Biografia transcrita por Rubem Queiroz Cobra do site
The Geological Society of America – Memorials
Visitado em 04-02-2011
MEMORIAL TO JOHN THOMAS KNIGHT STARK
camp on Ceylon, and liason officer with the British assault troups in Penang and Singapore.
The excitement and importance of his war experiences in the Far East left their mark on Stark, and when in 1946 he returned to Northwestern, his old research areas of the Precambrian of the Southern Rocky Mountains no longer satisfîed his professional interests. One might say, after an initial enthusiasm devoted to a research project, he was ready for a different problem in a new place. Perhaps this is why he was never recognized by his peers as a great geologist. Yet, he was a reader of the literature, was cognizant of and understood new concepts, and always was ready to test them in new territories. He had been the first to recognize the sedimentary rock ancestry of the granitoid rocks in the Sawatch Range, demonstrating that some had never been completely fiuid.
In 1949 he took leave froin his professorship at the university to become assistant to the Director of Strategic Minerais of the Economic Reconstruction Administration; however, when he believed his task to be accomplished, he returned to Northwestern. One year later (1952) he resîgned from Northwestern to join the U.S. Geological Survey party mapping Guam. His responsibility was to demonstrate his methods of identifying and correlating individual flows, and to this end he did much of the mapping. Soon thereafter (l954-1955) he became chief of the group carrying on similar studies of Truk. According to S. O. Schlanger (who some 25 years later went to Northwestern as Deering Professor of Geology), invariably Stark organized an important social life at each island. It was he who gathered together professional people, sometimes including the governor, into a cosmopolitan group of many cultural interests; he had staunch friends everywhere he had been.
By 1958 Stark had completed his work on Guain and Truk, whereupon he was loaned by the USGS to the State Department in support of its aid to the universities program in Brazil. There, he taught special courses in geology at the Universities of Recife and São Paulo. Despite the fact that he never learned to speak Portugese, he became an important member of the faculties. He was so much respected by the students that during a major revolt, which involved the burning of a building, he was able to convince them to resume an orderly protest without its former violent aspects.
Eventually, at the age of 76, he retired from professional service, returned to Jackson, Tennessee, and began an active career in journalism, reviewing books for local papers and journals. He organized, and was active in, vanous societies devoted to poetry; until the time of his death, he participated with groups of poets and writers in sections of eastern and southeastern United States.
Stark had three great loves to which he devoted most of his life: namely geology, literature and the world of culture, and friends he could gather in stimulating conversation and writing, wherever the geographic locality. He was at home everywhere, but eventually he grew restless for a new part of the civilized world, where he could meet new interesting people. He was not an explorer of poorly known regions; rather he loved the civilized world, its art, literature, and professional people.