{"id":1480,"date":"2009-01-17T14:30:20","date_gmt":"2009-01-17T19:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=1480"},"modified":"2014-12-17T14:30:59","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T19:30:59","slug":"great-meanderer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2009\/01\/great-meanderer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Meanderer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo<\/a>In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49 has shaped the brightest minds in geomorphology–and forever changed the field.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman<\/a> \u201949 has shaped the brightest minds in geomorphology\u2014and forever changed the field.<\/p>\n

On a crisp, cloudless morning in late October, on the kind of day that you hope for when someone utters the word \u201cfall,\u201d Markley Gordon \u201cReds\u201d Wolman stands on the grassy banks of Western Run in northern Baltimore County and surveys the water trickling a few feet below.<\/p>\n

Wolman knows the winding creek. He knows it well. Every year for the last 51 years he\u2019s brought the graduate students in his geomorphology class to this narrow, twisting tributary of the Gunpowder River to measure the dimensions of the channel, and to record the geometry of its orderly, repeated bends\u2014what geologists refer to as its \u201cmeander.\u201d With nary a glance, he can tell you where the soil is sandy and where it\u2019s full of clay, why the banks on the near side aren\u2019t as steep as the ones across the way, and the overall nature of the run\u2019s fluvial geomorphology\u2014why it looks the way it does right now and how it will look in the future.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more of a conversation than a lecture, one that Wolman \u201949 energetically leads with a lot of pointing and gesturing. He could spend hours out here.<\/p>\n

The air is cold. The wind persistent. And the terrain\u2014a horse pasture\u2014is pretty rugged for the 84-year-old professor of geography. Wolman, dressed in a bright orange Marmot shell, a navy blazer, khakis, and a polka dot bow tie, has few complaints, however.<\/p>\n

Well, really he has one: He hates the walker that he has been using lately. \u201cMaybe I should have quit teaching after 49 years,\u201d he says. He is smiling.<\/p>\n

Back in 1958, when Wolman joined the Hopkins faculty as an associate professor and chair of the geography department, then part of the School of Arts and Sciences<\/a>, he was a brisk walking, fiery-haired, 34-year-old geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey<\/a> who had already made major contributions to the field.<\/p>\n

His 1953 paper on sampling particle size distribution of riverbeds led to the \u201cWolman Pebble Count\u201d<\/a> as a standard technique for geomorphologists everywhere. Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology<\/a>, the book Wolman co-authored with Luna Leopold and John Miller in 1964,remains a seminal text more than 40 years after it was published. And through his policy and public health work, Wolman has given us new ways to think about the effects of land use, urbanization, and dams on channels and helped frame the international discussion on sustainable development.<\/p>\n

\u201cReds was a critical member of the generation who brought geomorphology from a qualitative historical discipline into a modern quantitative and quasi-engineering field that sat astride its roots in geology and geography and also tried to make engineering recommendations for the betterment of society and social use,\u201d says Jack Schmidt, PhD \u201987, a former Wolman advisee who is now a professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University.<\/p>\n

Wolman\u2019s research has earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences<\/a> and the National Academy of Engineering<\/a> as well as dozens of other prestigious honors and awards. But research has never been all that defines him. He is a teacher, one who has made his mark over the last five decades by shaping some of the brightest minds in the field. On the wall of Wolman\u2019s cluttered third-floor office in Ames Hall, there\u2019s a framed copy of an \u201cacademic family tree\u201d crafted by a former student. It shows how many academic careers have sprouted from the man everyone (from the lowliest undergraduate to the most distinguished university president) calls \u201cReds.\u201d The first few lines show the names of some of Wolman\u2019s early graduate students. Branching off of these names are Wolman\u2019s students\u2019 graduate students in geography and geology and then, those students\u2019 students in these fields. As of 1995, the tree boasted 47 children, 106 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. It\u2019s still growing.<\/p>\n

\u201cReds has a very rare combination of crystalline intelligence, brilliance, commitment to students, charm, and modesty.\u201d \u2014 Gordon Grant, PhD \u201986, Research Hydrologist USDA Forstry Service<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cReds has a very rare combination of crystalline intelligence, brilliance, commitment tostudents, charm, and modesty,\u201d says Gordon Grant, PhD \u201986, a research hydrologist with the USDA forestry service and courtesy professor of geosciences at Oregon State University. \u201cYou can find people who are pretty bright but don\u2019t have the other qualities Reds has. It\u2019s rare to find it all in the same person.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to know what kind of a teacher Wolman is, don\u2019t ask him. Doing so will cause the articulate, witty man with the seemingly insatiable curiosity to clam up like a first semester graduate student. Sitting in his office one recent afternoon, surrounded by stacks of papers and books, with various maps and photographs strewn here and there, he searches for the right assessment of himself. \u201cI guess you can say I\u2019m enthusiastic,\u201d is all he\u2019ll say.<\/p>\n

Ask Wolman\u2019s former students and colleagues about him, however, and the accolades and anecdotes flow. Grant calls his former advisor \u201ca Zen master with overtones of Woody Allen.\u201d He recalls with great delight the Friday afternoon field trips he made as part of Wolman\u2019s geomorphology class. Crammed into a rattling Hopkins van with no seat belts, the smell of brake fluid in the air, the class would visit a series of fields and streams around Baltimore with Wolman at the wheel. While the students would take measurements and jot down notes, Wolman would walk around and smoke a cigar. Then he\u2019d embark on a sort of Socratic dialogue, asking question after question about what they saw and why it looked as it did.<\/p>\n

\"Reds<\/a>
\n\u201cWe were all cold and fumbling for answers,\u201d Grant says. But Wolman never handed them out. Instead he challenged his students to make connections and think for themselves. \u201cReds has an unusual talent for making the people around him, including his students, feel smarter than they really are,\u201d Grant says. \u201cHe creates this illusion that you can actually think better than you really can and after a while you\u2019ve actually created some new synaptic connections. Fundamentally, he taught me to trust my scientific instincts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolman relishes the field trips, and nothing, not even a couple of hip replacements, has led him to stop doing them. Now he just brings along a folding chair. \u201cThere\u2019s no substitute in a field science for going out and seeing what it\u2019s like,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s indispensable. It\u2019s also a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the classroom, Wolman works from a bare-bones syllabus containing such diverse elements as excerpts from Ulysses and Peanuts comic strips. During his informal lectures he might veer from the topic at hand to tell a story about the time he was on the Yellow River or to hand around snapshots he took while cruising down the Mississippi. There is a purpose to it all, says Thomas Dunne, PhD \u201969, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the most prolific branches of Wolman\u2019s academic family tree.<\/p>\n

\u201cReds has this way of seeding little things in your mind that might not come back to you until much later,\u201d Dunne says. \u201cIt\u2019s seamless, his attitude about learning and passing on the learning.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no substitute in a field science for going out and seeing what it\u2019s like\u2026it\u2019s indispensable. It\u2019s also a lot of fun.\u201d \u2014 Reds Wolman<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201dWhether in a classroom or out in the field, Wolman exudes warmth. He seems genuinely interested in what people have to say and doesn\u2019t discount opinions that he disagrees with. At the same time, he\u2019s always challenging people to think for themselves. Just parroting back what you\u2019ve read isn\u2019t going to cut it in a Wolman class, Dunne cautions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn graduate school, students come in predisposed to believe that if something is published it\u2019s correct,\u201d Dunne says. \u201cReds is always trying to remind you that there are all different ways of thinking. He\u2019s always undermining his own authority and other people\u2019s authority so you will think for yourself and not just accept.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teaching comes so naturally to Wolman you would think it has always been his life\u2019s calling.<\/p>\n

It hasn\u2019t. As a child he spent a couple of summers on a family friend\u2019s Connecticut farm and from the time he was about 12 until he was a Hopkins undergraduate, he wanted to be a dairy farmer. \u201cI was a member of the 4HClub and living in a rowhouse in Baltimore,\u201d he says, laughing.<\/p>\n

Wolman\u2019s family has been involved with Hopkins for the better part of a century. His father, Abel Wolman<\/a> \u201913 A&S, \u201915 Eng, is known as the \u201cfather of sanitary engineering.\u201d The elder Wolman pioneered the chlorination process in public water, thereby bringing clean drinking water to millions of people worldwide. Abel Wolman established the Department of Sanitary Engineering in the School of Engineering and the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and chaired it from its start in 1937until 1962. He was involved with Hopkins until his death in 1989 at the age of 96.<\/p>\n

Father and son had a close relationship, one based on reading about and conversing about a wide range of issues, and Abel Wolman\u2019s involvement and interest in the field of natural resources made an impression on young Reds. He decided to pursue his love of the land by studying in the basic sciences related to the landscape. After graduating from Hopkins, he went on to earn an MA and a PhD in geology from Harvard.<\/p>\n

Wolman loved his work with the U.S. Geological Survey, where he worked from 1951 until 1958, but when Hopkins offered him the job as chair of the Isaiah Bowman Department of Geography, there was no question he\u2019d accept. \u201cI\u2019m a Baltimore boy, a Hopkins product,\u201d he says. Committed to the concept that the department become interdisciplinary and focus on all aspects of science and water policy, he was instrumental in bringing together the Department of Geography with the Department of Sanitary and Water Resources Engineering to create the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering<\/a> within the Whiting School of Engineering. Wolman chaired the department from 1970 to 1990 and made sure that it retained ties with the School of Public Health. During his years at Hopkins, Wolman has also served as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs. Twice.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you did a poll to determine the person who most represents the Hopkins ideal, everybody would say Reds. It would be a landslide.\u201d \u2014 Erica Schoenberger, Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible to imagine Hopkins without Reds,\u201d says Erica Schoenberger<\/a>, a professor and colleague of Wolman\u2019s in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering since the 1980s. \u201cHe\u2019s worked in every corner of the university, from engineering to public health to central administration. Everyone knows him. He knows everybody. If you did a poll to determine the person who most represents the Hopkins ideal, everybody would say Reds. It would be a landslide.”<\/p>\n

Wolman jokes about quitting teaching, but it\u2019s doubtful that he ever will. Sure he \u201csort of retired\u201d back in the 1990s, but he has continued teaching his water resource development class each fall and his geomorphology class in the spring.<\/p>\n

What he likes about teaching, he says, is that it allows him to talk about and experience the landscape with new generations of intelligent, energetic young scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s the graduate students that make you,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we have a program that attracts some good graduate students, it is they who help set the tone and the character of the enterprise. It is they who will encourage other people to come. It is their energy, their productivity, their thinking that matters,\u201d he says. He pauses to consider his words. \u201cAnd if what they publish makes you look good, well then it\u2019s as if you did something,\u201d he says, laughing.<\/p>\n

The relationship may start off as one between professor and student, but it usually doesn\u2019t stay that way. \u201cReds makes it possible to establish a lifelong friendship,\u201d says Schmidt. After Wolman\u2019s students are awarded their degrees and leave Hopkins, they don\u2019t ever really leave Reds. He comes to visit them. He writes. He calls. They do, too. Just as Wolman shared conversations with his father over the course of many years, he stays in touch with his former students because he wants to keep the conversation going, to keep learning about what they\u2019re doing and to share his research with them.<\/p>\n

His students take note of this relationship and try to carry it on with students of their own. However, Reds Wolman is not an easy act to follow, says John Costa, PhD \u201972, a retired geologist and university professor who lives in Vancouver, Washington.<\/p>\n

Costa remembers one spring day near finals time when an open window in the geography department office allowed in the noise of a particularly spirited game of lacrosse on the Keyser Quad. \u201cA secretary in the office grumbled something about how the students should be in the library,\u201d he says. \u201cReds [a former All-American lacrosse player at Hopkins<\/a>] takes off his glasses, looks out the window, and starts yelling at the students outside, \u2018No, no, no. Curl that ball.\u2019 He didn\u2019t care that they weren\u2019t in the library. He wanted to make sure they were playing the game right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Costa marvels at the story as he is telling it, almost four decades later. \u201cReds has the perfect reaction to every situation at every point in time,\u201d he says. \u201cHow could you not want to be like him?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49 has shaped the brightest minds in geomorphology–and forever changed the field. In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman \u201949…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","issue-winter-2009"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Great Meanderer - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2009\/01\/great-meanderer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Great Meanderer - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49 has shaped the brightest minds in geomorphology–and forever changed the field. 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