians.”

Clem was a great teacher who was willing and able to give the introductory general geology course, which got the Department many of our students. He taught this course in many Quarters, and in one case taught the course twice in two consecutive hours. This, however, he regretted; he confessed that he was never quite sure whether he had already told something to the class in front of him or to the previous class.

Other important teaching contributions of Clem’s were his Poleta Folds field exercise and his renowned field trips. Clem recognized the importance, and the fun, of field excursions. Besides being the mainstay of our Summer Field Program, he organized trips to his own area of research in the White/Inyo mountains, and eagerly participated in those lead by others. His trips were often arduous but always highly informative and worthwhile. On these trips he particularly loved telling stories which poked a little fun at somebody getting the geology wrong, especially when that person happened to be a geophysicist.

Richard W. Hurst (PhD 1975, now of Hurst & Associates, Inc.) was a TA for Clem’s Introductory Geology course, and recalls:

Being fresh from New York, I knew little of California geography at the time, and the class had a required field trip—an all day jaunt through the Santa Monica Mountains, making stops at various locations set up by Clem. The day of the trip, all of the TAs appeared ready to go but there was no Clem. The time of departure passed and still no Clem. Finally, Gordon Moir who was the “senior” TA called Clem at home, only to find he was ill. The bus driver had the route set up by Clem, so we ventured off anyway, making stops that appeared appropriate.

Now what gets funny about this is we had the same cast of characters the following quarter, Winter 1971. The day of the field trip came, and guess what, no Clem. Once again, he was ill.

The story might end here, but it does not. In the Spring, we once again met for the field trip and, to our surprise, along came Clem walking up to the bus. Of course he got ribbed about actually showing up, to which he responded, “You’re not going to believe this, but I have to pick up someone at the airport, so you guys need to lead the trip.” I can still remember his face, trying to control his laughter, talk to us over our laughing, and quell our disbelief.

He never lived it down, but boy did I enjoy being a TA under him and going on field trips to the White Inyos/Sierra Nevada. Clem Nelson had a great sense of humor and a warm, encouraging nature that will be missed.

Allen Glazner (PhD 1981, now at the University of North Carolina) so much liked field work in the White and Inyo Mountains that he regularly returned and took his students there:

As Clem became less able to get off trail or up into the high country of the White Mountains, he remained willing to take a drive and point at things from the roadside. He showed keen interest in any results that my students or I extracted from the rocks. One time in 1999, when he accompanied me to Little Poleta, where I was soon to take my class, he brought along his rolled-up original map of the area, “The Truth,” as he called it. We stopped and stood by the car while he waved his arms at the rocks and explained the structure. After a while we got back in and took off to Westgard Pass. A little later I noticed something bouncing along the road in my rear-view mirror; it was The Truth, which I had left on top of the car. I shudder to think of the consequences of letting it get blown away. I now have a digital copy tucked away in a safe place.

Last year my colleagues and I proposed, on the basis of two offset dike swarms, the hypothesis that a large right-lateral offset has occurred across Owens Valley. Clem, ever the skeptic, wanted to see the evidence for himself. After some prodding I sent maps of the key areas, one near Independence and the other in the Coso Range, to guide him, and Cecil Patrick his geologic adventure companion, to the outcrops. I don’t know whether they ever did get down to the Coso Range. No matter; Clem knows the answer now.

Steve Richardson (BS 1982, now of Richardson Consulting, Inc.) tells us:

I will always remember Clem’s enthusiasm for life and geology and I appreciate the positive impact Clem had on me in stimulating my interest in geology. It started in the classroom, but Clem’s greatest impact was out in the field. I was always amazed at Clem’s physical endurance, not to mention those mighty calf muscles, as I struggled to keep up with him during Summer Field in 1981. I am even more amazed now, as I get older.

Summer Field would not be Summer Field without softball, and Clem’s prowess as a softball pitcher cannot go unmentioned. Clem’s outstanding arm allowed us to hit many a homerun over the bathrooms, and—if memory serves me—beat the USC Summer Field team in the process.

Clem’s sense of humor lives on as I have attempted to retell his infamous campfire jokes, but I never seem to get the strong reaction that I remember those jokes getting when Clem would tell them!

Steve Lipshie (PhD 1984, now at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works) was a student at UCLA long enough to thoroughly study the characters of both faculty and fellow students:

Clem had a longstanding wager with John Christie about the existence of the Loch Ness monster. It was an annual contest, in which Clem won if, in the view of a specially appointed committee, the year produced more evidence against the “monster’s” existence, and John if the preponderance of evidence favored its existence. If John won, he would receive a bottle of Glen Livet whisky; if it was Clem, he would get a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. John usually had to deliver, but once the committee decided in his favor.

Clem was superb at talking people out of trilobites, but he never made them wagers in a bet. Over the years I heard from a number of former UCLA students who went on field trips to trilobite localities in the White-Inyo Range with Clem. Whenever they had found a particularly nice specimen, Clem would gently but effectively wheedle it from them for the UCLA collection. I recall that in the 1970s a fellow (not affiliated with UCLA, I believe) found a particularly large and well-preserved trilobite while hiking up a wash in Nevada. The man showed it to Clem at some point, and he told Clem that he planned to build the trilobite-bearing block into a fireplace he was going to build. Clem worked on the man for many months, offering him a painted cast of the specimen for his fireplace if he would donate the original to UCLA. After a long and unrelenting campaign, Clem finally wore down the man’s resistance, and the specimen ended up in the UCLA collection. To paraphrase Will Rogers, Clem never met a trilobite he didn’t like. And his fondness for the creatures made him a world expert on Cambrian trilobites.

Clem was quite a raconteur. He had an extensive repertoire of stories, some of which were rather long and involved and others of which hinged on terrible puns. Perhaps the most memorable were the “General Custer” and “Ernie” stories. The former even inspired a painting, which hangs in Clem’s office at the White Mountain Research Station. My favorite, though, was the “Ernie” story, which I probably heard Clem tell at least twenty times. And each time it was different; the differences made it as enjoyable on the twentieth telling as on the first.

As a teacher, Clem had a unique rapport with the students. He was the only professor at UCLA (or anywhere else that I’ve been) whom the undergraduates universally called by his first name. An impressive number of former students (more than thirty years’ worth!) look fondly back on their summer field camp that they spent with Clem, whether it was at Poleta or, in earlier years, in Nevada. I've talked to geologists who had summer field with Clem in the early 1950s and in the 1980s, and they all have fond recollections. Amazingly, even those who hated summer field camp at the time look nostalgically back on their days in Clem’s company.

During his years at UCLA, Clem acquired a certain renown for his bold (some might say wild) driving. People who are familiar with the road up to Papoose Flat may recall the tight hairpin curves on the stretch of road that climbs up to the plateau. Clem is the only person that I know who could negotiate those switchbacks during the descent in a carryall without having to back up on each switchback. He did this by driving faster than I had the nerve to do, so that when he made the sharp turn, the rear end of the vehicle would “fishtail” and slide around the hairpin bend, thus reducing the effective turning radius. I’m sure that every student who rode with Clem to Papoose Flat still remembers the experience—and the adrenaline rush on the ride down.

Rick Law (Virginia Tech) knew Clem mostly after he had established Bishop as his retirement home:

From 1990 through 2004 Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina placed a series of MS and PhD students in the White-Inyo Range and eastern Sierra Nevada for their research fieldwork. All of these students began their research projects by spending time in the field with Clem, either looking directly at their assigned field areas or being given a more general overview of the geology of the White-Inyo Range. Throughout their projects, Clem remained a constant source of sage geologic advice and enthusiasm, making his views well known when, on the occasional morning, students—and sometimes their advisors—were slow on leaving the Research Station for the field.

Although always encouraging the students in their research, Clem undoubtedly had mixed views on the projects that involved taking rock cores for anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility studies of the White-Inyo plutons. As good citizens, they tried to site their core holes away from regularly visited outcrops. On fieldtrips, however, Clem always had a knack for finding these drill holes and thoroughly chastising the guilty parties until they had plugged up the holes.

Clem was a valued resource for the 1999 University of North Carolina Burch Field Research Seminar. A dozen students and their advisor spent 12 weeks in Owens Valley, working on projects that were largely inspired by Clem’s maps. They mapped the Poleta Formation; they mapped the area around the Schulman Grove of bristlecone pines; they studied the geomorphology of the White Mountain escarpment; they studied the Waucobi lake beds. Clem was often around to lend advice and suggest new places to explore. At the end of the class students had a poster session to present the results of their independent research projects, complete with cash prizes, and Clem was the head judge.

Art Sylvester (PhD 1966, now on the faculty of the University of California Santa Barbara) points out:

Clem and Ruth were social activists, and this was passed on to his daughter Peggy, who is a legal champion for civil rights in a small community in New Mexico. At the Bishop memorial service, she read an eloquent letter that she had written to Clem in 2001; in it she had emphasized how the ideas instilled in her by her father motivated her to put them into actions.