Newsletter #6 January 2021
Charles Wickstrom: Geologist and Artist
Charles Wickstrom, geologist and artist, is the classmate I met at our 30th reunion sitting around a table at Mosca’s Restaurant across the river from New Orleans. I was surprised to learn that there was yet another Newman artist. At that time, he was engaging in Impressionist painting and actively exhibiting his work at a gallery in New Orleans. Later on I read about Charles and his sisters funding the Bette and Jack Kenneth Wickstrom MD Orthopaedics Endowment at Tulane Medical Center and how Dr. Wickstrom had been injured at Guadalcanal during World War II.
Jack K. Wickstrom, MD, was Chair of the Department of Orthopaedics at Tulane University. Charles told the Tulane alumni magazine, “My dad never took a vacation. His CV was the size of a phone book. He often said he knew he had been saved during World War II in order to teach, and it really meant everything to him.” Dr. Wickstrom also survived a massive coronary thrombosis at age 49. When Charles and his sisters, Cindi Wickstrom Wright and Merrilee Wickstrom Kullman, set up the endowment at Tulane, Charles said, “My parents gave me everything. You can’t repay those kinds of things, but you can do a little to show your appreciation. Tulane was so important to my life and to theirs.”
While Dr. Wickstrom was in undergraduate school at the University of Nebraska, he joined the US Navy ROTC program and then attended medical school at the University of Nebraska. He completed his residency at Tulane and married his wife Bette before World War II. In December 1941, when he and Bette were expecting their first child, he was called up to serve as a Navy doctor attached to the US Marines. He landed with the Marines on Guadalcanal, on his 26th birthday, August 7, 1942.
The Battle of Guadalcanal was part of the first major offensive undertaken by Allied Forces against Japan. Guadalcanal is the largest island in the Solomon Islands in the southwestern Pacific. Combat during his time on Guadalcanal was extremely intense, the Marines were shelled by Japanese ships, attacked by ground troops in banzai charges, and bombarded by Japanese planes. They ran low on food and lived on captured Japanese canned supplies. In all, 1600 US troops were killed, 4200 were wounded, and several thousand more died from malaria and other tropical diseases. In December 1942 the Army relieved the Marines.
The Battle lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 and was a turning point in favor of the Allies. Charles had asked his father if he had a field hospital there, like in MASH, and his father explained that all he had was a knapsack and a Springfield rifle, to treat the wounded and to boost morale for the Marines, who would know that at least there was a doctor on the island. In fact, Dr. Wickstrom performed his first battlefield amputation in a tent under the light of a flashlight.
Bearded Iris
Marines landing on Guadalcanal
Army relieving Marines at Guadalcanal
Dr. Wickstrom was evacuating on a Navy ship on November 4, 1942, when there was an explosion that blew him into the hold of the ship. He landed on his head and sustained a skull fracture but did not realize it at the time. Later he passed out and woke up on a stretcher. He sustained serious brain damage and had short-term memory problems and word-finding difficulty. He was triaged out to Mare Island Hospital in northern California, where he spent an entire year. Mare Island Hospital was so overcrowded during World War II that the soldiers were housed in double bunks.
At the end of the year he wrote to his wife that he was not coming home because he was not the same person, and his wife immediately went to California and brought him back home to New Orleans. He did sustain lasting personality changes, and occasionally his wife would say to the children, “I wish you’d known the man I married.” He was known at Tulane as “Cactus Jack,” an image that conveys his prickly disposition.
Dr. Wickstrom created the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Tulane. He carried out significant research, and he did the first total hip replacement in New Orleans. He was a leader in the field of orthopaedic surgery and was on the Board of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (he authored the History of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery 1934-1984). His research interests ranged from biomedical engineering, rehabilitation, surgical implants, prosthetic appliances, traffic safety, to sports medicine and ballet injuries. He rounded in four hospitals, and he often arrived home from rounding at 10 pm, at which time the family had dinner together. Charles participated in his father’s research studies on acceleration injuries, conducting experiments and spending time in the histology lab examining slides as part of a whiplash injury study.
I wondered about the impact of his father’s service and injury in World War II on Charles’s growing up. He said that wherever he went, even outside of New Orleans, people would tell him stories about how his father had saved their limb or saved their life. When he went to get his learner’s permit at the DMV in New Orleans, the examiner asked him who taught him to drive. He answered that his father had, and the examiner asked, “Dr. Jack Wickstrom?” When Charles said yes, the examiner pointed him to the camera, took his picture, and handed him his driver’s license without an examination, explaining, “Your father saved my life.”
Self-Portrait Sketch
The author and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, wrote that he disagreed with the concept of survivor guilt, preferring the concept of survivor responsibility, meaning a “deep sense of being responsible, of having carefully to listen to what the prompter called conscience is whispering into our ears regarding the question of how to make the best of each single opportunity that life may offer us.” Dr. Wickstrom clearly functioned according to survivor responsibility, and the prompter called conscience may have been even louder than a whisper.
Hemingway House on Wood
Door Panels
His father took Charles with him on hospital rounds when he was six to eight years old. He was interested in science as a child, which he feels he absorbed from his father by osmosis. Carving the dinner entrée would naturally lead to a lesson in anatomy and surgical technique. Charles had a rock and mineral collection from age eight, and at that age he was fascinated by seeing his first mountains, the Grand Tetons. As he described it from his vantage point in the Grand Teton Lodge: “As the clouds lifted the mountains appeared before me, as if the mountains were on a stage.” His father gave him an early pamphlet on continental drift that he used for a report in Mrs. Barfield’s seventh grade science class. That the continents were once joined together made “infinite sense” to Charles.
When Charles and I spoke recently, he explained to me that he had taught himself Impressionist painting and then started working in that style and selling his canvases in order to produce some much needed income. I commented that teaching oneself Impressionist painting is not something most people would consider if they needed extra income. He let me know that as a child he would be dropped off at the Delgado Museum, now the New Orleans Museum of Art, on Saturday mornings for art class. After class he would wander around the museum. He was especially intrigued by a Gauguin painting on the glass panels of a door, saying, “I can still see it.” Charles had traveled to museums in London and Paris and studied the strokes of Impressionist painting in detail. Learning about optical mineralogy had also helped him to understand the physics of light in Impressionist painting.
He also explained that Mrs. Turpin’s mechanical drawing class in the 10th grade “developed his brain for 3-dimensional imaging.” He found the work easy and he earned his only A+ at Newman. Mechanical drawing, he explained, allowed him to concentrate fully; it was meditative and he truly enjoyed it. He finds that painting is similar in bringing about full concentration and a meditative state. When he is in a deeply meditative state, he feels that painting “comes out of him” or through him, without direction from the rational mind.
Iris in Monet's Garden
Monet's Garden
Charles graduated from Tulane with a double major in History and Biology in 1972. He completed a pre-med curriculum and considered medicine as a career. His father had provided him with lots of exposure to hospitals, morgues, histology labs, and medical research, and eventually Charles decided that he preferred not to be in a hospital environment. He thought about attending graduate school in animal science, and he worked various jobs on ranches in Nebraska and South Dakota but returned to New Orleans, where he worked offshore as an Able Bodied Seaman, and onshore as an HVAC mechanic. In 1974 the Smithsonian Magazine published a series of articles on a new theory of “plate tectonics,” which reminded him of his seventh grade science report. Intrigued by the new research in geology, he decided to attend the University of New Orleans for their graduate Earth Sciences program, and he completed his MS in 1979.
Charles has been working as a petroleum geologist and geophysicist since 1978. He explained that geology has a great deal to do with pattern recognition. He can actually see an outcrop in the field, and through geophysics can trace the outcrop to know exactly where to drill. He is what is known in the trade as an “oil-finder.” He explained to me in some detail the changes in seismic technology that allow him to do this with precision, although most of what he said was not within my grasp. If you want to know more about the changes in geophysics technology, I’m pretty sure that Charles would be happy to explain it to you.
In our discussion of creativity, Charles said that he feels that the process of searching for oil requires every bit as much creativity as artistic painting. He feels that it is an art that is supported by technology. He quoted Wallace E. Pratt, considered to be the founder of petroleum geology, who said, “Where oil is first found is in the minds of men.” Charles also wanted to credit his late mentor, Charles W Oliphant, PhD, Harvard 1941, who was always years ahead of his time, as he feels he owes any success he has had in finding oil to his mentor’s teaching.
Charles said that he was labelled an “underachiever” at Newman. My view is that Charles has visual-spatial gifts and would have found any elementary school curriculum in the 1950s to be not a great match for his learning style. On the other hand, there were Newman teachers and courses that influenced his awareness of his abilities and ultimately his career choice, including seventh grade science with Mrs. Barfield, mechanical drawing with Mrs. Turpin, and a "true friend" on the faculty, Coach Reginelli. These aspects of his Newman education made a lasting impression on Charles and helped him to recognize and develop his visual-spatial gifts. As Charles had stated, “his parents gave him everything.” He had the encouragement and the exposure to art and science that allowed him to thrive in a scientific career and to develop as an artist.
Woodward Park, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Charles with Coach Reginelli
The map below is a “painting” (computer generated graphic representation of total energy returned as a reflection of a surface sourced seismic wave) of an oil reservoir, a tripolitic rock, which was originally deposited in the Mississippian Age as a fossiliferous micrite (limestone, CaCO3), and subsequently diagenetically altered, by hydro thermal fluids, into silica (SiO2). The technique of imaging a specific “time horizon” as it relates to a specific stratigraphic unit is called “seismic stratigraphy.”
It exemplifies for Charles the combination of art and science in petroleum exploration.
3D seismic interpretation of the East Hardy Unit, T25N-R3E Osage Co, Oklahoma
Post Script from Charles:
I extend my personal thank you to our wonderful and caring classmate Roxane Dinkin for initiating this project and allowing me to participate. Our internet interview and subsequent emails and text exchanges have brought back so many memories and a few regrets. I would have been a better son if I had been able to understand the traumas my father and mother had endured as a result of his injuries in combat in WWII and what we now call PTSD. My debt of gratitude can never be repaid to them, but we can pay things forward.