Frank Leverett

Among the papers I inherited upon my father's death was a file on Frank Leverett, a famous geologist of the early 20th century. Frank's father was Eben, who was James Walker Leverett's younger brother. He grew up on a farm in Denmark (southeast Iowa), and went to school in Colorado, then Ames. The famous family story about him is that he walked from Ames to Madison, walked! - to get a job which he then kept for thirty years. The job eventually moved him to Ann Arbor, or it is possible that he ended his days teaching in Ann Arbor. In any case many of the letters I have from him are postmarked Ann Arbor.

He married twice, but had no children, which is why I have this information in the file. It's like someone has to inherit it, and pass it along down, and do something with it - old newspaper clippings, articles about his career, etc. I might write a book, simply because I can.

His interest was in finding the places where glaciers had been in the midwest. Glaciers receded, yes, to a certain point, and caused things to happen, and he knew all that, and could tell it by walking and observing. He once said that though this walking trip was about 250 miles (though one account I read said that he walked from Denmark), he actually walked another thousand or so, doing his job, and mapping the line of glacial sedimentation. I would have to do a crash course on geology to write this book, obviously. But I think a guy that walks from Ames to Madison is worthy of some study.

Two glaciers are named after him, one in Greenland, and the other in Antarctica. The one in Greenland is obscure and also goes by another name. It is really hurting from global warming, so its name comes up in studies on how bad things are. But the other one, in Antarctica, is in a crucial spot. If you are going to the South Pole, or you are looking for the shortcut to the South Pole, in order to take supplies to the station or to go there for any reason, you want to find this glacier. It comes out at the sea, at the shortest point from the sea to the South Pole itself. So it is the shortcut.

So Frank wrote all these letters to members of the family; I especially have a collection of maybe a half dozen to his cousin Will who would be my great grandfather. He and Will shared an interest in family genealogy and he was especially interested in getting the details - birth, death, marriage, of everyone in the family. He always said things like, I hope your grandson is doing well, and, sorry to say that we heard of a death in the family. He was very polite and family members were helpful to him; in fact, I sense that much of what I have now, I have because he typed it, or he made it available, or he asked the right person at the right time. So as a genealogist I owe him a debt, which I of course could repay simply by writing this book, however feeble the effort would be.

Biography I feel is a way of saying to the world, look, this guy's life is important. It's a small but important subfield of book writing in that there is a relatively constant market for information about people's lives. I could do Kamala Harris, for example, and make a quick buck no matter how badly I wrote. Now I'm not so much interested in the quick buck, though that would be ok since my stories sell so tepidly, but I am interested in the possibility of showing the world the life of a person the world might just as well ignore or forget about forever. I am having fun with James Walker Leverett, for example; he led an interesting life, and there's much to learn and point out, and the world might forget about him if I don't come along and show us (my family in particular) about the times he lived through.

I feel the same way about Frank. He knew a lot, and did a lot, and it would be a shame if it were just forgotten. Sure, he's memorialized by the glaciers. But they're all melting, and pretty soon it will all be rising seas. More about Frank later.