Stan Mallory was Professor in the Geology Department from 1952 – 1984, and Curator in the Burke Museum from 1964-1984. After his retirement he continued to work in the museum two days a week until poor health prevented this in 1999. He died February 15, 2003 at the age of 83.

Virgil Standish Mallory was born in Englewood, New Jersey and as a child loved both music and rocks. He remained a musician and composer all his life. He attended Oberlin College but enlisted in the Army in 1940 and served with distinction in military intelligence in both Europe and the South Pacific. He was awarded degrees in music and geology from Oberlin and 1946 married his college sweetheart Mimi Rowan. They had 4 children, and now have 10 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.

Stan did his graduate studies in the Paleontology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, with the famous biostratigraphers Robert Kleinpell. Stan’s dissertation was groundbreaking work on Tertiary microfossil zonations. This was published in 1959 by AAPG, entitled Lower Tertiary Biostratigraphy of the California Coast Ranges and it remains the only comprehensive text for all Paleogene marine sedimentary units on the western margin of North America. On his death Kleinpell left part of his voluminous collection, and his library to the Burke Museum.

Stan was thesis-advisor to more than 50 students at UW, who are now working in academia and the oil industry all over North America and in a few in other countries. His classes and his students were the most important part of Stan’s life at the University of Washington. He built up the collections at the Burke Museum, especially filling gaps in the stratigraphic sections by collecting and swapping for Paleozoic fossils from the famous Midwest and East Coast localities. He traveled to Europe and always brought back a few fossils from notable sites in Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. He became an expert on wines and wine-growing soils – and brought samples of those back from Europe also. He was part of the group of UW academics that decided that the area north of the Columbia River in Eastern Washington would produce excellent wines; this was beginning the state’s fastest growing agricultural sector.

Stan was very active the professional societies, received many honors and served on executive committers for the Paleontology Society, the Paleontology Research Institute, GSA, SEPM, AAPG, Sigma Xi, and the NSF funded Institute for Secondary School Teachers. In the Geology Department he worked with Harry Wheeler, G. E. Goodspeed and Julian Barksdale. In the late 1960s, Stan had the foresight to start an endowment for paleontology in the Burke Museum from a bequest of a long time volunteer, Barbara Chapple. This fund now supports a graduate student in paleontology, and is being further built up to support a second student. Stan left a large legacy at UW.

-Submitted by Liz Nesbitt, ESS Affiliate Assistant Professor and Curator of Invertebrate
Paleontology at the Burke Museum