Not everybody can get that emotional about the fossilized remains of a saber-toothed cat in Nebraska. But then not everybody has taught paleontology, geology and biology for 47 years, as Alf has at Webb School, a private boys' secondary school in Claremont, Calif. In that time thousands of students have gone through the Alf Natural History Museum on campus, which houses Sarah's skeleton along with those of Betsy and Harold, the brontotheres (early cousins of the rhinoceros).
While Alf's wife of 43 years, Pearl, has maintained an immunity to his enthusiasm for the outdoors—"The one time she came along on a field trip she got an earache," he sighs—few others have.
J.O. Brew, professor emeritus of archeology at Harvard, who recently visited the Alf Museum, marveled, "I've never seen a place where you could learn so much so fast." Several of his former students have become prominent in the earth sciences and many of those in other fields still write to thank him for his intellectual encouragement.
The urge to explore surfaced early in Alf, who lived as a child for 12 years in Canton, China, where his father was a Congregationalist missionary. "I was pretty good in math," he says, "but all I really wanted to do was climb trees." After graduating from Doane College in Nebraska, he taught high school chemistry and math, then moved to Los Angeles to work as a brokerage house messenger and run the 220-yard dash for the Los Angeles Athletic Club. (He still jogs one mile around the Webb track every day.) When he first began teaching at Webb in 1929, his prime subject was biology.
In 1936 he started fossil hunting as a hobby and a year later found the 15 million-year-old skull of a peccary, an ancestor of the wild pig. The peccary, of a previously unknown species, has achieved a kind of immortality at Webb, where Alf's students sing, "We'll stand on the brink of the missing link/ We're Webb School Peccary Men." It also inspired Alf to ask for a year's sabbatical to earn his master's in geology at the University of Colorado.
Since then Alf has taken his students on 50 expeditions through the Grand Canyon, occasional trips as far as the Badlands in South Dakota and frequent forays into the Mojave, two hours from the school. "The things we study are dead, but they are documents of life and therefore beautiful," he tells his students. "Every rock, every speck tells something about our history."
Alf has received three honorary doctorates, job offers from Princeton and Yale, and a Harvard award as the nation's top high school earth sciences teacher. He shows few signs of slowing down. On a recent Mojave outing, he scrambled over the hills ahead of his students, pointing out significant land formations and "sacred places" where fossils have been found. That night he sat around the campfire talking about his plans for a somewhat more ambitious expedition: to study the geology of the South Pole.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
