Editor’s note: The delightful material that follows was kindly supplied by our distinguished alumna Janet Franklin (PhD 1988) in response to the October 30 article, “Can You Name These Vagabonds?” Dr. Franklin is a Senior Sustainability Scientist, Global Institute of Sustainability, and a Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, at Arizona State University.
I started the Master’s program in Geography in January 1980, supervised by Alan Strahler. Alan’s student Curtis Woodcock had gotten me a job with Alan as a summer field assistant in 1979 when I was a Biology undergrad at UCSB (where I had learned, in Bob Haller’s Plants of California botany boot camp, how to distinguish a red from a white fir – which qualified me for Strahler’s project – forest inventory using Landsat). As the Department’s history page recounts, Strahler was one of a cohort of young professors who David Simonett recruited to the faculty to rebuild Geography at UCSB. 1980 was the first year the Ph.D. program was in place, and the first friends I made in graduate school were among the very first to get Ph.D.’s in this program – Curtis, Tom Logan, Doug Stow, Jim Frew, Danny Marks…!
I do remember those Friday happy hours at the English Department (bar). In addition to the barkeeper’s (Bob Brandts) Friday poetry recitations at the E.D., I especially remember the field work, and field trips, from the first half of the decade I spent in the Department. Summers in the Klamath National Forest, camping at Juanita Lake with Strahler and his crew – Curtis Woodcock, Tom Logan, Mike Cosentino – competing to make the most elaborate dinner on a Coleman stove – kung pao chicken, fettuccini alfredo…
There were several Department field trips to Santa Cruz Island. Then the infamous field trip to the Eastern Sierras, Rock Creek, and Mammoth (UC’s SNARL lab) – three UCSB Suburbans in a caravan, driving over the pass to Bodie, hit ice. Strahler, who was driving the first vehicle and who learned to drive in New Jersey, skidded skillfully to a stop on the ice without hitting anything. I was in that car. We looked behind to see the second car slide slowly into a ditch and the third one plow slowly into the rear of the second (both driven by California-born drivers). Fortunately, no one was badly hurt, and after getting one student checked out at the ER, we limped through the rest of the trip with two functional vehicles. I still have never been to Bodie.
My other rich but fuzzy memories from the early 80s are of the remarkable geography students who were my peers at UCSB — I am afraid to recount them for fear of leaving something or someone out. Friends, weddings, babies… Janet Tabor, Barbara Marks, Debbie (Negri) Donohue, Susan Moran, Tim Minor, Peter Burley, Ralph Milliff, Nathan Gale, Steve Yool, Larry Gorenflo, Bob Crippin, Li Xiaowen, Don Taube, Fred and Susan Mertz, Joe and Kathleen Scepan, Elaine (Ezra) and Larry Tinney… (with apologies for my imperfect memory to those I have not mentioned).
I finished my Masters in 1983, and after a year’s internship at NASA HQ in Washington, D.C., I returned to UCSB for a Ph.D. in Geography (1984-1988). Jack Estes, although he was not on my graduate committee, was always a strongly supportive mentor, hiring me as an RA, and landing me the internship at NASA. Jack was incredibly supportive of his students and staff. Alan Strahler had left for Hunter College by 1984, and although Alan was the intellectual mentor of my PhD research, Simonett was officially my Chair, and his job was to crack the whip. He did it well.
I had been in the Department so long that I was there before many of the faculty who are considered among its founders – I remember when Ray Smith, Rick Church, Joel Michaelsen, Frank Davis, Julia Jones, Babs Buttenfield, Helen Couclelis, and Luc Anselin were hired. What I recall about the second half of my decade in the UCSB Geography Department was interacting with the new young faculty (Frank, Babs, Julia, Joel) perhaps overly familiarly, as if they were my slightly older academic siblings. This was in stark contrast with the fear with which I approached any conversation with Simonett or Golledge, the awe I felt in the presence of Terry Smith, Ray Smith, or Waldo Tobler, or the ninja-like alertness with which I entered into any conversation about energy balance with Jeff Dozier.
I also remember the fieldwork – both of my advisers, Strahler and Simonett, paid me supervisorial visits at my field sites in Mali, West Africa. I remember Alan teaching our young collaborators to use the hand-held radiometer, and Simonett buying a large Songhai straw hat in the market, and having to wear it home on the flight, because how do you pack something like that? Here are some rarely seen photos from that trip. I kept the snapshot of Simonett on the camp cot above my desk for many years. It was one of the few times I ever saw him relaxed — or unshaven.
My other strong memories from the second part of the amazing 80s are of the new cohorts of grad students who kept arriving. (Again, with apologies for those I have left out…) Kelly Elder, Scott Goetz, Ralph Dubayah, Ed Harvey, Aaron Goldschmidt, Anuja Parikh, Suchi Gopal, Dave Burroughs, Laura Hess, Marty Landsfeld, Craig Bloxham, Jim Damkowitch, Pete Krsnak, Serge Rey, Mark Friedl, Dave Theobald,… Who were these’ Young Turks’ and what is this place called Penn State? And Canada… eh, Friedl?
I married Serge in 1988! We will celebrate our 24th anniversary this New Year’s Eve.
In 1988, I finished my PhD, Serge his Masters, and that was also the year Mike Goodchild arrived at UCSB. We had the best graduation party, which also served as Mike’s welcome party. Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan played. There were jugglers. Everyone was there.
After 20-something very happy years on the faculty at San Diego State University (where I went immediately after graduation from UCSB), for the last 3 years I have been at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Serge and I were invited here by Luc Anselin, the new Director of the School. Four of the Geography & Planning professors at ASU have PhDs from UCSB Geography – Serge, Alan Murray, Emily Talen, and I. No coincidence. What happened in Geography at UCSB in the 1980s was a watershed and helped to shape 21st century American Geography. Just look at Boston University or the University of Maryland. I know Simonett is smiling down on Tempe, AZ, from geographer’s heaven (where he is bossing everybody around), always gleeful to see his empire expand.
