By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter
Anthony Porter, chief geologist at WINDALCO, shows off some of his prized finds of rocks in Jamaica. - Norman Grindley
Today we continue profiles of the nominees for the Gleaner's Man of the Year and winner of the prestigious Honour Award. The nominee in the field of science and technology is Anthony Porter.
WHEN MOST of his friends and classmates were thinking of making their livelihood in conventional fields, such as medicine, dentistry and law, Anthony Porter had his mind set on developing a career out of his love for rocks.
They thought he was crazy; they thought he had rocks in his head. His nickname was "bones" because he used to be so skinny as a boy but when they heard about his career plans, that nickname was revised and he was known as "bones and stones".
"In fact, I had visions of going into a very narrow field at the time called palaeobotany and most of the people I spoke to were running to the dictionary to find out what is geology and not to mention palaeobotany. But I loved plants and rocks and I was trying to combine the two," said Mr. Porter who is now the chief geologist at West Indies Alumina Company (WINDALCO).
In those days, 30 years or so ago, the opening field for palaeobotanists was the oil industry. They would examine samples of rocks important in oil well drilling to locate the oil source and they would use microfossils to know where they were in the sequence of things. So a young Porter had a strong interest in looking at fossil plants.
To this day, people still ask Mr. Porter, "How on earth did you get into this field?" He said that as a high school student, he always had a strong inclination for the subject, geography. Though he attended three different high schools (Hilcrest boarding school, DeCarteret College and Jamaica College) in the late 50s and early 60s, his love for geography was constant.
He was born in Kingston but grew up on a sugar estate in St. Catherine so his parents decided to board him out first in Brown's Town at Hilcrest and from there he went to DeCarteret College, another boarding school, then to Jamaica College in St. Andrew.
"So you can see that from my early life I moved from St. Catherine to St. Ann then to Manchester and back to Kingston, so I guess I was born to travel," he said.
He did in fact do a lot of travelling, all over the world, in his position as chief geologist of Alcan Jamaica (before it recently became WINDALCO). He assisted with bauxite exploration work in parts of Africa (such as Guinea and Cameroons), Australia and Canada and attended conferences in others but not before of course, going through the rigours of educating himself in the field of geology.
He claims that he was "just like an average student in school" but when he left Jamaica in 1961 to start his university life in Canada he really found his niche in geology building on his boyhood love of geography. From there, he said, there was no holding back.
"Then I knew, for sure, what I was going to do," he recalled.
At the University of Manitoba in Canada, Mr. Porter read a general degree in geology and botany to prepare him for the narrow field of palaeobotany.
"When I left Jamaica, I don't believe that geology was yet offered at the University of the West Indies. Canada was cheaper for somebody like me who didn't have a scholarship and I applied to a few universities in Canada, including McGill, but Manitoba was the first one that replied and I had a friend at Manitoba who was also a former JC student, and he encouraged me to come to that university which was, and still is I believe, one of the reasonably-priced schools that still offered quality education," he said.
At the end of that degree programme, he pursued the two-year honours programme in geology. University life wasn't just about getting up the usual tricks of youth, Mr. Porter also worked for income that went towards underwriting his education. He sought and gained employment in Canada's national railway service as a sleeping car porter, during summer holidays. In those days, the train travelled for long hours from Winnipeg to Vancouver, commuters could travel either by sleeping cars (with sleeping facilities) or by coach.
Another job, Mr. Porter held while a student was with the Canadian government doing geological surveys in the north of Canada and this not only gave him field work experience in his chosen career but he also was able to see most of Canada by the time he left university.
"These working years were very important to me ...Too many students now are on scholarships, so they don't see the value of hard work," he said.
In pursuit of postgraduate education, Mr. Porter found himself back home, in Jamaica, towards the end of the 1960s, at the University of the West Indies.
"I had to satisfy an interest and to educate myself about Jamaica's geology. You know there is a saying that the best geologists are the ones who have seen the most rocks. Also my parents were still in Jamaica and my father wanted to retire, so I had personal reasons for wanting to come home," he recalled.
His postgraduate research thesis was "The geology of the Ginger Ridge grandiorite stock and associated rocks, St. Catherine, Jamaica".
Rocks, he explained, are classified according to the content of their minerals -- limestones and marbles have about 99 per cent calcite; a true granite is composed of three, sometimes four minerals visible to the naked eye; the grandiorite is a little bit further down the scale.
To earn "his stripes" he boarded with a Baptist pastor in the north of Old Harbour, in the village of Ginger Ridge. In 1968, there was very little electricity in that part of the world, certainly no running water. Mr. Porter worked by candlelight and he travelled up and down analysing rocks on his motorcycle, almost like a maverick in the wind.
He worked at the Department of Mines briefly sharing an office, he recalled with Carlton Davis - currently the Cabinet secretary but arguably Mr. Porter started to really contribute to Jamaica's geological studies when he was employed to Geological Survey Department between 1971 to 1974. He recalled that he worked alongside people like Franklyn McDonald (now executive director of the National Environment Planning Agency, NEPA) on a project to produce the geological sheet of Kingston in colour. They went all over, surveying upstream, gullies, stones, rocks and so on and then making their recordings.
"You see, Kingston was becoming a sensitive area, from a building point of view... and this project to produce the geological sheet had assistance from expatriates from England," he said.
After the "Kingston sheet" project, he took on the role of map co-ordinator, producing many important maps with the Geological Survey. But soon, in 1974, he joined Alcan Jamaica (now WINDALCO), as the staff geologist, where he is still employed.
Alcan Jamaica back then needed a geologist as part of their team, to participate in a tunnel building project to run some 12 miles under Mount Diablo, taking a conveyor belt. This project, which Mr. Porter said could have been "an engineering feat", never materialised -- several events conspired against it.
In 1978, he was appointed chief geologist responsible, along with a modest staff, for exploration work -- drilling exploration of bauxite deposits among other things, such as assessing clay deposits and setting up a monitoring system for the red mud lake.
A lot of his world travels as an accomplished expert in his field intensified at this time. In 1979, he went to Brazil to attend a conference; he was released by Alcan Jamaica in 1987 to the Head Office in Montreal to assist in field work; he went to the Cameroons on exploration work; he has been on work missions to Vietnam; 1991 to 1995 he was living and working in the Republic of Guinea (on secondment from Alcan Jamaica); 1998 he was in Australia, assisting with field work in the project in Cape York, Queensland, at the northern tip of Australia.
He has some interesting memories of all this international fieldwork, for example, encounters with poisonous snakes in Africa and bears in northern Canada that would invade the campsite and ransack the tents, especially in the evenings when the work team was cooking their dinner.
Because geology and specifically the study of agatea, is not only Mr. Porter's work but his hobby and passion, he finds time for many parallel activities such as his work with the Geological Society of Jamaica (he held the office of president of that society in the early 70s); contributions to several scientific articles and papers on aspects of Jamaica's geology to local and international publications such as the American Mineralogist, the Journal of the Geological Society and the Jamaica Journal and co-author (along with Professor Trevor Jackson and Dr. Edward Robinson) of the book "Minerals and Rocks of Jamaica" and the author of "A Geological Portrait of Jamaica".
His passion for sharing his knowledge on Jamaica's rich heritage of geology and gemstone also lead him in the 1980s to write a series of articles in The Gleaner and to organise several field trips and co-ordinate at least five major international bauxite symposia between 1971 and 1982.
He is highly-respected by his colleagues and in honour of his work, the Geological Society of Jamaica, earlier this year, presented him with the Chubb Award for Excellence in Exploration Geology. The citation read to him then indicated that Mr. Porter "has set high standards in geological investigations in Jamaica and abroad".
Mr. Porter continues to be a member of the Geological Society of Jamaica, the Geological Society of America and the Historical Society of Jamaica.
His big dream is to see the island possess a beautiful, well-ordered national museum that will include all the artefacts and treasures from the earth. He wants them to be in one location and not scattered all over the island, for the benefit of Jamaicans and also as a tourist attraction.
He has found time for personal life too; he has been married to Joan since 1971 and they nurtured two children. He loves photography and what does he like to photograph? You guessed it... rocks of course.
