UB professor taught geology to thousands of students
BRIDGEPORT — Professor John Nicholas, a treasure to decades of geology students, will no longer hold court in the basement of the University of Bridgeport’s Dana Hall of Science.
After a career spanning nearly a half-century, Nicholas, better known as Doc Rock, is retiring — packing up his fossils, rocks and his many mementos from the two rooms where he’s spent much of his waking life.
“I love to teach and I love to travel, which is why I’ve hung on for so long,” he said recently.
In his lab, tables groan under the weight of his hundreds of samples. The gneiss and schists — the metamorphic rocks that are just about everywhere — are worthless. But then there are the amethyst crystals and bizarre fossils. There’s a meteorite that’s 4.5 billion years old. Other rocks, like the black chunks of extruded lava from Hawaii, are younger than some of his students.
Nicholas, 79, is a professor in the old-school mold. In his lab there’s a wall of boxes containing scores of Kodak slide projector trays, each one labeled with a name of a geologically interesting place that he’s visited, like Antarctica, Indonesia, Japan and the Aleutians.
“I have never met a more passionate teacher,” said former student Carolina Echeverri, who was Nicholas’ assistant in the mid-1990s. “His wife is the godmother of one of my boys.”
Other students agreed. “Warm, inspiring and absolutely brilliant,” said Audrius Pelanis who was a student at UB in the 1990s and now lives in London.
In the field
Nicholas’ rock-hunting field trips to the Catskills and beyond were true adventures for those used to the lecture hall. Buses filled with students — some bored, some wide-eyed — would trundle over narrow back roads in search of a Devonian fossil bed chockablock with ferns, crinoids and trilobites. Once there, Nicholas would pull out one his favorite tools — a sledge hammer.
“Let’s get some decentsized samples,” he’d say with a twinkle in his eye.
By the end of the day, weary students would load their plastic buckets on the bus heavy with their treasures and settle in for the long ride back to Bridgeport.
“I still have the fossils that we collected — any rock that you picked up, he could tell you all about it,” said Elena Cela, who took Doc Rock’s class in 2012. “He’s one of the most inspiring men I’ve ever met,” she said.
“That Catskill trip was great,” said Donnamarie Faiella, 22, of Bridgeport. “I still have that fossil.”
Former student Andrew Dolny, ’79, credits Nicholas with launching him on his career in finance.
“I was on a job interview at Amax, a mining company,” he recalled. “In the room was a rock on display and the interviewer said it was molybdenum. ‘It looks more like cobalt’ I said, because I had just taken Doc Rock’s class. He checked with his boss, and, sure enough, I was right — and I got the job.”
Volcanic memories
To be sure, not all of his students were inspired by metamorphism or or plate tectonics.
“Many, I’m sorry to say, were incurious, which is one of the most disturbing qualities that a student can have,” he said. “Either they couldn’t care less or they don’t care at all.”
Other students assume that there are connections between two earthquakes occurring on the same day on opposite sides of the Earth.
“Coincidences do happen,” Nicholas said.
One of his biggest thrills was collecting molten rock from a volcano in Hawaii. His tools were a chain, a pair of pliers and a bucket of water.
“It sounds low-tech, but that’s how it’s done,” he said.
Another thrill was a helicopter flight into the hot, smoking crater of Mount St. Helens. He’s also met geologist, astronaut and Moonwalker Harrison Schmitt.
“The students really respond when you tell them your first-hand experience collecting lava,” Nicholas said.
Nicholas received all of his degrees — bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. — from New York University. He said that he should have gone to three separate schools, but scholarships kept him at NYU. He began teaching at UB in 1971; he married the same year. He’s seen seven university presidents come and go.
Nicholas had about 100 students a semester, about 20 each, in five classes. That works out to more than 10,000 students over his long career, he notes. He taught two classes, Science 101 and Geology 205.
As for the next chapter, Nicholas said that he’d retire to Florida with his wife, Penny. It’s far from geologically interesting, as states go, but as he notes, “there are rocks everywhere.”
“I meet with alumni who were at UB 30 years ago, and everyone still talks about Doc Rock,” said Scott Miller, who now lives in New Jersey.
And when you’re with Nicholas, don’t make the mistake of calling a rock a stone.
“Stones are the things they sell in jewelery stores,” he said