Preston Cloud

Cambridge, Massachusetts. Preston and Mildred had no children. But when Preston resigned from Harvard, he and Mildred were divorced, and she returned to New Haven and the Peabody Museum, regretful but not bitter. Early in his Washington years he married Frances Webster, whom he had met on Saipan. They had three children, Karen, Lisa, and Kevin, of whom Preston was intensely proud. When Preston was getting ready to leave Minnesota, however, they too were divorced; the children remained a bond between them, though, not a source of contention. After some years in Santa Barbara, he met and married Janice Gibson, an accomplished opera singer and vocal teacher. She made a permanent home for him in Santa Barbara, and he became a surrogate father for her three young children. She also went with him on some of his travels. Moreover, she became interested in his family history and pursued the Cloud genealogy, incidentally laying to rest a few family myths that Preston himself had believed. He was fortu­ nate to have had three devoted helpmates in the different stages of his career. In 1974 Preston decided to “retire” at the University of California in Santa Barbara and to return to a full-time job with the U.S. Geological Survey; he kept right on working as hard as ever. He had earlier organized, on the Santa Barbara campus, the Survey’s Biogeology Clean Laboratory to look for evidence of life, past or present, in the rocks brought back from the moon; with the Survey’s approval, he now used it to study the “pre-Phanerozoic” Earth. After five years of this work, he went away for extended visits—a Visiting Professorship of Cosmol­ ogy at Mount Holyoke College, a Senior Fellowship at Canberra in Australia—but he continued pre-Phanerozoic fossils on every continent except Antarctica. He also kept moving around sci­ entifically, turning every so often into some new field which he then had to, and did, master. Besides the subjects listed above, he wrote on lunar geology, on extraterrestrial life (or its absence), and on creationism. Moreover, he wanted to share his knowledge and his growing wisdom with others. In his later years he wrote books of almost unbelievable breadth, addressed more and more to the general reader: Adventures in Earth History (1970), Cosmos, Earth, and Man (1978), and Oasis in Space (1988). Cloud’s restlessness was matched by his intensity. Whatever he did, he did to the hilt. When he moved on to a new position or a new scientific problem, he threw himself into it, yet