Memorial to Arthur Sidney Huey1909-1984

JOHN KILKENNY1120 S. Fourth Street, Alhambra, California 91801

Arthur S. Huey was born in Kansas, July 29,1909. His father, an avid reader and inventor, died at an early age during the flu epidemic of 1918. Shortly afterward, his mother moved the family to Los Angeles. Here he continued his education, first in junior high school and then at Manual Arts High School, where he excelled both as a student and in extracurricular activities.He was president of the student body in his senior year, participated in athletics, and was a member of the Artisan and Coterie Club, which still meets regularly more than 60 years after its founding.

Art entered the University of Southern California on a full scholarship in 1928. Influenced by Professor John Bradley, he chose geology as his major. He won the Lottie Lane Award for the highest grades in the School of Arts and Sciences and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Tau social fraternity and Sigma Gamma Epsilon honorary geology fraternity. He graduated with honors in 1932.

After graduation, Art had an opportunity to work for Union Oil Company as a junior chemist in their Wilmington laboratory, which was a holding pen for future staffing of various departments that were inactive due to the depression. Instead, Art decided to accept a teaching fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. It was here that I met him after an exchange of elbows in an interfraternity basketball game in the fall of 1932.

Art’s first graduate year was mainly occupied with taking the Berkeley Hills Field Geology course and other important undergraduate courses, taught mostly by N. L. Taliaferro. The next year he became a teaching assistant; it was then that I first began to appreciate his great teaching ability. I was having trouble with optical mineralogy and attended a seminar given by Art just before the final examinations. This enabled me to obtain a respectable grade in the course.

Art’s doctoral thesis was on the Tesla quadrangle near Livermore, California. This was an area of complex structure and stratigraphy in an old channel connecting the San Joaquin Valley with the Livermore Basin. The thesis was published by the California State Division of Mines and Geology as Bulletin 140. The work was done under Taliaferro’s supervision, and out of it came the proposal to use the name Moreno Grande Formation to include beds of similar lithology previously mapped as the Moreno Formation by Anderson and Pack of the U.S. Geological Survey (1911). The Moreno Grande, however, included units of the Upper Cretaceous that are not time equivalents. This classification helped to clarify the stratigraphy of a very controversial part of the geological section in the San Joaquin Valley.

Art completed most of his work toward a Ph.D. in 1936 and went to work for the Shell Oil Company in Bakersfield, California, as a field geologist. He mapped the south and west sides of the San Joaquin Valley and presented several elucidating papers on Cretaceous stratigraphy at meetings of the AAPG Pacific Section. Art and I continued our basketball rivalry during our spare time, playing in the City of Bakersfield Industrial League, in company with such players as Dudley Tower, later president of Union Oil Company, and Lee “Rubberlegs” Guttero, University of Southern California All

2 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

American. In an exhibition at the end of the season, we learned some of the finer points of the game from the touring Harlem Globetrotters’ second-string team.

In 1940, after receiving his Ph.D., the most important event of Art’s life occurred. A friend of his had been dating a beautiful young lady from Texas by the name of La Verne Brunson. After giving his friend due warning of his intentions, Art proposed to her; shortly afterward they were married in Texas.

The following year, Shell discovered the Antelope Hills Field, based on Art’s field and subsurface work on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in Kern County. In 1943, Art was transferred to Montana. He and La Verne had established a nice home in Bakersfield and it was quite a jolt to make their first move into a remote area with a precarious housing situation. They learned to appreciate the rigors of Rocky Mountain winter exploration, and the following year, they returned to Bakersfield where Art was promoted to San Joaquin division geologist for Shell. In 1946, Art served as president of the San Joaquin Valley Geological Society, his year marked by many interesting and meaty programs.

In 1948, Art resigned from Shell to become chief geologist for Hancock Oil Company in Long Beach, where he built a high-quality exploration department and program. His exploration department is credited with discoveries at East Gosford, North Gosford, and Arvin in the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Alamitos Field in the Los Angeles Basin. They participated in the Russell Ranch Field of the Cuyama Valley, and also found the South Glenrock Field in Wyoming and participated in a joint discovery at Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Art truly proved himself an oil finder.

With the passing of Will Reid, Hancock’s chief executive officer and the sparkplug of the company, Hancock merged with Signal Oil and Gas Company, which also originated at Long Beach. In the reorganization that followed, Art became chief foreign geologist. One of his first projects was a major research study of the North Sea. He reviewed the surface geology in the adjacent countries— Great Britain, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark—and concluded that there was a major sedimentary basin with oil and gas potential under these waters. As a result, Signal established a position in this offshore area (one of the first companies to do so) and participated in the discovery of an offshore gas field in British waters. Art made a number of other studies of foreign areas throughout the world. His last work for Signal was as assistant manager in Tunisia.

In 1966, Art left Signal to go into consulting and independent ventures. From 1968 to 1970 he was president of Oil Securities, Inc., and from 1970 to 1973 he was a director and member of the executive committee of PEDCO, a corporation with large holdings in the Eastern Hemisphere. In 1980, he became vice-president of CEMCO, an Irvine corporation, retiring in 1983.

In spite of his industry work load and frequent traveling, Art found time to be active in AAPG affairs, especially in the Pacific Section. In 1950 he was vice-president of the Pacific Section and was a candidate for president the following year. In 1951, Art compiled and edited the first Pacific Section directory with pictures of the members, no mean feat at that time. In 1961, mainly through his instigation, the Honorary Life Membership Award was established, and Art served as awards chairman in 1962 and 1963. In 1983, Art himself was the recipient of this award. During his career he gave many papers at Pacific Section meetings and at local society meetings. He was an outstanding speaker, and his talks were always well organized and well illustrated. He would have been a strong candidate for the Levorsen Award, if such an award had been given in those days.

Late in his career, Art became active in the Branner Club, a small but distinguished scholarly geological group founded in 1921 and named after J. C. Branner, a renowned early professor of geology at Stanford University. Art was president in 1970 and 1971. He organized and led a field trip to Copper Canyon in Death Valley to inspect fossil footprints and prepared replicas of the original charter for presentation to the remaining charter members. Later he was elected to life membership in this organization.

Art was a member of the AAPG business committee for several years and was on the executive

MEMORIAL TO ARTHUR SIDNEY HUEY 3committee of Long Beach State University. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Frontiers o f Science and Technology.

One of Art’s hobbies was working with wood. He built a pool table, map racks, and other useful items around the house and in his office. Art and La Verne belonged to the Los Amigos Dance Club for many years. Later, they purchased a chalet in the Lake Gregory area of the San Bernardino Mountains, where they spent many happy and relaxing weekends.

Art suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years before his passing early in December,1984. He is survived by La Verne and two children: Ray, who is a professor of zoology at the University of Washington, and Shauni, who is a chiropractor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Art will be remembered for his many contributions to his profession, especially to the knowledge of California petroleum geology. It was a great privilege to know him, and he will be sorely missed by his many friends, most especially by his family.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF A. S. HUEY1948 Geology of the Tesla quadrangle, California: California Department of Natural Resources,

Division of Mines, Bulletin 140, 75 p.1951 Future oil provinces of North America: Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum

Geologists, v. 35, no. 2, p. 219-223.

Printed in U.S.A. 11/87