4. Back on Campus

Abstract

4. Back on Campus Bill Broyles (bio) Following his stint in the army, at age 37 Ronald Ives returned to college, this time at Indiana University in Bloomington, seeking his doctorate degree in geography. He entered graduate school in geography on October 11, 1946, and acquired his MA degree on October 15, 1947, and a PhD on June 12, 1950.187 He came to campus in July 1946 as a research associate and instructor. His work finished, he left by August 1950. He chose Indiana so he could study geography, not geology as you might expect. Apparently he had decided that he loved the wider range of geography as a discipline. He could incorporate his love of meteorology and history with his experience in geology. He was seeing things on a landscape scale. He went to Indiana, he said, because "I got offered a teaching fellowship there. I was in the Army and it turned out to be fraudulent. I didn't know it until I arrived that Indiana was using the GI Bill.188 I got the money, but instead of being a teaching university, they were feeding on the GI Bill."189 But he stuck with it. The Geography Department at Indiana University was launched in the summer of 1946. In fact its classes began three weeks late and its temporary quarters were in the attic of Rawles Hall after previously having been taught within the geology department. Too, many war veterans were returning to school, creating a bulge in enrollment. It is unclear if Ronald himself was taking advantage of the GI Bill to help finance his studies, but obviously he had hoped for more from his fellowship. Over his entire life he seldom had financial help from anyone, whether his father, a scholarship, or grants. "I got a couple of grants from the American Philosophical Society back in the 1930s to work on glaciation in Colorado. It was quite a small grant, $300 or something, but it was a help." Even on his now-classic paper "The Pinacate Region, Sonora, Mexico,"190 which involved considerable expense and time, he relied on [End Page 292] his own pocket. "I contacted the National Academy of Sciences about that. We went back and forth and they told me that unless I could prove something in advance, they weren't interested. I didn't work that way."191 Ives had his sights set on the doctorate degree, but as was common in those days, he earned a master's degree along the way. His master's work in geology at Colorado would not have prepared him fully for geography, so he needed to take those first-year courses that brought him to the master's. We wonder if the wise counsel of NDRA professors at Dugway helped encourage him to get the piece of diploma paper that would place him alongside his peers. We hear echoes of his sister saying that even in high school he found himself lagging behind employees who had a diploma, so he returned to school. One of his trusted advisors was Dr. Thomas F. Barton, who joined the school in 1947 and managed the Journal of Geography from 1950 to 1965. Regularly Indiana University still bestows the Thomas F. Barton Award to exemplary students. Ives was a teaching assistant in economic geography and physical geography, two required undergraduate classes. In addition to teaching, Ives helped establish a U.S. Airway Weather Station at the university. His doctoral committee included geographers Stephen Visher192 and Otis Starkey.193 It was said that one of the professors in botany got talking about tundra and Ives had walked over most of the tundra in the Rocky Mountains, and he knew so much about it that he could answer questions this botany professor had been wanting answered that it almost became a monologue.194 Barton readily remembered Ives and talked about him 30 years after he graduated. In addition to doing his teaching and his dissertation, he was still busy writing articles. Ronald would come to the office after his evening meal and work until one or two o'clock in the morning, depending on how interested he was...