Memorial to Frank W alker Johnson 1909-1989

RICH A RD H. TED FO R D Department o f Vertebrate Paleontology, American Museum o f Natural History,

Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York 10024-5192

F. W alker Johnson was born on M ay 22, 1909, in St. Augustine, Florida, and died on July 22, 1989, in Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania. He was raised on a farm in Cass County in eastern Nebraska, an environment certain to promote an interest in natural history for a young boy with an inquiring mind. He attended the Weeping Water and Lincoln High schools in Nebraska and entered the University of Nebraska geology pro­gram in 1929.

Earth sciences at UN were guided by the dynamicE. H. Barbour, who was chairman of the Department of Geology, director of the Nebraska State Museum, and state geologist. B arbour’s enthusiasm for vertebrate fossils was infectious, and Walker was soon employed collecting fossils during the summer and preparing and curating them during the school year. He also participated in exhibit work in the geology museum. W alker’s interest and talent for this work resulted in his appointment as field party chief from 1932 to 1935. He graduated with a B.A. in geology in 1934. His first published scientific paper (1936) concerned the Neogene stratigraphy of eastern Cherry County, Nebraska, based on observations made while he was collecting fossil mammals in that region for the Nebraska State Museum. This paper was notable as the first to clearly delineate the stratigraphy and relegate the fossil occurrences to the rock column. It was one of the few substantive contributions to the “Valentine controversy” that erupted over the confusion of rock, time-rock, and faunal units in the pre-codified days of stratigraphy. The controversy continued into 1938, with debates in the pages of the American Journal o f Science on the criteria for the boundary between the Miocene and Pliocene epochs in continental deposits. Walker, writing from Venezuela in 1938, contributed further com­ments on these questions.

After seven months spent collecting fossil mammals for the Frick Laboratory of the American Museum of Natural History in Nebraska, South Dakota, and California, Walker joined the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon Corporation) in 1936. He was sent to Venezuela to participate in the development of oil fields in the Maracaibo and Orinoco basins, an area of strategic importance during the war years. Working for Lago Petroleum Corporation from 1936 to 1941, he moved from junior geologist to resident geologist and took charge of all the geological work pertaining to oil field operations in the Tia Juana and La Rosa areas of the Bolivar Coastal field. In 1941-1942, he was dis­trict geologist for Standard Oil Company of Venezuela, working in the Orinoco Basin. From 1942 to 1944, he worked for Standard Oil and Creole Petroleum as a senior geolo­gist in a special study of the Quiriquire field in western Venezuela, recorrelating the mul­tiple oil-producing sands in this field. This provided the framework for a complete revi­sion of the geology of the field and ideas about the migration and entrapment of oil there.

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This study provided the technical justification for an accelerated drilling program that boosted production. From 1944 to 1952, Walker became division geologist for Creole in western Venezuela. He was put in charge of all geological activities of the company in that area, including the accelerated development o f selected oil reserves of strategic importance, particularly in Bolivar Coastal field, which at that time was the world’s largest oil field. This was followed by an aggressive postwar search for new oil in all of western Venezuela.

Walker was recalled to the New York office o f Standard Oil o f New Jersey in 1952-1953 for a training assignment as regional geologist monitoring all the company’s exploration in South America. Following this, he was back with Creole from 1953 to 1958, becoming assistant exploration manager for all oil and gas exploration in Venezuela.

In 1958, Walker left Venezuela and spent the next four years with Jersey Production Research Company in Tulsa as vice-president in charge of exploration research. There he managed a broad-based research effort incorporating geology, geophysics, paleontology, and geochemistry to develop better techniques for subsurface detection of petroleum through fundamental studies of the origin, migration, and entrapment o f oil and gas.

Back in the New York office of Standard Oil o f New Jersey in 1961, Walker became deputy manager o f exploration, with broad responsibility for management, planning, review, and coordination of the company’s worldwide exploration efforts. During the next six years, he spearheaded a successful effort to obtain participation in the exploration and discovery of offshore oil Helds in Australia. He was one o f the first to recognize the oil and gas potential o f the North Sea, and he implemented the early regional geological stud­ies by Standard Oil geologists and geophysicists that led to the discovery of oil and gas fields there. His position enabled him to urge a vigorous program o f exploration of the continental shelves and deeper water offshore by U.S. and Canadian affiliates, notably in the arctic areas of Alaska and the Northwest Territories.

During this period (1962 to 1968), Walker was chairman of the Research Advisory Committee for Exxon’s exploration research. He urged interdisciplinary research pro­grams, advising the company on the needs, areas of emphasis, and adequacy of research programs in petroleum exploration. His broad experience as a regional geologist was once again utilized as senior exploration advisor (1966 to 1968), and in 1968 to 1971, at the close of his career with Exxon, as exploration manager for the developing interests in the Far East.

In January 1972, Walker retired to his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, from which he launched a new career as an environmentalist and returned to the geological studies he had left in Nebraska 35 years before. In Greenwich he served as chairman of the town’s Conservation Commission, organized a regulatory agency for wetlands and waterways, and was appointed by the governor to the Citizens Advisory Group for the Connecticut River Project o f the New England River Basins Commission.

In 1971 he rejoined his University of Nebraska classmate Morris F. Skinner, a curator in the Department o f Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum o f Natural History. Working as a volunteer with Skinner, who had a lifetime preoccupation with the Neogene deposits and their fossils from north-central Nebraska, they expanded Walker’s 1936 study to include a review of the stratigraphy of the outcrops along 140 miles of the Niobrara River. Their work brought together a masterful stratigraphic synthesis and allo­cation o f the many fossil collections made in the region since the pioneering work of F. V. Hayden over 120 years ago. This joint project will remain an enduring source work for geological and paleontological studies for many years to come. Following publication of this monograph, Johnson and Skinner collaborated on a historical study of the earliest

MEMORIAL TO FRANK WALKER JOHNSON 45geological exploration o f the Niobrara River region by the Warren-Hayden party in 1857. They had undertaken much field study and gathered extensive historical records, but the work remained uncompleted on the deaths of both authors in 1989.

Walker Johnson was a member of seventeen professional organizations— including being a Fellow o f the Geological Society o f America—and many other geological soci­eties and conservation groups. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor o f Science degree by the University o f Nebraska in 1979. He volunteered his services readily in retirement and was selected for the Mayor’s Voluntary Service Award for New York City in 1976. He served on advisory committees to the American Geographical Society, Micropaleontology Press of the American Museum o f Natural History, and the Department o f Geological Sciences of the University o f Nebraska. He is survived by his w ife Miriam Juvonen Johnson, son Joseph Miller Johnson, and daughter Eleana Johnson Bums.

S E L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y O F F . W . J O H N S O N1936 The status of the name “Valentine” in Tertiary geology and paleontology: American

Journal o f Science, v. 31, p. 467-475.1938 Further comments on the usage of “Valentine”: American Journal o f Science, v. 36,

p. 215-219.1984 (with Skinner, M. F.) Tertiary stratigraphy and the Frick Collection o f fossil

vertebrates from north-central Nebraska: Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, v. 178, p. 215-368.

Panted in U.S.A. 10/90