Alumnus Gregory Mohr (BA 1976) recently contacted the Department in order to make a generous donation to the David S. Simonett Memorial Fund and to share some memories of his work in the Geography Remote Sensing Unit (GRSU) in the late 1970s. Greg recently retired after 28+ years as a planner and environmental specialist with Santa Barbara County. During that period, he was a lecturer in the UCSB Environmental Studies Program, was a founding member (and is a current Co-President) of the UCSB Environmental Studies Associates, and, immediately after “retirement,” accepted an offer to join Ryerson, Master & Associates, a small local firm, to help prepare and verify carbon emission inventories for clients as large as SoCal Edison.
Regarding his donation to the Simonett Memorial Fund, Greg states: “without Dave, my life would’ve been very different. He nominated me for a NSF Summer Science Internship in 1975, which led to my ES senior thesis, a related lecture to a lower-division ES class in the last quarter of my senior year, part-time employment during my first year of grad school with the firm that hosted my internship (eventually including my first publication credit), and eventually my recently concluded career with Santa Barbara County and next venture with RMA. I know that Dave was disappointed that I never finished earning the MA, but wish he was still around to see what came of it anyway.”
While going through “some old stuff” recently, Greg unearthed the t-shirt (right) and decided to share his memories of being a “dirt digger”:
In 1977 & 1978, the Geography Remote Sensing Unit was involved in several experiments to see if active and passive microwave and thermal IR sensors could be used to determine soil moisture levels over large areas. I helped collect ground truth (soil moisture levels and temperature profiles) for two studies in the Bakersfield area, and was on the UCSB crew for a much larger effort in the Oklahoma panhandle in August 1978. This was a joint effort with Texas A&M, and one of their professors, Dr. Bruce Blanchard, was the Principle Investigator.
On July 27, 1978, six of us from UCSB set out in two International Carryalls, bound for glory in Guymon OK. I don’t remember the names of all the other five, but recall that Patricia Casey, Don Taube, and maybe Susan Atwater were three of them. Some folks platooned in and out during August, and some of us were there for the duration.
After packing up and having dinner at Heidi Pies in Goleta, we drove most of the night and got a (yes, “one”) cheap motel room in Las Vegas; after a few hours sleep, we gawked through a casino or two (Circus Circus is a vivid, somewhat scary memory), then hit the road again, had dinner at a Chinese place in Kingman AZ that had “Baby Ribs” as an item on its menu, and spent the night in Oak Creek Canyon AZ, between Flagstaff & Sedona. After some hiking and creek-dipping the next day, we again headed out and spent the next night at a motel in Albuquerque NM; I have vivid memories of after-dinner drinks in the bar, watching Saturday Night Live with Steve Martin doing the “King Tut” number (it was my birthday, so it was very special—the others paid for my drinks).
The next day we made it to Guymon and got settled at the motel that would be our home for the next month. Got acquainted with the Aggie field & lab crew, Doc Blanchard, and as many locals as would talk with us hippies from CA. I don’t remember many names from the A&M crew, but do recall Sid Theis, Wes Rosenthal, Jerry Don [whatever], and Doc’s son. Sid and Jerry Don were quintessential Texans, with the drawl and the drool from their ubiquitous “dip,” and were a ton of fun. One night (or afternoon, after field work), Sid & company took a wooden sheep from the community college and posed it in Jerry Don’s bed while he slept; wonder whatever happened to the pictures?
A typical day involved rising before the crack of dawn, having a bite to eat, then hitting the fields to collect our soil samples and temperature profiles before it got too hot. We’d drop off the dirt at the lab at Panhandle State University down the road in Goodwell, where the lab crew (pampered bastards) would weigh the samples wet, dry ‘em, and weigh ‘em again; then we’d get lunch at some local diner. Ate a lot of okra and chicken-fried steak that month. Then, back to Guymon to shower, maybe take a nap, get some beer at the Payless across the street, hang out in and by the pool, and eventually gather for dinner. One restaurant became our favorite; I remember that it had a GIANT block of yellow cheese as the centerpiece of its salad bar. The wait staff and we became very familiar, but I don’t recall any lasting romances. After dinner, we’d sometimes hit a local “club” for some music and dancing, where one of the Aggie women tried to teach me the Texas two-step, but gave up in exasperation because I wouldn’t “lead”; how can a California boy who doesn’t know what he’s doing “lead?”
One regrettable incident happened at the end of a morning of digging dirt. There was a local kid, Rann Dee Betz, or maybe it was Butz (I kid you not), who’d parked his dirt bike right behind our Carryall, which I’d parked facing the hub of a center-pivot irrigator. The bike was lower than the Carryall’s rear window, and I backed right over it and caused “some damage.” After consulting with UCSB legal staff, I took him up to Liberal KS, home of the nearest motorcycle shop, to get the parts he needed to fix the damned thing, paid for ‘em, and got him to sign a release that I drafted in the motel room. What a trip.
Oh yeah, the business end of the experiment: every three days, SEASAT passed over with its active SAR imaging sensor, and every day a NASA C-130 passed over, bristling with every sensor known to then-modern science. One day a B-52 passed over at a hundred feet or so, on a low-level practice run. That blew us out of our shoes and socks!
All too soon, it was over. We headed back to CA, trying not to retrace our steps except to stay again at Oak Creek Canyon AZ. That evening we went down to Sedona for dinner; Don and Sue goaded me into going over to a table of three women in their mid- or late 20s, and asking them to join us. They declined. I still feel the frostbite.
It was a memorable time.
–Greg Mohr, June 2007
The formal outcome of Greg’s adventure was a NASA Final Report (Blanchard, B. J. 1979. Soil moisture determination study. Report # FR-3829; NASA-CR-160046). But the experiential outcome of that adventure, 29 years ago, goes beyond a Final Report, an old t-shirt, and even personal memories. As Greg puts it, “I hope it might give some students hope that what they’re going through probably will be worth it.”
