Memorial to Cordell Durrell1908-1986E. M. MOORES

Department o f Geology, University o f California, Davis, California 95616

Cordell Durrell, professor emeritus of geology at the University of California, Davis, passed away October 12, 1986, after a brief illness. His death followed that of his wife, Helen, by two years.

Born in 1908 in San Francisco, Durrell grew up around Oakland. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1931 and 1936, respectively. He was an instructor in geology at U.C. Berkeley in 1936-1937, and a geologist for Richfield Oil Corporation in Los Angeles in 1937-1938. In 1938 he became an instructor in geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, beginning an association that lasted for 25 years. In 1943 he received a two-year leave of absence from UCLA, during which he worked with the U.S. Geological Survey helping to assess U.S. resources in barite and optical-quality calcite. He returned to UCLA in 1945 with the rank of assistant professor, receiving promotions to associate professor in 1946 and professor in 1951.

In 1963, Durrell came to Davis as professor and chairman of the Geology Department to oversee the planned growth of the department, then small, into a first-rank research and teaching group. During his chairmanship (1963-1967), he laid the foundation for departmental expansion and planned a new building, occupied in 1971. He remained an active and influential member of the department until his retirement in 1976. Even after retirement he came to the department daily.

Professionally, Durrell was known principally as an outstanding and dedicated educator and as an expert in Sierra Nevada geology. As an educator he inspired hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students at both UCLA and UC Davis; many of them have gone on to distinguished geological careers in industry, government service, and academia. Two courses were his strongest. One was an undergraduate course in handspecimen petrology, in which he spent hours on a one-to-one basis with each student. Many students remember facing their conferences with Durrell with a great deal of apprehension; afterward they recalled the experience as one of the most memorable of their college careers. Durrell’s other famous course was a graduate seminar in geology of California. This course involved analyzing thoroughly, and usually demolishing, selected primary references on field geology of California. For most students this sort of critical analysis of an individual author’s arguments was a real eye-opener. Without children themselves, Cord and Helen literally adopted their students as their own children. Perhaps a measure of his memorable qualities as a teacher is the fact that in 1974 he became one of the very few professors in the history of the University of California ever to receive a promotion to over-scale professor based upon his lifelong effectiveness as a teacher, rather than his research.

Durrell began his geologic work in the Sierra Nevada near Visalia in 1933. In 1938 he began work on the Blairsden quadrangle in the northeastern Sierra Nevada, a study that continued the rest of his professional career. During the course of this work, he became the principal authority on the Cenozoic geology of the Sierra Nevada and surrounding regions. A book containing the main results of his life-long Sierran work will be published in September 1987 by the University of California Press.

2 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY O F AMERICA

Cord was a tireless and indefatigable field geologist. Even after his first heart attack in 1966, he would set a pace on a field traverse that left many much younger geologists panting in his dust.

From 1958 to 1960, Durrell took a leave of absence from UCLA to become a professor of geology in the Corso de Geología at PETROBRAS (Petroleo Brasiliero), the Brazilian national oil company, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Together with several other faculty members, Durrell educated the first PETROBRAS geological staff. Durrell taught principally petrology and field geology. Durrell’s mapping, in conjunction with other faculty members, resulted in our ability to match structural features along the Brazilian and African coastlines, thereby supporting the concept of continental drift. Durrell returned to Brazil in 1968 on sabbatical leave, during which time he consulted with the University of Bahia on plans for development of an institute for earth sciences.

Durrell was a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, as well as of the Sociedade Brasileiro de Geología. He is survived by his cousins lone Giordanino of Sonora, and Lois Chislett of West Lake Village, his grand-nephews Stephen Obershaw of San Bernardino and Thomas Obershaw of Los Altos, and hundreds of former students.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CORDELL DURRELL1959 The Lovejoy Formation of northern California: Berkeley, University of California

Publications in Geological Sciences, no. 34, p. 193-220.____ (with Lovering, J. K.) Zoned gabbro pegmatites of Eureka Park, Plumas County,

California: Journal of Geology, v. 67, p. 253-267.1966 Tertiary and Quaternary geology of northern Sierra Nevada: California Division of Mines

and Geology Bulletin 190, p. 185-197.1977 (and D’Allura, J. A.) Upper Paleozoic section in eastern Plumas and Sierra counties,

northern Sierra Nevada, California: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 88, p. 844-852.

1987 Geology of the Feather River area: Berkeley, University of California Press (in press).

Printed in U.S.A. 11/87