Remembering David and Barbara Stone
I've known David and Barbara Stone for 30 years. David was the one who recruited me to come to UAF. I came up with a young family, we actually stayed a couple days at their place before we found a temporary home. They kind of adopted me and my kids and my wife. They were just so gracious. They always asked about how everybody was doing and really cared about my family. For me, that was always very gratifying.
David was a renowned scientist with a specialization in paleomagnetics and tectonics. We wrote several papers together and we were in the field working on several projects. I went to Russia with David a couple of times in the early 90s and we did fieldwork there. On one of those trips Barbara came along. We were in Yakutsk and I think David was off working with one of the scientists, so Barbara and I went exploring. We wanted to buy something in a store. Our Russian wasn't very good, but we found something we wanted, and we tried to figure out how to buy it in this very Byzantine system. Barbara was very persistent about haggling a price even though we couldn't speak the language. It was just really a fun experience with her, to see her in action. They were definitely a couple, they were definitely a team.
In the summer the students and faculty would all get together with David on Fridays on the deck of the Golden Eagle Saloon in Ester and have a beer and conversations. This tradition started years before with the Friday wine tastings in the paleomagnetic lab, which at that time was on the third floor of the Elvey building. In those early days, late on Friday afternoons you could walk into Elvey and on the third floor the geomagnetism scientists had their wine tasting, I think the space physicists had some sort of event on the seventh floor, the glaciologists were doing something on the fifth floor. There were always these social gatherings happening on Fridays. But in the mid 1990s that kind of event on campus was kind of getting frowned upon so we moved off-site to the Pub. David was a loyal pub patron, he's recognized on the wall down there. Then in the summer, we would go out to the Eagle and just sit on the porch and relax and chat. That was really a big part of the things you looked forward to during the week, but it was also a great way to build this feeling of family, a way to build colleague relationships, to make everybody feel welcome. I think it highlighted David's approach. He served as a geosciences department chair and he served as an associate director of the GI. It was really his way of trying to build relationships and reach across disciplines.
For many, many years David and Barbara hosted the annual geoscience welcome back party at their home in Ester. It was a way of welcoming new students and faculty. We had a big bonfire and barbecue, it was always on a fine September day. It was a nice party to welcome students back to the geoscience department. We really looked forward to that every year.
That's another thing about David that really strikes me. In the GI and in many science programs it’s easy to get siloed. The space physicists don't necessarily mingle with the seismologists or glaciologists, but David really worked, in his research and his teaching, to reach across disciplines. He was very much interested in all aspects of the GI. I was very impressed with that and I tried to emulate that by getting involved with other groups in the GI. With David it was just that consistency of being there and being a good colleague. I’m very sad that they’ve both left us.
David and Barbara were such a big fixture of the community, they were sort of the royal couple of Ester. They embraced being part of Ester and taking an active role in all of the different things in that community.
These are the ways I want to remember them.