David I. Blumenstock, 1913-1963

Abstract

David I Blumenstock, 1913-1963 CAKL O. Sauer* David I. Blumenstock first came to Berkeley in the summer of 1935, newly graduated from the University of Chicago, where he had studied geology and mathematics along with geography. He made his own way through college in those depression years, somewhat by aid of scholarships, then of very modest amounts and under sharp competition. That he held three scholarships in his undergraduate days does not mark him as an award hunter but as necessitous and enterprising. His interest in money never extended beyond immediate and minimal needs until his marriage in 1946 when his wife Nancy began to inform him gently of the uses of ahouseholdbudget. I do not know nor think that he ever took a position for its salary or prestige. The graduate years at Berkeley turned him to climatology, working under John Leighly, jointly exercising their mathematical bents on the dynamics of weather. David was a member of my weekend field course, at that time directed to the Marin shore north of San Francisco. It was a lively group, sparked in particular by himself and Erhard Rostlund, complementary personalities who formed a lifelong friendship. Surf and tide, cliffed headlands about pocket beaches, marine terraces, coastal chaparral and wind-sheared laurel and oaks, redwoods in the canyons, sheep and cattle pastures, and houses sheltered and designed against the sea wind were the stuff for observation and discussion. The Chicago city lad saw alertly and sharply and at noon lunch and evening camp would spice learning with spontaneous fun. * Chairman of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, CaI., 94720, from 1923 until 1954, Dr. Sauer has been Professor Emeritus since 1957. 9 10ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS As teaching assistant, he communicated to undergraduates his and our interests in the wider substances and problems of physical and cultural geography. To our instruction he added work in geology and plant physiology, and courses in anthropology with Kroeber and Lowie. Professor Kroeber at the time was drawing up the trait list for California Indians and trying to determine their statistical correlations , to which David contributed a critique of relevance and validity. From 1938 to 1941 he was Research Climatologist in the Soil Conservation Service at Washington under Warren Thornthwaite, completing his dissertation on drought lengths and frequencies in the United States. The USDA Yearbook of Agriculture of 1941 carried their joint memoir, Climate and the World Pattern. The Climatic and Physiographic Division was engaged in various studies of good promise as to the processes and incidence of soil erosion until interrupted by the war. During the war years David served as meteorologist and climatologist in various capacities. He was in the Army Air Force Weather Service at Washington until 1944, with terms at UCLA and California Institute of Technology. The studies which he directed, made, or shared concerned possible military objectives and contingencies and were restricted within the Defense Department. In 1944 he was assigned by the U.S. Naval Reserve to Pan American Airways as weather forecaster of the Naval Air Transport Service; he was stationed in New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Hawaii. In 1945 he returned to the Army Air Force Weather Service as Consultant and Senior Meteorologist, working in Asheville, N.C.; at Langley Field, Virginia; and in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, he had begun to compose his thinking on the mobile atmosphere that was to result after a decade in the Ocean of Air (published in 1959). After the war he was attached to the Navy Electronics Laboratory at Point Lorna in charge of publications and as a member of the administration. Also, he tried out his climatology at San Diego State College and at San Francisco State College. In 1951 he returned to the Atlantic coast as consultant to the Army Air Force in Washington and Baltimore, adding a position as lecturer at Rutgers University from 1952 to 1955. He was an active VOLUME 30 f YEARBOOK t 196811 participant in the Wenner-Gren Symposium at Princeton in 1955 and guided an international group across New Jersey as an excursion in human ecology. In 1956 he came back to the Pacific to be...