It is my considered opinion that one can learn a great deal from obituaries, they being a sort of clearinghouse of people of disparate disciplines and walks of life. This is a perfect example.
Jack Oliver, whose studies of earthquakes provided convincing proof that Earth’s continents are constantly moving, died last Wednesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 87. The idea of continental drift, that Earth’s crust is slowly shifting and moving, had been proposed by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but most of the scientific community regarded it with skepticism and often derision through much of the 20th century.
In 1968, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Isacks and another former graduate student of Dr. Oliver, Lynn Sykes, wrote a paper, “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” that put together earthquake evidence from around the world that made a convincing case that continental drift — now called plate tectonics — was indeed occurring.
John Ertle Oliver was born Sept. 26, 1923, in Massillon, Ohio. In high school, he played on Massillon’s championship football team, which was coached by Paul Brown, who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach of the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League.
In his 1998 autobiography, “Shakespeare Got It Wrong: It’s Not ‘to Be,’ It’s ‘to Do,’ ” Dr. Oliver indulged in a fondness for limericks, interspersing them between chapters. Here is one:
The youth wondered what he should be.
His prof said, “You’re missing the key.
Life’s not to be, but to do.
Pick a task, follow through.
You’ll live ever after most happily.”
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