2. A College as Big as All Outdoors

2. A College as Big as All Outdoors Bill Broyles (bio) High school had been an ordeal for Ronald and undoubtedly for his family, but for him education could be found in the hills around his childhood home and in the mountains of the West. Following his graduation in June of 1928, he broke free of the East and his family almost as soon as he received his diploma. His university would be the great outdoors. Ronald explained his decision this way: "I headed west to Boulder when I was 18. It was a long way from the Friends meeting house and a long way from shrinking female relatives. Each one had a different story of what God demanded. I could never get them to agree on anything. They were overly-devout and we had a great deal of religious disagreement. I didn't like the East particularly probably because it had, let's say, too much Jesus and not enough good sense."100 Not only did Ronald explore academics, but he also explored new [End Page 264] territory. Ronald's interest in geology apparently grew from his childhood in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. At age nine he was somewhat interested in Chestnut Hill outside Philadelphia. It had exposures of mica and schist, and just north of the city was a marble quarry. He said that he got interested by watching the new cuts in the Pennsylvania railroad. They reduced the grade on the Chestnut Hill branch and went through a whole series of Wissahickon Formation schists and red sandstone quartzites. I watched it being dug out with steam shovels, footprints in sandstone and things like that. It was three blocks from our house. Just outside of Philadelphia, a few miles from where we lived, they had marble quarries from which parts of Independence Hall were taken.101 Too, back when I was in high school I found a lead line in Ellenville, New York, about 45 miles from Montclair. I rode out there on my bicycle and collected, I guess, 50 pounds of galena, one of the crystals used in radios. I broke the galena up into quarterinch tubes and sold them for $.25 a piece. In those days, that was wealth. All through high school I made a reasonable income from the sale of crystals for radios until about 1928 when I graduated, and by then crystals were on their way out and vacuum tubes were coming in.102 Glaciation drew his interest when he visited a glacier-carved lake near Paterson, New Jersey, at age 10.103 Later his 1937 master's thesis was about glaciation (in 1947 he earned a second master's degree in geography). His father was not interested in geology to any particular extent, but Ronald asked questions of everyone, a form of inquiry that he practiced the rest of his life. Even as a boy he was comfortable conversing with adults on an academic level. And he was intrigued by the laval palisades along the Hudson River. It was heady stuff for a 10-year-old. It is nice to think of a young Ives seeing rocks and learning about deposition, eruption, and rock sequences, much like an early Robert Chambers or Charles Darwin. That experience plus a book helped lure him to the Pinacate region of northwest Sonora; he had read it when he was starting grade school. "Back in about 1915, I picked up a copy of W. T. Hornaday's book Camp-fires on Desert and Lava.104 He was the first Anglo to go in the area and write any publication about it. I read the book and was interested. I had a chance to get down there, and I went down and took a look. That was 1931. Obviously, Hornaday hadn't gotten it [End Page 265] all. So I've been planning to get more ever since. I think I've raised more problems than I've solved, which is standard."105 When asked what launched his first scientific interest in the Pinacate, he replied, "Volcanics. It is lava beds with desert on both sides. Besides the lava beds, you have a shield volcano...

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