by Michael Arthur, Terry Engelder, Hiroshi Ohmoto, Rudy Slingerland,and Barry Voight, all professors emeritus
The June 1963 newsletter of Penn State’s College of Mineral Industries announced that a visiting professor of geology had been appointed for the spring term in the Geology and Geophysics unit of the colleges’ Division of Earth Sciences. That visiting professor was Dr. Albert Lee Guber, a promising young paleontologist who recently graduated from the University of Illinois and was coming off a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the Universities of Stockholm and Uppsala and Imperial College, London. It marked the start of an influential thirty-four-year career of teaching, research, and service. Al Guber retired in 1996 as professor emeritus of geology and died January 16, 2021, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, at the age of 85.
Al was born and raised in Heidelburg, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh in the Pennsylvanian coal measures, where he first developed an interest in geology. He received his B.S. degree in geology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1957 and his doctorate in geology from the University of Illinois in 1962 with a dissertation somewhat enigmatically entitled, “Some Richmond (Ordovician) Ostracodes from Indiana and Ohio.”
After arriving at Penn State, Al continued his early work revolving around problems of sexual dimorphism, population structure, and taxonomy of Ordovician Ostracodes. But given his geological expertise he was quickly drawn into studies of western Pennsylvania coals, showing for example, that their sulfur content could be predicted by knowing the origin of their covering shales. By the early 1970s it had also become clear that Al was a superb teacher, particularly at the undergraduate level. In 1972 he helped create, and became the director of, Penn State’s ten-week field and lab program at the Wallops Island Marine Science Consortium on the Virginia Eastern Shore. It was Al’s conviction that hands-on problem definition, data collection, and hypothesis testing was the best training one could give the next generation. Consequently, the new program consisted of a sequential curriculum in marine engineering, coastal geology, and coastal biology and ecosystems, all organized around particular problems to be solved by the students in the field and lab. Al conducted interviews during the winter quarter and selected about fifty students from a range of discipline backgrounds including biology, geology, geophysics, Earth science, education, and business. Al and the students then spent the spring term living and working together at the Wallops Field Station as other faculty came and went. As one student said, “The program was what a university should be all about but never usually is—a place for learning and working together towards a mutual understanding of some process or processes.”
In recognition of this innovative and effective program, Al received Penn State’s highest teaching award in 1974, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. His continuing efforts were also acknowledged by the college’s Wilson Teaching Award, and in 2020 his former students endowed the Al Guber Program Fund in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences in recognition of his life-long impact.
Reflections from emeriti faculty
Although all of us were fond colleagues of Al, we knew him in different ways. Rudy Slingerland was initially a student early in Al’s teaching and research career. Mike Arthur first met Al when he came to Penn State as department head in 1991, and Al held the position of associate head for undergraduate programs in the department. Rudy, Mike, and Barry Voight taught with Al in the Wallops Marine Science Program over parts of its history—Rudy and Barry during its early phase as a term course on coastal ecology, engineering, and geology, and Mike in its last few years as a three-week long component of a more extensive Marine Science curriculum. Hiroshi Ohmoto worked closely with Al during the multi-year Kuroko research project, and Barry and his family were close friends with Al and his family. Al was Terry Engelder’s undergraduate adviser and was instrumental in guiding him into the geosciences.
In 1977, Hiroshi had just returned from a sabbatical leave in Japan where his research focus was the origin of the Kuroko deposits, which were thought to be formed by submarine hydrothermal fluids that were discharged in shallow marine basins. The “evidence” was the findings by some paleontologists of microfossils of “shallow-sea” benthic foraminifera in mudstones that were interbedded with the massive sulfide ores. However, he was unhappy with the shallow-sea model. As Hiroshi says, “I took the list of foraminifera fossils from the Kuroko district to Al and asked if he would evaluate the data. Al found that the list contained widely different groups of foraminifera, some that lived in shallow seas and some that lived in very deep oceans and suggested the only plausible explanation for such
mixtures is that the formation environment for Kuroko deposits was a very deep seafloor where shallow-sea sediments were transported as turbidites. After the Kuroko Project, our research interests went separate ways, but our friendship endured, with conversations about our respective fields, football and wine, and our families. Beyond the science and the teaching, we most remember Al as a wonderful colleague and friend.”
Barry and MaryAnne Voight said, “Al and Nancy and their two kids, Al Jr. and Lisa, were favorite persons of ours since the 1960s at Penn State. We have many memories of dinners and random visits to their Boalsburg home, and to Al’s Master Gardener productions in his backyard farm. He was such a generous and kind guy! And talented too, in his office work, and in his cellar wine laboratory! What is chemistry for, if not for that? At home with his vineyard and after grape collection expeditions, he demonstrated great skill with developing white wines, and thereby had earned many wine society awards. We commonly returned home from his place in Boalsburg with fresh veggies in a stuffed bag, and bottles of fresh good wine in our pockets. Upon hearing of his death, we went to our Atherton Street wine store and got bottles of fine New York State white with which to toast this memory. We’d much rather have gotten an Al original, but we can’t get them anymore.” Al was an accomplished amateur wine maker and ranked among the American Wine Society’s top fifteen amateurs for several years.
Mike Arthur said, “I arrived at Penn State in early 1991, and Al retired in 1996, but it seemed as though we had known each other for decades. After Al grilled me about my interest and dedication to teaching undergraduates, it didn’t take long before Al had me teaching Geosc 040, Oceanography, and the Wallops 3-week course in the Marine Science Program. Soon we were taking trips to wineries near Lake Erie to procure wine grapes for fermenting and talking extensively about departmental issues, teaching, and geology.”
Rudy Slingerland said, “As a young graduate student, I had the pleasure to watch Al sit in the faculty office at Wallops and kibitz with Gene Williams and Bob Schmalz. It was clear Gene and Bob loved Al for his earnestness, his enthusiasm for our science and the teaching of it, and for his warm and caring concern for his colleagues and students. Could we all be such good colleagues…”
Terry Engelder said, “My wife of 51 years, Janice (Wicks), and I knew Professor Albert Guber almost from the beginning of his distinguished career at Penn State. Our long relationship started soon after his arrival in Happy Valley in the early 1960s.
I arrived on campus early in the fall of 1964 as an athlete, a recruited distance runner. The academic nature of the University was not a major factor in my decision to enroll at Penn State. Furthermore, I had no idea that the Division of Earth Sciences, of which Al Guber was a member, was one of the more highly ranked academic units with a focus on geosciences in the nation. At the time Al was the low man on the faculty totem pole and was charged with advising new students and talking to those who might walk in randomly off the street. Although I had not declared as a geosciences major, Al recommended the usual courses for an incoming freshman who had an inkling that geology was his cup of tea. Arguably, the biggest effect that Al had on me was indirect at best. I met my future wife, Janice Wicks, the semester she was taking Al’s general education class, GEOSC 40. Al was a good cook and brought his passion into the classroom. In GEOSC 40, he was asked how the folds of the Appalachian Valley and Ridge were formed. Back then, gravity tectonics was the favorite explanation, championed by Penn State’s Rob Scholten. Al used a thin crust of pie dough sliding on a base of flour. Lifting the end of the table, Al got the dough to slid downhill against piece of wood clamped to the edge of the table. The pie dough wrinkled in a series of folds much like the view of the area around State College from an airplane at 35,000 feet. Years later Al and his wife, Nancy, were our hosts when we returned to State College on a house-hunting trip, and we actually got to eat a piece of that pie.”
After retirement Al and Nancy continued to live in Boalsburg where Al served on the Boalsburg water board for years. They ardently followed Penn State and Pittsburgh sport teams, particularly Penn State women’s basketball. In 2010 they moved from State College to Virginia to be closer to family and where Nancy preceded Al in death. Al is survived by his daughter, Lisa D’Albis and her husband Michael, Al’s son Albert Lynn Guber and wife Kendra, a sister, Marlene Gibson of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and his five granddaughters, Alexandra, Brianna, Olivia, Chenin, and Kate.