AASP Primary Records Program

A CAREER IN PALYNOLOGY
W. W. Fairchild

I was born in March, 1929 in Cranford, New Jersey, far from the oil patch, but by about age ten had developed an interest in mineral collecting. Soon I was saving my allowance to send off for 25 cent "grab-bags" of small specimens and enduring my dad's taunts about the company receiving the order calling out "Hey, Joe, go sweep the floor again, we got another live one!" Nevertheless he did take me some of the famous localities in the area and my interest increased to the point where I decided to become a mining geologist. I went out to Missouri School of Mines (now the University of Missouri - Rolla) in the fall of 1947. A couple of years passed, during which I actually had the opportunity to visit several mines, and my illusions were quickly shattered by sloshing through drifts and stopes with a foot of water on the floor and cracked timbers above bearing chalked warnings such as "nearer my God to Thee". About that time I took my first course in paleontology, taught by the charismatic micropaleontologist Don L. Frizzell and soon fell in love with fossils, especially the Foraminifera which were his specialty.

After three years of Army service as a helicopter pilot I had to choose between flying (which I loved) and geology as a career. Stability won out over excitement and I enrolled in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley to work on forams under Robert M. Kleinpell. My first brush with palynology came in 1956 in Berkeley when I was interviewed by a representative of the Carter Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He asked if I would be interested in joining a recently formed group investigating the stratigraphic applications of fossil pollen, spores, and other organic-walled microfossils. Jane Gray was then a Ph.D. candidate in the paleontology department and frequently bugged me to look through her microscope at the objects of her interest, but I was never able to work up much interest in palynomorphs, considering them much less beautiful than my forams. I declined the offer and after completing the M.A. in the spring of 1957 accepted a job with the Standard Oil Company of Texas in Houston. There I spent three years in the laboratory and at well sites both on and offshore "picking tops" until in 1959 I was asked to become a palynologist.

I am not sure which company was the first to open a palynology lab in the United States., but it may have been Shell Oil in Bellaire, Texas. Royal Dutch Shell was probably the first oil company to utilize palynology for the solution of stratigraphic problems, and their successes overseas led to the establishment of the Texas lab, which I believe was already in operation when I arrived in Houston in the spring of 1957. At the same time, research in palynology under the direction of Bill Hoffmeister was going on at Carter Oil in Tulsa, where William R. Evitt and Lewis. E. Stover began their distinguished careers in the field.

Word of the successful stratigraphic application of palynology by these scientists began to circulate, and other major companies were eager to join the bandwagon. Standard of California was among them, and in 1959 its research arm, California Research Corporation in La Habra, California, offered to train micropaleontologists from foreign and domestic operating company subsidiaries in the new discipline. The training program was to be directed by Dr. W. L. (Lu) Norem, a botanist with no geological training. Interested subsidiaries were invited to send representatives to La Habra for several months of "basic training", after which they were to return to their home companies and promptly solve all the correlation and dating problems.

My company was at that time heavily involved in the exploration of the downdip Paleocene-Eocene Wilcox group, and correlation of the thousands of feet of deltaic sands, shales, and lignites was exceedingly difficult. Our management decided to try palynology and I was selected to attend the course, primarily (I think) because money was tight and I, being the only single paleontologist, was much cheaper to send out than a married man and family.

It is difficult to realize now, but in those days very little was known about the ranges of palynomorphs other than those of the Carboniferous, which had been used in correlating coal seams in England. Lu Norem, with no knowledge of or interest in stratigraphy, simply set out on a table all the reference material he had and told us to get to work. We had each brought with us material collected from the part of the section posing problems in our home areas. These samples were processed (in a very primitive and ineffective way), and we set to work examining them. A good example of our abysmal lack of knowledge was a case in which one of my samples of supposed Eocene Wilcox lignite from a railroad cut near Milano, Texas yielded an excellent assemblage which looked to me very much like the Carboniferous miospores illustrated in some of our reference material. When I asked Norem about this he cautioned me that we really didn't know all that much about the ranges of such forms as Triquitrites, Tripartites, Densosporites, etc., and that these genera might very well range up into the Eocene! It was several years later that I realized I had inadvertently mixed in with my Wilcox lignites some Carboniferous coal fallen from passing trains!

We returned to our home companies, set up labs, processed samples, and went to work. Some of the projects were successful; others were not. A story circulated about how the Trinidad project was cancelled when, after a presentation in which results of a year's palynological work were reviewed by management, the head man dryly observed that by his calculations it would be 20 years before practical applications were forthcoming. The Wilcox project in our Houston lab also fared badly because thermal alteration of the palynomorphs in the downdip area of exploration interest rendered most of them unidentifiable.

The Wilcox project and Houston lab were shut down in 1962 and I was transferred to Amarillo, Texas to join Paul Nygreen and O.B. (Ben) Bourn in that office. I was charged with developing a zonation of the Early Paleozic pre-Woodford sediments in southeastern New Mexico. I worked for about a year dutifully recording and cataloging the abundant assemblages and wondering why there was so little change with depth until we finally got some core samples and I realized to my chagrin that almost all the forms I had seen were caving from the overlying Woodford and masking the relatively rare in situ palynomorphs.

In 1964 the Standard Oil Company of Texas decided to close its Amarillo office and move the personnel to Oklahoma City. I did not consider this a desirable move and accepted a job in Houston with what is now the Exxon Production Research Company.

Gene Borden, Bill Elsik, Dan Jones, Jim Morgan, and Joan Stough were at the lab when I was hired, and Bill Morgan, and Walter W. Wornardt. Arrived shortly afterwards. Joan may have been the first woman palynologist employed by an oil company ---- at least I can't think of another who goes back that far.

In retrospect, the years I spent at Exxon Research were the "glory days" of palynology. Almost every major oil company had its own lab and staff. Amoco Research in Tulsa was certainly one of the leaders, with many of its palynologists recruited from Sheffield University in England. The American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists, founded in 1967 by 31 of the "old-timers" in the field, grew rapidly, and many important papers began to appear in its journal. Policies on publication of palynological research varied from company to company, but in general publication was encouraged so long as it did not reveal any information on the ranges of fossils. Publication of papers describing new species and presentations at palynological meetings was certainly encouraged at Exxon Research. Several of the publications by my colleagues W. C. Elsik, L.. E. Stover, and me describe species known to us to be stratigraphically important, although we were not permitted to say so in print. Warren S. Drugg of the California Research Company confided in me that he had also selected for publication species with restricted ranges instead of other perhaps more striking but longer-ranging forms.

Like most industry palynologists of the time, I worked on various projects coming in from around the world: Alaska, Australia, South America and elsewhere. In the fall of 1965 I was asked to transfer temporarily to Imperial Oil in Calgary to work on cores from the Grand Banks. Jan Jansonius came down to Houston to take my place and I joined Frank Staplin and Stan Pocock in Canada. There I spent an interesting year. Frank and Stan were fun to work with and I found the atmosphere of the lab more relaxed than other places I had worked. It was on this project that I first became interested in dinoflagellates. Previously at Exxon none of us had paid much attention to the "hystrix", but study of the Grand Banks cores made it clear to me that dino species described in Europe were present in sediments of the same age on the Grand Banks. Returning from Canada, I began urging more research be done on this group and was given the job of studying the distribution of Tertiary dinoflagellates. At about the same time Swiss specialist Marcel Millioud was hired to study Mesozoic dinoflagellates.. Marcel, with his wry sense of humor, and I became great friends and had many spirited discussions about dinos, geology, and life in general.

A troublesome aspect of work in the research labs (at least at Exxon Research) was the conflict between actual research and the "service work" done for the various operating companies and billed to them. When service work was heavy we complained that no basic research was being done and longed for the day when the load would slacken and we could do some real research. When that day arrived, however, management urged us to drum up more service work to pay the bills. I remember one meeting in which our supervisor exhorted us to come up with some good new research ideas, ending his pep talk with the caution "just be sure they're going to work"!

In these days when "down-sizing" and job-hopping are the order of the day, it is hard to remember the old days in the oil business when loyalty to one's company was very strong and many professionals spent their entire career with a single company. There was also a strong element of collusion between competing major companies when it came to hiring. When I interviewed for a position with Exxon (then Humble) Research, the interviewer would not make a firm job offer or discuss a salary until I had phoned my boss at Standard of Texas (in his presence) to say that I was resigning. Only then did he say "we know what you make at Standard of Texas and we're going to pay you ten dollars a week more"!

Back then it was rare for a professional to be fired by a major oil company, but in 1972 Exxon Research asked me to "seek employment elsewhere" when for personal family reasons I declined to accept a permanent transfer to Imperial Oil in Calgary. Service work for operating companies had always been an important part of my job at Exxon Research and since family obligations made it impossible for me to accept a job outside Houston, I began to think about starting a consulting business. I knew that Robert Schudy had tried this, apparently with only partial success, but at that time (as far as I know) the only successful biostratigraphic consulting company in existence was Robertson Research in Wales. I knew that several of the better known palynologists in the academic world were doing some consulting on the side, but it seemed the time had come when a company offering complete biostratigraphic services to smaller oil companies could make a go of it. Besides, I really had no choice if I wanted to stay in palynology. I persuaded my friend and former Standard of California colleague, C. Rodman Pickett, also a palynologist and planktonic foram expert to join me and together we opened International Biostratigraphers Incorporated in 1972.

As in many new small businesses, the going was rough for several years and we were constantly out making new contacts and looking for work. Fortunately, by that time many of the geologists with smaller companies had spent time in the majors and understood how biostratigraphy could help their exploration programs, so we managed to keep the doors open. The turning point for International Biostratigraphers did not come, however, until 1976, when we were selected by a consortium of major companies to do the paleontological and palynological analyses of core samples from the Continental Offshore Stratigraphic Test B-2 well in the Baltimore Canyon, offshore Atlantic. Other C.O.S.T. wells and other offshore Atlantic ventures followed and we were kept busy for several years with this work and a contract with the Minerals Management Service for sample preparation.

In 1984 I sold my interest in International Biostratigraphers to my partner and moved to Taos, New Mexico, to enjoy life in the mountains. I continued to do some consulting, including at one point a project for my former competitor , Robertson Research, but the downturn in the industry and concomitant layoffs of palynologists resulted in more and more consultants slicing up a smaller and smaller pie. At present I am living in Longmont, Colorado, enjoying my family, a beautiful view of the Front Range, and the study of jazz piano. It has been a great life!