Beloit College recently honored emeritus professor Hank Woodard on his 60th anniversary as a faculty member by establishing the Woodard Laboratory in the geology department. Hank came to Dartmouth in 1943 as part of the U.S. Navy V-5 Air Force program, which was folded into the V-12 regular Navy. He was transferred to Columbia, where he was commissioned as a line officer, went to the South Pacific for destroyer duty and returned to Dartmouth after the war in the fall of 1945, receiving his A.B. in 1947 and M.A. in geology in 1949. He was recalled by the Navy in 1950 for the Korean War, joined Beloit as its first geology professor in 1953 and completed his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Chicago in 1955. By 1957 Hank had established a geology department at Beloit and was named its chair. In 1949 he married Helen “Lyn” Herald, who was also a geologist and partnered with Hank in their careers. They managed to visit some 38 countries together in their geological field trips and raise a family of two boys. They spent 64 years together until she passed away last July. Through Hank’s summer research—spanning four decades in the pristine Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada west of Lake Superior with more than 100 students from Beloit and other colleges—the field of geology developed an understanding of the formation of the northern midsection of North America 2.6 billion years ago. In 1987 the National Association of Geoscience Teachers presented Hank with the prestigious Neil Miner Award, recognizing his exceptional contributions in stimulating interest in the earth sciences. He was a founding member and coordinator of the Keck Consortium, a model for collaborative undergraduate and faculty research. He continues office hours on campus and is active with the Society for Learning Unlimited.


Sonny Drury remembers talking with Duke Ellington at the Roseland Ball Room in 1946 to check his program for Green Key the next weekend. The Duke said, “We know what to play.” They opened with “Take the A Train” and the place was theirs.


—Dave Kurr, 4281 Indian Field Road, Clinton, NY, 13323; (315) 853-3582; dkkurr@verizon.net