Biografia transcrita por Rubem Queiroz Cobra do site
The Geological Society of America – Memorials
Visitado em 04-02-2011
THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
In the same year (1932), Arthur Howland, fresh from Princeton, was appointed to the Department of geology at Northwestern. he brought an interest in the petrology of the Mîchigan-Minnesota Precambrian and the research ability to investigate it. He also had a strong love for English literature. Rowland was great medicine for Stark. In many respects they were much alike; they became staunch colleagues and exceptionally loyal friends. For several years they returned to the studies in Minnesota, but this was to be more or less halted when they became important members of the Northwestern project that had been organized by C. H. Behre, Jr., to map South Park, Colorado, and adjacent mountain areas. 1932 was also the year Stark became a Fellow of GSA.
Sometime before 1935, Beecher, who was always quite frail, decided to voyage through parts of the South Seas in search of some locality where his health might improve. In the Society Islands he found such a spot and forthwith resigned his university post to live in Tahiti, where he purchased a coconut and vanilla plantation. In subsequent visits to Tahiti, Stark developed an interest in the volcanics, particularly of Borabora, Raiatea, and Moorea; he set about to develop techniques for identifying characteristics of individual and coeval flows. Later he was to return to this interest when he joined the U.S. Geological Survey to continue similar mapping in Guam.
Two significant events in Stark’s life occurred about this time. The first was his marriage to a young and pretty Tahitian girl; the second was the involvement of the United States in World War II. From the marriage, which was severed during the latter stages of the war, came Stark’s beautiful daughter, Teura. She spent her early years in the islands, but later came to the United States to be reunited with her father.
Between intervals of mapping in Borabora, Stark was asked in 1937 to join a party, chiefly of California geologists, to undertake structural studies of the Precambrian of the Grand Canyon. The canyon was then still poorly known, and traversing certain rapids with wooden boats equipped only with oars was extremely hazardous and time consuming. Unfortunately there were also problems ofjurisdiction, as well as mistakes in preparation, and very little publication resulted.
Sometime in the mid-193Os, Stark met Oliver Jahn, an Evanston, Illinois, resident who was knowledgeable in financial matters and the two developed a friendship which was to grow for more than 50 years. Jahn guided Stark in organizing his financial condition. Although they saw one another only occasionally after Stark’s retirement from professional life, they renewed their staunch friendship during three separate round-the-world cruises on freighters.
Stark had a personality which attracted people. He was never long in becoming part of the group of writers, artists, local politicians, geologists, and others, wherever the place might be. He enjoyed young people and invariably developed a strong rapport with graduate and undergraduate students. He was their confidant, good friend, and often their benefactor. Wherever Stark arrived, the social life was enriched, as when he brought musicians, artists, and writers – including Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall – into a closely knit group who enjoyed one another thoroughly during their stay in Tahiti.
In 1940, having returned to Northwestern from Tahiti, Stark became interested in mapping the Precambrian of the Los Pinos and Manzano Ranges in New Mexico, but this came to an end when the U.S. entered World War II. Stark, who was then 56, enlisted as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Force, and was assigned to the Arctic-Desert-Tropic Information Center. His duties were to help develop route descriptions between the U.S. and Panama, vanous countries in South America, North Africa, and China. Also, his group prepared survival manuals, intelligence reports, and a handbook on Burma for Air Force personnel. By 1944 he was transferred to the Office of Strategic Service where he was chief of a division attached to the 15th Army of Great Britain for the second Burma campaign. Later, as a major, he was commander of a final briefing