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XVI. Back on the Beach

THE CAMPUS

In the first chapter is a glimpse of the Scripps Institution in 1936 — the place that would launch a thousand trips. There were then about thirty people at the laboratory by the sea, in three main buildings. Today there are slightly more than a thousand people at Scripps Institution, located — when in port — in a myriad of buildings on the campus and in an assortment of off-campus locations from Sorrento Valley to Point Loma.

The physical changes on the campus were most dramatic during the 1950s, when oceanography was expanding. Prior to that the only extensive building project was the repair of the pier in 1946, when buildings and grounds superintendent Carl Johnson supervised the jacketing of the pier pilings with steel and concrete and the redecking of the structure. In 1950 the Aquarium-Museum was built, as well as the north garage and the west garage in the service yard. The purchasing and storehouse building was added in 1953. The first addition to Ritter Hall followed in 1956, and it turned the face of the campus toward the sea. The

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experimental aquarium building was built in 1958, and in 1959 the “cafeteria” — called the general services building, now New Scripps Building.

By then, the School of Science and Engineering had been established, and the new general campus was being planned. The “cafeteria” was preempted for the office of the first chancellor, Herbert F. York, plus the Director's office, other administrative offices, and some laboratories. (The lunch stand was added on the northeast corner of New Scripps Building in 1961.)

The peak year for building was 1960, when the second addition to Ritter Hall, and Sverdrup Hall and Sumner Auditorium were all completed. The occasion was acknowledged in a historical ceremony on 18 May 1961, at which the name plaques of each building were appropriately unveiled: Sumner Auditorium by Mrs. Francis B. Sumner, widow of the building's honoree; Sverdrup Hall by Mrs. Harald U. Sverdrup, widow of the building's honoree; New Scripps Building by Mrs. J. G. Johanson, niece of George H. Scripps; and the new wing of Ritter Hall by Mrs. W. W. Hawkins, widow of Robert P. Scripps.

The flat area of the campus was suddenly brimful of buildings. The internal roads were rearranged (which eliminated a particularly attractive planting of succulents on the turn to the library), and most of the old cottages on the south end of the campus were removed. Revelle apologized in May 1960 that “there has been dust, mud, dirt, noise and a general mess caused by construction for a long time,” even as he noted that the institution had to expand “in the national interest,” and predicted that “all the people of La Jolla very shortly will be proud of Scripps Institution.”^[1]

Perhaps to avoid the building confusion, more Scripps people than ever before went out to sea in 1960; nine major expeditions that year logged more than 90,000 miles, and

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for the first time Scripps ships entered the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

In 1962 a small building was constructed near the landward end of the pier, and later a 60-foot steel tower was added; this facility was used until 1971 by researchers from Berkeley and UCLA on sea-water conversion methods. In the basement of that building were stored the Scripps sea-floor rock samples. When the sea-water conversion project ended, Scripps researchers moved into the building, and in 1973 the Shore Processes Laboratory was built on its roof.

The only other addition on the flat area of the campus during the 1960s was the Physiological Research Laboratory west of the Aquarium-Museum in 1965. That group also built a facility to house dogs, horses, and sheep for research projects, just below radio station WWD in Seaweed Canyon^[*]

[*] Also called snake Canyon, or Rattlesnake Canyon, for obvious reasons.

(so named because city trucks dumped seaweed there from La Jolla Shores and Scripps beaches). The building of the “farm” in 1965 put an end to the seaweed dumping, and to other extramural activities in Seaweed Canyon, such as the dumping of garden trimmings by nearby residents, the pistol-practice range of the campus police, and an archery range.

The obvious direction for further expansion was up the slope. Walter Munk chose a scenic site there for the Scripps laboratory of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, built in 1963. The Hydraulics Laboratory, slightly uphill from IGPP, followed in 1964. It served first as an echoing setting for a lively farewell party for the Revelles; then the distinctive building with the wave-shaped roof was outfitted with a wave-and-tidal basin, a wind-wave channel, a wave-and-current channel, a granular fluid mechanics test facility, and a fluidizing channel.

During the 1950s and 1960s, various of the campus cottages were removed, and others were converted to offices

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and laboratories as the tenants moved off campus.^[*]

[*] The last tenants, George Bien and family, moved out of T-24 in 1969.

In 1951 a group of Scripps staff members purchased the 40 acres of land comprising Scripps Estates Associates on the canyon rim above the institution and developed it into 42 homesites and a privately protected coastal-canyon preserve.

The graduate students set up their social center in the late 1960s, when they were given the use of T-8, a one-story house at the south edge of the campus that had been purchased when the land for the south parking lot was acquired. The center at first was under the auspices of the Dean of Student Activities of UCSD, until 1968 when a Scripps Student Committee was formed. Students renovated the building, which they call Surfside, into a recreation center, with a ping-pong room, pool table, change room, and storage rack for surfboards. Volunteer labor, some funds from the office of Student Affairs, and proceeds from vending machines on campus made the renovations and recreation facilities possible. TGIF — the weekly beerbust — began at Surfside in January 1968. As the student committee reported to staff luncheon in September 1969: “The purpose of this party was to provide a friendly atmosphere where the entire SIO community could meet and get better acquainted. This party has been very successful.”

The uphill trend in construction has continued into the 1970s: the Deep Sea Drilling Building was completed in 1970, across La Jolla Shores Drive from the main campus; the Norpax building was completed in 1975, below the Fishery Oceanography Center (which was built by the federal government in 1964 and was renamed Southwest Fishery Center in 1970); the Carl Eckart Building to house the Scripps Library was completed in December 1976; and the Marine Biology Building was nearing completion at the close of 1976.

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The library had long outgrown its space, even after extensive remodeling in the mid-1960s provided to it the entire building, which had also contained, at various times, a museum, an auditorium, some non-library offices, the mail room, and the telephone switchboard (a lively social center in its day). From 15,000 volumes in 1936, the library holdings had increased by the end of 1976 to include: 113,608 bound volumes, more than 26,000 maps, 3,843 microforms, 20,611 reprints, 27,312 reports, documents, and translations, 5,753 serial titles, and 120 linear feet of historical archives. Of necessity, during the 1970s some volumes had to be stored in other locations, some in the basement of IGPP and others in buildings at Camp Elliott.

The first full-time professionally trained librarian for Scripps, Roy W. Holleman, began in September 1950, soon after the retirement of longtime librarian Ruth Ragan. Besides extending the oceanographic collections, Holleman in the latter 1950s began assembling an all-subject general library for UCSD. Joseph Gantner succeeded Holleman from 1963 to 1966, when he transferred to the upper campus. William J. Goff, then assistant librarian at Scripps, and holding master's degrees in both geology and library science, succeeded Gantner in 1967.

For many years the Scripps library has been distinguished by its broad coverage of ocean-related literature — and equally distinguished by the cheerful helpfulness of its staff.

One long-discussed construction project that has not come to pass is the “Scripps Island.” The concept of creating a unique replacement for the Scripps pier began in the early 1950s. The “Island” grew in conversation to incorporate a harbor, various underwater laboratories, aquarium facilities for research and holding purposes, data cables for relaying a number of continuous measurements, facilities

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for divers and their supplies, a sea-water intake, and more. Some hoped that the facility could provide for mooring the sea-going fleet. One of the earliest plans committed to paper was of a moderately small, crescent-shaped, rock island designed by Robert S. Arthur, Douglas L. Inman, and Admiral Charles D. Wheelock.

In 1964, shortly before leaving Scripps, Roger Revelle appointed a committee to consider the “Island,” which became formalized as first, the Offshore Research Facility, and later, the Experimental Inshore Oceanographic Facility. Early in 1967, through the Foundation for Ocean Research and the city of San Diego, funds were provided for preliminary design studies of a research platform. As William A. Nierenberg pointed out:

Whatever measurements one wants to make, whatever operations one would like to conduct, however one wishes to employ a man in the sea, the greatest fraction of the effort and the greatest source of danger is at the air-sea interface….We visualize an Island connected by causeway to shore sufficiently far out past the surf zone and that much closer to the canyon area, so designed with particular installations and instrumentation, that the problem of inserting a man or his equipment into the sea and retrieving them become relatively trivial operations, thus reserving the maximum of the effort for engineering or scientific work.^[2]

In November 1967, Robert H. Oversmith became the project engineer, and, with the engineering firm of Sverdrup and Parcel and Associates,^[*]

[*] Headed by Leif J. Sverdrup, brother of Harald U. Sverdrup.

he prepared a preliminary design of a horseshoe-shaped laboratory, 300 feet long and 200 feet wide, to be located adjacent to Scripps submarine

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canyon, and connected to shore by a 2,400-foot curved bridge. The regents of the university in 1969 approved the proposal for building the facility, and in 1972, the city of San Diego leased to Scripps a square mile of sea floor for the island. The construction was estimated at $18,600,000.

Some Scripps researchers were beginning to question the cost involved, especially in relation to the research benefits. A poll in 1972 showed that “only a very small fraction [of the Scripps staff] would make intensive use of the facility, two-thirds would use it only occasionally, if at all.” The “Island” was shelved. Douglas L. Inman, one of the early proponents, commented that “not building the island made us learn how to develop the technology of working in the open ocean, at which we have been very successful.”

THE ADMINISTRATION

Throughout the years of greatest expansion of the Scripps Institution, the dominant figure on campus was Roger Revelle, a man who has been described as physically and temperamentally designed for the study of the deep oceans. Physically he is big — six feet, four inches tall, and with oversized hands and feet. Temperamentally he is broad: he has a wide grasp of knowledge and assimilates material quickly. There is a quiet self-confidence about this big grave man, yet also humility, and he listens with interest and sympathy.

Revelle's history at Scripps, as noted throughout these pages, was a long one: from 1931 to 1964, from graduate student to director and dean.

He was born on 7 March 1909, in Seattle, where his father practiced law. When he was seven, the family moved to Pasadena, California. Revelle attended Pomona College in Claremont, where he intended to study journalism, but

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he was turned toward geology by Professor Alfred Woodford and went on to graduate work at Berkeley. Sea-floor cores that had been saved from the research ship Carnegie, which exploded in Samoa in November 1929, had been sent to Scripps Institution, which queried Berkeley for a geologist to help analyze them. Revelle was sent from Berkeley in 1931. La Jolla was, fortuitously, the birthplace of his bride, Ellen Clark — a great-niece of Ellen Browning Scripps — whom he had met while she was attending Scripps College, not far from his own alma mater. They were married in 1931.

After earning his Ph.D. at Scripps in 1936, with a dissertation on the Carnegie cores, Revelle spent a year in Europe, chiefly at the Geophysical Institute in Norway, and returned to Scripps as an instructor. In 1941 he became an assistant professor and joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, through which he was assigned to duty at UCDWR (see chapter 2). As he told it long afterward:

…a year and a half later [Commander Rawson] Bennett [head of the sonar design section of the Bureau of Ships] arranged for my transfer to Washington, ostensibly to the Hydrographic Office. Unfortunately, the Hydrographer, a charming and gentle admiral, was somewhat out of touch. He could not think of anything for an oceanographer to do, except to examine some old echo soundings that showed shoals and banks off the west coast of Central America where later ship crossings had found only deep water. I appealed to Bennett to give me a job that might be more relevant-to the real world, and he set me up as officer in charge of what amounted to an oceanographic subsection in the Bureau of Ships….From this vantage point I was able to help guide and foster the Navy's growing involvement in oceanography

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throughout the latter part of the war and the early postwar period.^[3]

Immediately after the war, in the U.S. Naval Reserve, by then with the rank of Commander, Revelle served as head of the geophysics branch of the Office of Naval Research, and was in charge of the oceanographic investigations of Operation Crossroads in 1946 (see chapter 15). Much later he recounted his return to Scripps in 1948:

Harald Sverdrup, the little great man who had already begun to transform the institution, felt he must return to Norway, and that is when a struggle began as to who should be his successor. Harald Sverdrup and Carl Eckart were determined that I should have the job, even though I was still in Washington, working for the Office of Naval Research. But there was a great deal of equally determined opposition.

It was resolved by Carl [Eckart] agreeing to become the Director; he asked me to be his Associate Director. Although I didn't realize it at the time (he never let on), this was actually a ploy on Carl's part, with Harald's encouragement, to create a situation in which the opposition to my appointment might be diminished. As soon as Carl judged that this had happened, he resigned, and I took his place, first as Acting Director and then as Director.

After I assumed the job, I rapidly gained a reputation as a poor administrator. But in some ways, compared to Carl, I was an administrative genius. The difficulty was that he took the job too seriously. No detail was too small, no problem too unimportant, for him to attack it with meticulous and elaborate care, giving attention to every detail, and examining every

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― 448 ―

alternative. The rigor in definition and precision of thought, and the inability to leave any loose strings untied, which were his great strengths as a scientist, were just what was not needed as an administrator. I remember he spent a good deal of time trying to tidy the Scripps Institution up; it was quite a messy place in those days and this was a completely frustrating job for him.^[4]

Revelle, as the director, had his defenders and his detractors. He also had big ideas, which he was eager to carry through, sometimes too quickly. “I think I'm undiplomatic,” he once said. “I just bull things through.”^[5] Eckart, however, felt that Revelle had “the ability to put knowledge and enthusiasm together in words that excite people.”^[6] Not always a good speaker, he was nevertheless at times almost an orator on the possibilities in oceanography during his Scripps days. His enthusiasm came through in a mellow resonant tone in measured, sometimes hesitant, phrases.

Big projects appealed to Revelle, and he was intent upon keeping Scripps in the forefront while other institutions were moving into oceanography. The most intense booster for the institution, Revelle was also the keenest recruiter — of people whose imaginative approach to their discipline appealed to him and who could contribute to oceanography. Some of these arrived, fired with his enthusiasm, to find that they did not even have an office, certainly not a laboratory. Assistant Director Jeffery Frautschy or other campus officials would scurry to find them space and funds.

Revelle had — and has — a great respect for the capabilities of science in helping to solve world problems. While at Scripps, he was drawn into a great many international committees: various UNESCO appointments; Atoms for Peace; the International Geophysical Year; the International

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Indian Ocean Expedition; the Special Committee on Ocean Research, which, with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, organized the First International Oceanographic Congress in 1959, of which Revelle was president; the U.S. National Committee for the International Biological Program; the United States-Japan Committee on Scientific Cooperation; the International Association of Physical Sciences of the Ocean; and others. There were national committee appointments as well. No wonder that some Scripps staff members grumbled that Revelle was too often elsewhere and was not tending to affairs at home base.

Through his committee obligations, Revelle knew a great many oceanographers throughout the world. He had a way of persuading them to take on projects that required a great deal of time and energy. An example is the summary treatise, The Sea: Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas.^[7] The classic text of 1942, The Oceans, by Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, was indeed somewhat out of date twenty years later. Maurice N. Hill of the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics in Cambridge, England, said: “Revelle suggested that we produce another such volume containing ideas and observations concerning the work accomplished during the twenty years since this masterpiece. It was suggested that this new work should not attempt to be a textbook but a balanced account of how oceanography, and the thoughts of oceanographers, were moving.”^[8] Hill served as general editor of the new work until his death in 1966, when Arthur E. Maxwell of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution took on the task. The first volume of the treatise came out in 1962, “from the pens of many authors,” noted Hill. By 1974 the project had reached five volumes (in six books) in an invaluable summary of all the vast field of oceanography except marine biology. Naturally, many of the contributors were Scrippsians.

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Revelle has always had an impressive impact:

…At a sleepy meeting in Paris, a big slouching man rose to his feet and began to speak of geology at sea [wrote Daniel Behrman]. His voice and presence filled the committee room.

He told of oily uncomfortable ships, of the great grinding mills that destroy the sea floor in the deep trenches, of the maps of this realm that were no better than the land maps of the seventeenth century. More than any other single figure, Revelle is responsible for the introduction of oceanography into public affairs. He began as a marine geologist and geophysicist; he has evolved into a statesman of science.^[9]

At home base during the 1950s Revelle began envisioning a new kind of university, one that started at the top. He carried on a long campaign, and he gained some political foes along the way; but the result was the establishment, first, of the Institute of Technology and Engineering, then the School of Science and Engineering, housed on the Scripps campus from 1958 to 1963, and from that the entire campus of the University of California at San Diego.^[*]

[*] The campus was first known as the University of California at La Jolla, and one Scripps dissertation came out under that name, in 1961. But pressure from the rest of the city led to changing the name. La Jolla is, after all, within the city of San Diego.

Revelle has credited Carl Eckart as being his co-worker and goad throughout the early planning, and he has pointed out that many others also devoted a great deal of time to founding the new campus, but the drive was certainly Revelle's. The innovative features were the multi-college concept within the one big campus, and opening the college at the graduate-student level first, taking off essentially from Scripps Institution into other fields of science and later,

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humanities. To Revelle can go a great deal of credit for drawing to UCSD some of the top names in their fields.

As Walter Munk said: “It was an interesting experiment to watch a bunch of sailors start a university.”^[10] In addition to a great many hours of planning, those sailors contributed the dormitory names for the first college — for noted exploration ships^[*]

[*] Helen Raitt, a participant on Capricorn Expedition, compiled the list of dormitory names.

; they donated the trident symbol to UCSD; and they awarded the name, Revelle College, for the sailor who started it all.

Ten years after Revelle's idea had become a full campus of the university, Chancellor William J. McGill looked back at its founding:

This is the end of an era at the University of California, San Diego. The era began with Sputnik and with the national panic which that little beeping Soviet satellite created. Sputnik's effects on American education were on the whole remarkably positive, and they were in full ascendancy when UCSD was born a decade ago. Only in such an era could the extraordinary beginnings of UCSD have been conceived, much less attempted, and only in such an era could the attempt have been brought off successfully. It was an era of unparalleled national investment in education, especially in science. The Russian Sputnik fathered many new American university campuses and caused the sudden dramatic expansion of many old ones. It was a time of bold educational planning, of sudden affluence for professors, and a pervading sense of limitless vistas of academic excellence, both here and throughout the country — but especially here.^[11]

Revelle's last few years at Scripps Institution were interrupted times at his home base. From October 1961 to

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February 1963 he served as science advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. In that post he headed a panel of experts in both natural and social sciences in a valuable study and analysis of land and water development in the Indus River basin of West Pakistan. Revelle then returned to Scripps and simultaneously became University Dean of Research for all campuses. In 1964 he accepted the appointment as director of the Center for Population Studies at Harvard, to which he was enticed by some of the academics with whom he had worked on the Pakistan project.

Revelle is remembered fondly by those who have been long at Scripps, one of whom said just after his departure: “It is a great tribute to Roger, I think, that he has retained the cordial regard and friendship even of those who have felt that his shortcomings as an administrator were serious.” Part of his popularity was no doubt due to his enthusiasm for oceanography just as that field was undergoing its greatest expansion. Revelle knew and liked oily ships, from the 64-foot Scripps and 94-foot E. W. Scripps to the 213-foot Argo, and he understood oceanographers, himself included. “The chief motivation of most oceanographers I know,” he once said, “is the sheer excitement of finding out what has never been known before.”^[12] He went on to speak of what oceanography could accomplish for the world, but, as always when Revelle spoke, his theme was “Oceanography is fun.” That phrase, which he used oft-times, has been joked about — almost every time the seas start sloshing over the fantail or the winch jams — but the joking is done by men who knew Revelle at Scripps and who go back to sea themselves again and again. As one of those said later, “When Roger was around, things were always exciting.”

Revelle's fiftieth birthday is remembered fondly too. The idea of a surprise party for the occasion of 7 March 1959 was mainly John A. Knauss's, who provided his house for the event and established the theme of Cannery Row. (A

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few days after the invitations were sent out, every bookstore in town had run out of Steinbeck's book.) With appropriate quotations from the book, Lynne and John Knauss urged the guests to bring presents — “homemade, or at least something you yourself found or caught”; to bring liquid refreshment, which, “in best Monterey tradition,” would be dumped into one large punch bowl; and to keep the secret from Roger.

“The conspiracy grew and there were visits back and forth” — as people thought of ingenious gifts and ideas. The Shors' house across the street from Knausses' was decorated with “models” to represent the Bear Flag Restaurant in Cannery Row. All of Revelle's family, except himself, knew of the event, so it was arranged that Roger and Ellen would have dinner at their daughter and son-in-law's (George and Anne Shumway's) house, about a block away from Knausses', while the party assembled. At 8:30 the crowd strolled to the Shumways', where Scripps police officer Howard (“Mac”) McKelvey led off with his siren, and Roger was summoned forth — to his complete surprise. Serenaded by the wheeze of a calliope (played by chemist-musician Charles D. Keeling), he was seated upon a litter and borne up the street on the shoulders of an honor guard, amid confetti and banners, to be deposited in the midst of the festivities.

It was a great party. The gifts represented Scripps ingenuity at its best. The punch was remarkable. And it seemed as if everyone at Scripps was there. The finale was the arrival of a giant box, which opened to reveal “Texas Bobbie” Roberts (a striptease artist, about six feet tall). Revelle vanished into the box and the two were carried off triumphantly. Texas Bobbie's breathless comment later was: “I never knew there was so much to learn about oceanography!”

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One who deserves a great deal of credit for having kept Scripps running smoothly during Revelle's absences is

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Jeffery D. Frautschy, who became assistant director on 1 August 1958. As mentioned in chapter 2, Frautschy began his oceanographic career with UCDWR, in 1942. After World War II he was a student at Scripps, then spent two years with the U.S. Geological Survey and in graduate work at the University of Southern California before joining the staff of the institution in 1949. He headed the research support shop, directed the Scripps portion of the International Geophysical Year, and as assistant director served as troubleshooter everywhere on campus. During the construction boom of the 1950s and 1960s, Frautschy always knew where the utility connections ran through the campus, and he has long kept track of the history of the institution's structures and ships and people. By training a geologist, in practice Frautschy is an all-round engineer who has contributed a great many ingenious improvements to shipboard equipment and techniques. One of his most widely used early contributions was a coreless three-strand wire rope that endured much longer than the seven-strand wire with a central core (“aircraft cord”) that had been previously used. Since 1972 he has served very actively on the California Coastal Conservation Commission, and in 1975 he became Associate Director of the Institute of Marine Resources, with responsibility for the University of California Sea Grant program, headquartered at Scripps.

Fred N. Spiess, director of the Marine Physical Laboratory, stepped in as acting director of the institution in 1961. This native Californian, born in Oakland in 1919, had graduated from Berkeley in physics in 1941 and had immediately entered Navy submarine school. During World War II he made thirteen submarine patrols. Spiess received his M.S. at Harvard in communication engineering and his Ph. D. at Berkeley in physics. In 1952 he joined the staff of MPL and in 1958 he became director of that laboratory.

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As acting director at Scripps from 1961 to 1963, while Revelle was science advisor to Udall, Spiess worked closely with UCSD's first chancellor, Herbert F. York, to retain the autonomy of the institution, in its long-established role of both teaching and research, as the new undergraduate campus was being established. A long-time Scrippsian said of Spiess's term as acting director: “I have never known a period when affairs of the Institution were run so smoothly. Matters were settled promptly and with the use of remarkably fine judgement.”

When Revelle left in 1964, Spiess became director of Scripps, partly as an interim measure while a second chancellor for UCSD was being sought. Spiess helped complete the negotiations for establishing the Physiological Research Laboratory (see chapter 8), and he expanded the programs in biology and chemistry at the institution. His valuable contributions to the development of Flip and the Deep-Tow instrument package are cited in chapter 4.

In July 1965, William A. Nierenberg became director of Scripps Institution. Physicist Nierenberg was born in New York city in 1919. He received his B.S. from City College of New York (with one year at the University of Paris), and his Ph. D. from Columbia University. He was a participant in the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war he taught at the University of Michigan, and in 1950 became professor of physics at Berkeley. In 1953-54, on leave from Berkeley, he was Project Director of Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories, then returned to Berkeley until his appointment at Scripps. From 1960 to 1962 he served in Paris as the Assistant Secretary General for Scientific Affairs of NATO, and he was simultaneously Professor Associé at the University of Paris.

At Berkeley Nierenberg established the Atomic Beam Laboratory on the main campus and the Atomic Beam

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Research Group at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. His researches there included atomic-beam measurements of electronic and nuclear properties of radioactive atoms, gaseous-diffusion theory and experiments, cascade theory, atomic and molecular beams, the measurement of nuclear spins, magnetic and electric quadrupole moments, hyperfine anomalies with particular application to radioactive nuclei, and similar applications to atomic electronic ground states.

This hoarse-voiced, staccato-talking man is disconcertingly able to talk and listen simultaneously. His interest in ocean research and his pride in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are unending. He is a strong advocate of using the right — and best — equipment for the job at hand, which he often ensures by negotiating for the necessary funding. The task has not been easy, as the money available for increasingly expensive marine research has become much more difficult to obtain during the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the earliest programs that Nierenberg advocated when he became director was computers for the larger Scripps ships. The Deep-Tow group of the Marine Physical Laboratory actually carried the first Scripps computer system — a PDP-8 computer — to sea on the Thomas Washington in the fall of 1966, for use in calculating navigation for the acoustic transponder and to provide a digital-data logging capability for the magnetometer and the precision echo-sounder of the Deep-Tow system. In the following year an IBM 1800 Data Acquisition and Control System — the “Red Baron” — was installed on the Thomas Washington, through joint sponsorship of Scripps and International Business Machines. At first IBM provided personnel to service the system, but Scripps soon decided to hire its own technicians, engineers, and programmers, to service the shipboard equipment and programs and also to participate in other underway projects. The Shipboard Computer

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Group, headed by J. Lynn Abbott since 1966, routinely provides personnel for the computers on the expeditions of the Thomas Washington and the Melville (the Argo carried a computer on Circe Expedition in 1968 and on Scan Expedition in 1969). The group also operates and maintains the Scripps computer facility, located in Ritter Hall. On expeditions the computer continuously handles programs for ship navigation and underway measurements of bathymetry, salinity-temperature-depth data, magnetometer readings, surface-water measurements, and more, as well as certain special programs for individual researchers on board. The navigation program is set up to handle input from a satellite receiver; the first such installation for Scripps was on the Argo in 1968.

As Nierenberg said in 1969: “In many ways I feel that I am reliving my life, watching the development of the computerized ship and its effect on oceanographic research,” for he had been deeply involved in the development of the applications of computers to nuclear physics and particle-physics research while at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

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Nierenberg also established the Applied Ocean Engineering Laboratory at Scripps in 1969, under the financial support of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. For this unit a steering committee of distinguished scientists was established, to select significant projects in advanced engineering marine research. Marion W. Johnson was the project manager until 1971, when Gerard H. Fisher succeeded him; both of them had previously been at Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories. The several programs supported by ARPA at Scripps for several years were: instrumentation and installation of mid-ocean buoys, under the direction of John D. Isaacs and in a cooperative project with the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University; research on stable floating platforms, under the direction of Fred N.

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Spiess, which led to constructing and testing scale models of multi-leg platforms for oceanographic research; adapting a quartz vertical accelerometer for deep-ocean measurements, under Walter H. Munk, Robert D. Moore, and William A. Prothero; devising equipment for recording subsurface pressures in the ocean caused by earthquakes, under Hugh Bradner and John Isaacs; investigating the water-sediment interface near the breaker zone and the velocity field of breaking waves, under Douglas L. Inman and William G. Van Dorn; and constructing equipment to measure radio signals scattered from the sea surface in order to determine the directional spectrum of ocean waves, under Nierenberg and Munk, in a cooperative project with the Center for Radio Astronomy at Stanford University. For this project Nierenberg set up the computer programs for handling the complex data. Although AOEL has ended, several of the engineering projects, some of them bearing significantly on future ocean technology, have been incorporated into other units at Scripps.

Also established at Nierenberg's instigation was the Center for Marine Affairs, which began in 1970 under a grant from the Ford Foundation. Warren S. Wooster first headed the group, which brought together specialists from the social sciences, law, government, and oceanography to explore the conditions for freedom of oceanic research and for determining international pollution policy. In 1973 the center, then headed by Gerald L. Wick, was placed in the Institute of Marine Resources, and, in cooperation with Mexican agencies, also undertook a study of long-range marine resource management issues related to desert coasts, with emphasis on the Baja California coastline.

In service to the nation and its oceanography, Nierenberg presided as chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA) from October 1971 until February 1975, and he has continued as a member

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since then. NACOA's goal, as defined in its first annual report (1972) has been “to help clarify what is good husbandry of the resources of the sea and air and what this can mean to the United States of America.” The committee has advised the President and the Congress on law of the sea, United States fisheries, weather modification, coastal zone management, resource management, and energy.

Nierenberg was also chairman of the Department of Defense Advisory Board for Project AGILE from 1969 until 1972. He has served as an Advisor-at-Large to the Department of State, as a member of the United States Commission for UNESCO, the JASON Divison of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the National Academy of Sciences' Space Applications Board, the California Advisory Commission on Ocean Resources, the President's Science and Technology Advisory Group, the Advisory Committee on Law of the Sea, and a number of other national and international panels and boards. He sometimes saves committee-commuting time by piloting an airplane himself to and from meetings, having become a proficient pilot during the 1970s.

Like most of his predecessors as director, Nierenberg has tried to organize the diversified marine institution into a logical administrative unit, and he has admitted that Scripps doesn't lend itself to being organized.

For years the administrative organization of Scripps has been joked about (“the only state institution that is run by the inmates”), and occasionally deplored. “The Scripps Institution has never been planned,” wrote former director Eckart in 1965, “and many of the organizational features have just happened.” Perhaps the most honest appraisal of the organization appeared in the thin volume, Manual of Rules and Procedures for the institution, in 1951:

Organization Chart of the SIO
To be supplied later

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An outsider who was speaking kindly of the institution noted, in 1973, that it has “an organizational and management structure that has remained relaxed and flexible. The very informality of its management has been an important factor in its past accomplishments.”

The flexibility has resulted from the institution's dual role as a graduate teaching school and a research organization. Appointments overlap within the research divisions and the organized laboratories, with inevitable confusion to the uninitiated (and sometimes to the accounting office). The academic staff includes both a professorial series and a parallel research series — some of whom also teach classes.

Over the years Scrippsians have grumbled at rules and procedures imposed from “above” — Berkeley, or UCLA (to which Scripps was attached for administrative academic affairs until UCSD was established), or UCSD. Spiess deplored in 1962: “We are already tending in the large scale administration of the University to rely too readily on use of ratios, formulae, IBM machines and broadly applied rules as substitutes for direct knowledge and sensitivity on the part of those who must make decisions.” The freedom created originally by the awareness that Scripps was an independent research laboratory from 1903 until 1912, and furthered by the distance from Berkeley to Scripps during the early years, has never been readily yielded. When aggravated, Scripps officials are inclined to suggest that a certain recommended action might be contrary to the original deed of transfer in 1912 and to remind reformers that certain university policies are stated by the Regents of the University to be “not applicable to…the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.”^[*]

[*] Similarly exempted from certain policies, as defined in 1961, were the Agricultural Experiment Station, the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories at Berkeley and Livermore, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

And memories at Scripps are long.

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Example: Sverdrup was sharply criticized in the spring of 1947 by President Sproul for not having notified him of the early negotiations to establish the Marine Life Reserch program. The reprimand was undeserved, for Sverdrup had indeed provided the information, but others in the university administration had failed to get it to Sproul. Sverdrup received an apology.

Example: Revelle drew a reprimand from Sproul in 1954 over the negotiations to transfer the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offices from Stanford to Scripps, which Revelle had discussed fully with Sproul in person earlier. “I believe what we have done so far is kosher,” replied Revelle, “and a necessary preliminary to formal negotiations.” He was allowed to proceed.

Example: In the mid-1950s one of the university regents suggested that the Scripps Institution should be moved to Santa Barbara, possibly over a twenty-year period. The university campus there was in the process of moving from its downtown Santa Barbara location to its present site nine miles west of the city on the shore. Scripps administrators were appalled. Revelle's masterful reply (mostly derived by Frautschy) logically explained the impossibility — even absurdity — of such a disruption to Scripps. The lack of ship berthing and of sources for marine supplies and equipment, the absence of cooperating Navy facilities, the shortage of available personnel in the smaller city, and even the “somewhat poorer weather conditions” of Santa Barbara were cited as “serious disadvantages,” as well as the expense of moving equipment and personnel and the tragedy of breaking off the half-century record of scientific observations from the Scripps pier. It was even noted that the Santa Barbara faculty might not indeed “welcome the influx of a rather specialized laboratory with a budget and staff twice as big as their own.” The cost of transfer was boldly estimated as

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$2,338,000. To the relief of Scripps administrators, the subject was dropped.

SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

The formality that was typical during T. Wayland Vaughan's era at Scripps began to change in the 1930s, and the changes continued after the war. Shirt sleeves became more common than suit coats; Hawaiian and Tahitian shirts were special favorites. Military-style crew haircuts were in vogue after World War II and, until the late 1960s, only an occasional beard was seen, usually an indication that the “bearded wonder” had recently returned from a long sea trip. The lunch area became known as “Bikini plaza.”

Almost everyone addressed one another by first name, from director to graduate student. As a crew member said, “It's kind of hard to call a guy ‘Mister’ when you've passed the salt to him at mess aboard ship.”^[13] The students, many of them veterans, were part of the extended family, and for a long time, as it was not uncommon for a student to take six to ten years to complete his studies and his dissertation. Students were often expedition leaders, on long as well as short cruises.

For many years, the women's group, Oceanids, was the tone-setter for campus social activities, and was also the service group for special events and visitors. In the 1940s Mrs. Francis B. (“Mom”) Sumner had been the leader of what was first known as “Scripps Wives,” a sewing and social group that devoted much time to projects for servicemen. In 1946, according to Helen (Mrs. Russell W.) Raitt, “a group of enthusiastic young student wives took the initiative and organized a wives' club,” which was also endorsed by the faculty wives. In April 1952, Mrs. John S. (Sally)

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Bradshaw and other student wives, “with renewed vim and vigor,” again organized a Scripps women's group, “to foster social affairs for all persons on the Scripps Campus and to provide a means by which new students and new personnel may become acquainted.”^[14] Denis Fox proposed the name Oceanids, for the Greek ocean nymphs, the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys. After voting on a constitution, the group's first organized activity was “an informal dance for all hands in the library of Scripps Institution,” in honor of the return of Shellback Expedition.

The organization was open to all women connected with the institution: staff wives and student wives, women employees, and women students. Not all eligibles attended the activities, of course, but there was a broad scattering of regulars throughout all disciplines and all ranks. The members provided and served refreshments at all special occasions on campus, served as ushers for campus-sponsored lectures, and hosted a Christmas party (originally for the children, in a carry-over of the custom established by Gudrun Sverdrup), an Easter-egg hunt, dances, potluck dinners, and some lectures. Funds for these events were usually raised through ticket sales to a night at the Old Globe Theatre. The organization set up special interest groups — book review, bridge, folk dancing, sewing, and others. Helen Raitt and Carol Schultz were the prime movers for starting Oceanids' information-filled monthly newsletter, “Bear Facts,” in 1962. Newcomers were welcomed cordially, as potential cookie-bakers and ushers as well as new members of the oceanographic family. Lonesome wives whose husbands were at sea could find news items, a respite from loneliness, and a word of sympathetic understanding at Oceanids' gatherings. The organization has become the women's group of the entire UCSD campus.

Members of Oceanids plus many staff members contributed to the performance “Flip” in 1960; this original

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musical review was composed by draftsman Madeleine Miller (now Mahnken) and directed by secretary and musician Lorayne Buck and her husband Frederick. The theme was to prove that “oceanography is fun,” and, put to music, it certainly was fun. There were mermaids and grunion hunters, sons of the beaches, girls from the “Friendly Islands,” and a Rube Goldberg sort of machine that erupted bubbles; there were also some pointed digs at certain campus figures. The highlight of the choreography was a spectacular dance, titled “Flip, Flop, Flip,” by nimble terpsichoreans in swim-fins.^[*]

[*] “Flip II” and “Flip III” were presented in 1961 and 1962, but they were not so thoroughly oceanic in theme.

A much-appreciated welcoming custom was established by Edith Nierenberg in 1965, when her husband became director: a coffee party and introduction to the campus for all new wives and women employees of Scripps. The event usually has included a walking tour of several of the institution's laboratories, to provide a glimpse of the variety of researches. The hostesses — who are “oldtimers” — find that the gathering helps them understand their campus better.

A well-attended summer event throughout the 1950s was the family beach picnic, with games and prizes and beer. This was enthusiastically sponsored by the local chapter of the California State Employees Association, of which Ben Cox was a longtime official. (The annual beach picnic that was resumed in 1969 is hosted by graduate students and funded anonymously.)

Town and gown turned out to celebrate the University's Charter Day every March, often at Scripps in the form of an open house and public lecture. The 1951 Charter Day presented the dedication of Vaughan Aquarium-Museum (see chapter 9). In 1952 the Horizon and the Crest carried a hundred visitors out to sea for a demonstration of oceanographic equipment at work; to the delight of Carl L.

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Hubbs, on that one-day jaunt the new Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl added to the fish collection the first adult Dolichopteryx (a spookfish) recorded from the North Pacific and the third threadfin slickhead (Talismania bifurcata) ever found — duly reported by a seasick newsman. In 1954 the five ships of the research fleet were open to public display at the dock. The 1956 Charter Day became a university-wide celebration of Robert Gordon Sproul's twentyfifth year as president of the university. At Scripps he dedicated the first addition to Ritter Hall, attended a two-day symposium on biology, and presided at an evening lecture. Sproul observed that during his quarter-century as president, Scripps had increased its budget 25-fold, its staff tenfold, and its buildings only threefold. The construction spree was just beginning.

In 1957 a display of oceanographic equipment was set out on the Scripps pier for visitors to view, and a continuous film program was offered in the library. The institution's first robed academic procession distinguished the evening ceremony that year, when Robert Maynard Hutchins addressed an overflow crowd on the subject of “Science and People.” And in 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt, 75 years old, erect and firm-voiced, exhorted an even larger audience in San Diego's Russ Auditorium: “We have to wake up, change our views, and realize this is a different world today.”

It was the world of Sputnik and space — and “inner space,” as oceanography was beginning to be called. In that era, while envying the money being expended in the space program, Scripps scientists were wont to observe: “We know less about the ocean's bottom than the moon's behind.”^[*]

[*] This remark, which Bob Fisher believes may have been first used by Athelstan F. Spilhaus, appeared many times in speech and print by oceanographers, often oddly bowdlerized. In 1940, long before Sputnik, Harald Sverdrup wrote: “…we live on the shores bordering the largest ocean on earth, an ocean less charted than the surface of the moon.” (“Research in Oceanography,” California Monthly, December 1940)

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Other special events on campus brought out the institution's families and many townspeople. On 22 April 1952, a sizable crowd greeted the Galathea, called “one of the world's outstanding pieces of oceanographic scientific equipment.” The 80-meter-long frigate was homeward bound on the Danish Deep Sea Round the World Expedition when she paused for several hours off the Scripps pier. Visitors went out in smallboats to consume Danish pastries (and Carlsberg beer, the Carlsberg Foundation being the chief financial support of the two-year expedition), and to admire the oceanographic accoutrements, especially the giant winch that could handle seven miles of cable. Expedition leader Anton F. Bruun told of gathering great numbers of sea anemones, sea cucumbers, worms, clams, and crustaceans from ocean depths greater than six miles in the Philippine Trench.

In October 1958 the campus greeted newly inaugurated University President Clark Kerr, who reviewed the Scripps fleet, which was emblazoned in the university's colors, blue and gold. With some tricky maneuvering, Horizon, Spencer F. Baird, Stranger, Paolina-T, T-441, Buoy Boat, and even minute Macrocystis lined up, bow toward the beach, just beyond the Scripps pier, to honor the visitor.^[*]

[*] Only Orca was unable to participate, as she was in the shipyard.

The end of the International Geophysical Year in 1958 was climaxed at Scripps by the visit of the Soviet research ship Vityaz to San Francisco. Americans were still chagrined at the success of Sputnik I in 1957. What might Soviet scientists be capable of doing in oceanography? For the Vityaz visit a flurry of letters began in October 1958, from Revelle to IGY and state department officials, and finally mutual invitations by radio flitted between the institution and the ship (which was not allowed to visit San Diego). When the 363-foot vessel sailed into San Francisco on 18

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December, she was met by a large crowd that included 20 Scripps scientists who had flown up to ask questions and to take the grand tour. The following day the Horizon sailed into San Francisco, bearing some of the Scripps seismic group to join the fun. The American oceanographers were much relieved to find that Soviet methods of exploring the ocean were similar to, and no better than, their own. John Tyler summed it up: “Walk into any [Vityaz] lab and you will find differences in technique and in detail, with some ideas you like and some you don't like.”^[15] The great size of the Soviet research ship, its twelve separate laboratories, a scientific party of 65 people, and the many concurrent programs were considered by Scripps people to be generally not advantages (especially as all participants were expected to stay for the entire expedition, many months long). From San Francisco ten of the Soviet oceanographers were flown to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. The guests were hosted for dinner, in twos and threes, at Scripps homes, with other staff families as additional guests — a form of entertainment that especially appealed to the Soviets, who asked many questions about American homes and family life. Their own interpreters, a few Russian-speaking Scrippsians, and considerable arm-waving kept the conversations flowing.

On 27 September 1966, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey visited Scripps Institution, in his capacity as chairman of the National Council on Marine Resources and Engineering Development. He was provided with what he called “a very exciting tour” of the institution and some of its novel equipment, after which he declared: “We're on the threshold of a new age of exploration….Our dreams for the oceans are not those of the poets and the prophets. They are practical dreams….We intend to develop the bountiful resources of the sea to serve man's pressing needs.”

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In the same capacity three years later, on 23 October 1969, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew arrived at Scripps for what newsman Bryant Evans called “probably the shortest and most concentrated survey course in oceanography in history.”^[16] En route to a Palm Springs vacation, Agnew was on the campus for only an hour, and was shown sediment cores taken by the Deep Sea Drilling Project and deep-sea tide capsules of IGPP. Campus officials had only scanty warning of the brief visit, but Director Nierenberg was able to fly home from England (via Washington, D.C.) to welcome the visitor. (On the airplane he spilled soup on his only necktie and had to borrow one from Carl L. Hubbs — patterned, typically, in whales.)

After very elaborate preparations, Emperor Hirohito of Japan visited Scripps Institution on 9 October 1975, during his first trip to the United States. Biologist Hirohito was very interested in the marine specimens set out for his inspection, and was presented with a fine specimen of the “living fossil” Neopilina collected on Southtow Expedition in 1972.

The brunt of arranging details of the visits of such distinguished visitors fell to the Scripps branch of the Public Affairs Office, headed by R. Nelson Fuller from 1965. For some years that office has been responsible for providing information on Scripps researches to news media and for handling official visits to the institution in cooperation with the director's office, as well as answering requests for oceanographic information that arrive at the institution by letter and telephone by the dozens each week. Since the mid-1960s the Scripps Public Affairs Office has also coordinated, edited, and published the annual reports of the institution.

Until the late 1940s, the publicity duties of the institution were handled chiefly by the director's office, aided by various staff members. For example, during the 1930s a

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weekly news feature, called Institution Notes, which reported the comings and goings of the campus community, was provided to local newspapers by W. E. Allen (Scripps' first “publicity secretary,” who started in 1919), Denis L. Fox, or Claude E. ZoBell. As public interest in inner space increased, the task of handling news and visitors grew larger, so that in 1949 a Public Relations Committee was established, and in May 1951 an Office of Public Relations was formed (under the committee). Carl L. Hubbs was appointed chairman of the committee, then director of the office. From the time he joined the staff of the Aquarium-Museum in 1946, Sam Hinton devoted a great deal of time to answering inquiries and conducting visitors about. The staff of the Scripps library also served — and still do serve — as an information center for the public.

In 1950 Thomas A. (“Lon”) Manar joined the staff to prepare the reports of the Marine Life Research program. In the latter 1950s he became the public information officer for Scripps, and handled coordination with the news media as well as institution-sponsored events, such as Charter Day programs. For some years Scripps offered a lecture series annually in cooperation with the La Jolla Theatre and Arts Foundation, which required considerable coordination on details by Manar. When UCSD was established, the Scripps public information office came under the auspices of the upper campus.

And Now…

In 1940 Harald Sverdrup wrote:

Oceanography may sometime in the distant future give us a many-colored picture of the oceans, but at the present time we have only started working with a large and intriguing puzzle game, each one of us trying

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to put together pieces of similar color, hoping that all the fragments can be joined into one complete picture. It is as yet far too early to guess what this picture will look like, but it is not difficult to visualize oceanography as a unified field of research.^[17]

The picture is not yet complete, but a great many pieces of the puzzle have indeed been put into place. The unified field of research has grown into a complexity of institutions and disciplines. It utilizes equipment that Sverdrup could not have envisioned 40 years ago: sea-going computer systems, satellites for navigation, research platforms that stand on end, electron microscopes, devices that glide from the depths of the sea when called.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography no longer stands alone, but shares its field with dozens of other oceanographic research organizations. While there is a certain rivalry amongst them, there is also a great deal of cordial cooperation. In fact, the trend in oceanography since the latter 1960s has been toward multi-institutional research projects. As Nierenberg said in 1971: “The developing attitude on the part of government managers is the growing dependence on the ‘larger’ programs. These are important programs that require major concentrations of manpower and money because of either synoptic or engineering considerations.”^[18]

Such projects — which simultaneously involve a number of researchers at several institutions — have occupied a great deal of the director's time and that of the principal investigators: the Deep Sea Drilling Program, discussed in chapter 12; developing Norpax, which expanded into a major research effort from the North Pacific Buoy Project; establishing Geosecs, which has drawn in a wide range of oceanographic and meteorologic researchers; the Alpha Helix program, which has attracted hundreds of researchers

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to spending short periods of time aboard that vessel; the Sea Grant Program, which has become a statewide, multi-campus effort; and other units which are in the embryonic or adolescent stage. Such broad programs, too close to the present to be yet put into perspective, will become a history to be recounted at some future date.

“These projects,” continued Nierenberg, “make extraordinary demands on the limited manpower of the oceanographic community, but they are very rewarding in their results and applications.”

That seems to be it: Oceanography is not only fun, as Revelle said; it is also very rewarding.

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NOTES