Memorial to Stanley G. Wissler 1900-1990

WILLIAM R. MORAN La Cañada, California

F. DOUGLAS CRAWFORD Guerneville, California

There was never any question that Stanley G. Wissler would make his mark in the sciences, although from time to time in the beginning there was some question as to just which scientific pursuit would take precedence; actually, he had two distinguished, although overlapping, careers in the fields of paleontology and petroleum geology.

The son of Clark Wissler, Curator of Anthropology and Dean of the Scientific Staff, American Museum of Natural History, Stan’s arrival in New York City was just three months late for the turn of the century. His early schooling was largely in New York. He graduated in 1922 from Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, with B.S. degrees in both geology and chemistry, the latter having been bolstered by summer work at the University of Illinois. Summer work digging in the Indian mounds of Ohio earned him the offer of a scholarship in archaeology from the Peabody Museum, but he finally decided on graduate work at Columbia rather than Harvard or Yale, free room and board having something to do with the decision. At Columbia he was fortunate in being able to work under James Furman Kemp, Charles P. Berkey, Horace N. Coryell, and, above all, Jesse J. Galloway. An extension course in petroleum geology was a deciding factor in Stan’s career. He earned his M.A. in petroleum geology and sedimentation in 1923 and continued as a graduate assistant in micropaleontology and stratigraphy at Columbia through 1924.

As the result of a summer consulting job in Tampico and Tobasco in 1923, Galloway had become convinced that foraminifera could be an important tool in oil exploration. In the fall of 1923, he offered the first formal course in forams; his students were George H. Doane, John C. Miller, Corbin D. Fletcher, Maynard P. White, and Stan Wissler. There was no textbook other than Chapman’s work of 1902, so the group began collecting all foram descriptions they could find at the Columbia, American Museum, Yale, Harvard, and U.S. Geological Survey libraries. All plates were copied photographically and pertinent data on age and horizon were added. David White visited Columbia and was so impressed by the work Galloway and his students were doing that he urged publication. (After a long and complex history, which included many revisions, much of this work was eventually privately published in 1933.)

Oil companies began to get word of the work going on at Columbia, and late in 1924, Wissler received an offer from Rolf C. McCollum of Union Oil Company of California to head west and apply the new correlation methods to the company’s oil search in southern California. Union gave Stan half-pay for the first six months in 1925 while he finished some of his work at Columbia and began to gather data on the Pliocene forams of California. By mid-year, he was established at Union’s research facility, then at Wilmington, California.

Life was not easy. In the first place, there was a healthy skepticism in the geological and production departments concerning the real value of “bugs.” Stan had wisely made it a condi

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82 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAtion of his job that he would be allowed to have at least a year to sample and zone the strati- graphic section before undertaking correlations. Stored samples and cores were a help and, as the result of some rather spectacular prognostications and some commercial oil discoveries based on Wissler’s foram correlations, most of the doubters became believers.

Writing in 1970, Robert M. Kleinpell said: “In 1927, with Professor Galloway, [Wissler] published the first modem scientific paper on the California Cenozoic Foraminifera in the first number of the first volume of the Journal o f Paleontology. But at the time of publication Wissler had already been two years with the Union Oil Company and was just beginning his well-fought battle for the recognition of foraminiferal paleontology as an invaluable tool in subsurface exploration. The [highly faulted] Dominguez oil field was the arena of his victory, and in the eyes of Union Oil it was such a victory that he was soon responsible not only for helping the geologists correlate strata but also for telling the petroleum engineers where to set pipe.”

From July of 1925 to March of 1930, Wissler was research supervisor in charge of foram and heavy-mineral correlation work at Union’s Wilmington lab. During this time, he set up field and lab techniques and procedures, and built an efficient working staff that could process and provide rapid determinations on samples shipped to the lab from drilling wells. During this period, in 1928, Stan spent four months in Miajuapan, Mexico, where he first established surface sections from hand-dug pits and later made correlations on drilling wells. In March 1930, Stan was able to convince the company that a separate paleo department was needed, and he established his famous “Bug Lab” at Dominguez, California, where he became chief paleontologist and was at one time administering a staff of more than 40 people.

By 1935, branch laboratories were opened at Bakersfield and Santa Maria under the direction of Wissler trainees, or as Kleinpell termed them, “second generation professionals.” Among these are found some of the best known names of the California oil business: some eventually started paleo labs for other oil companies; some became independent oil producers, others well- known paleontology consultants.

Concurrently with the work at Dominguez, the paleontology staff expended its investigations throughout southern California. In the Los Angeles basin alone, by 1940, more than 200,000 three-foot core samples, representing essentially complete composite cored sections of the lower Pliocene Repetto formation and the upper Miocene Puente formation from all of the fields in the basin, had been collected and examined. At least 90% of the considerably more than 8 billion barrels of oil that have been produced in the basin came from these two formations.

The Repetto samples were easily washed for examination. In the Puente, however, many of the forams were very thin shelled or crushed, and they disintegrated in the washing process. Stan thought that a careful direct examination of the forams on the bedding planes of the platy shales of the Puente could yield satisfactory correlations, and he assigned Bradford C. Jones to study this possibility. This was so successful that correlations were comparable in quality to those made in the overlying Repetto formation. Eventually, 18 foram zones with 67 subzones were established in the Repetto, and five divisions with 55 marker horizons were recognized in the Puente. Although some of these faunal subdivisions are less than ten feet thick, they can be recognized over the greater part of the Los Angeles basin. In a 1943 paper, Stan wrote: “No single sand or shale body extends over the entire basin. In general, the lateral variation from sand to shale is so extreme that interfield correlations based on lithology alone or on a comparison of electric logs are impracticable and extremely precarious. Therefore, Foraminifera offer the only feasible means of interfield correlation.”

Studies by the Union Oil paleo staff made during the forties to early sixties of the forams in the Ventura basin were the basis for detailed geologic mapping of a large part of the Santa Barbara Channel. This mapping became an integral component in the appraisal of the oil-producing potential of the area prior to the bidding for lease parcels in the fifties and sixties. Union Oil’s

MEMORIAL TO STANLEY O. WISSLER 83paleo department still prospers 66 years after Stan founded it in 1925. Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey awarded five members of the department (now called the paleontology-bio- stratigraphy group at Ventura, California) the John Wesley Powell award, recognizing the value of work done to describe the geologic history and energy-resource potential o f California’s Santa Maria oil province.

During the 18 years when Stan Wissler reigned at his Dominguez bug lab, he had opportunities to initiate and expand paleontological studies in Kansas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, as well as Mexico and the Philippines. He also made literature studies on the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, Africa, and elsewhere. While still supervising the work of three paleo labs, he gradually became involved in regional as well as local geological studies, leasing recommendations, and other functions o f the Union geological department.

In the fall and winter of 1949 he assisted Walter Heathman and Chief Geologist Earl B. Noble in organizing the geological department of the newly formed Union Oil Company of Canada. It was also in 1949 that Stan gave up immediate supervision of the paleolabs and became chief geologist for the Pacific Coast for Union Oil, moving his office from Dominguez to Los Angeles. In 1951, he became assistant to the chief geologist (then Lon D. Cartwright), and in 1954, he joined Union’s Special Exploration Group, under the direction of John C. Haz- zard, where he remained until his retirement in 1965. During the latter period with Union, Wissler made many important contributions by performing detailed regional studies in such areas as the Williston and Salina basins, Montana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana, as well as a number of foreign areas.

After retirement from Union, between 1965 and 1970, Wissler was a consultant to International Resources Ltd., and a member of a six-man team sent to the Far East to discuss natural resources potential with the governments of the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma, Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Taiwan. From 1970 to 1973, he was a partner in the consulting firm of Haz- zard, Morris and Associates, after which he continued doing consulting work from his home in Long Beach, California.

Early in 1926, Wissler had been one of an informal group (including Guy Miller, George Doane, Herschel Driver, Don Hughes, W.S.W. Kew, Ralph Reed, and others) which began to hold monthly dinner meetings to discuss common problems, one o f the most important of which was to “sell” field geologists on forams. During the first few meetings, the principal subjects of discussion were taxonomy and the Cushman and Galloway classifications. In order to have a common denominator, different outcrop sections in southern California were assigned to the various oil company labs represented to work up and report on, and duplicate sets of slides were provided for each participant. In 1927, Wissler attended the AAPG meeting in Tulsa, at which the SEPM was formally organized and named. He proposed the informal Pacific Coast group as a formal SEPM Section, and nominated Don Hughes for vice president. Wissler became Chairman of the Pacific Coast Section in 1928, and he was elected SEPM president for 1937-1938. During his term as president, SEPM headquarters was moved from Ft. Worth to Tulsa.

In an interview in 1965, Stan was asked to tell his most interesting experience during more than 40 years at Union Oil. He replied: “There were too many! But I’ll never forget the time an engineer representing another company brought some Wilmington field core samples to Dominguez for identification. When he returned for the report that afternoon, I told him one of the cores had been tagged at the wrong end, i.e., it was upside down. We knew, because the older bugs appeared at the top instead of the bottom of this core. He went back to the well, reexamined the core, talked to the driller, and found that I was right. The core had been tagged upside down, but how we knew remained a mystery to him. The story spread all through the oil fields!” Such is the stuff of which real legends are made!

Stanley Wissler was married October 26,1926, to Agnes Meerhoff, whom he lost just six

84 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAmonths before his own death, which occurred on their 64th wedding anniversary. They are survived by one daughter and two sons, eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Inspired mentor. Loyal friend. Delightful companion. True scientist.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF S. G. WISSLER1927 (with Galloway, J. J.) Correction of names of Foraminifera: Journal of Paleontology, v. 1,

p. 193.------ (with Galloway, J. J.) Pleistocene Foraminifera from the Lomita quarry, Palos Verdes

Hills, California: Journal of Paleontology, v. 1, p. 35-87, pi. 7-12.1943 Stratigraphic relations of the producing zones of the Los Angeles basin oil fields, in

Geologic formations and economic development of the oil and gas fields of California: California Division of Mines and Geology Bulletin 118, p. 209-234.

------ (and Dreyer, F. E.) Correlation of the oil fields of the Santa Maria district: CaliforniaDivision of Mines and Geology Bulletin 118, p. 235-238.

1958 Correlation chart of producing zones of Los Angeles basin oil fields, in Guide to thegeology and oil fields of Los Angeles and Ventura regions: AAPG Pacific Section Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, p. 59-61.

Printed in U.S.A. on Recycled Paper 11/91