LAURENCE McKINLEY GOULD, A POLAR EXPLORER AND INNOVATIVE 
COLLEGE PRESIDENT, DIES AT 98

By Walter Sullivan

Laurance McKinley Gould a polar explorer who led American 
efforts in Antarctica for many years and was also an 
innovative college president died on Tuesday (June 20, 1995) 
at a home for the elderly in Tucson Arizona.  He was 98.

He was second in command of Adm. Richard E. Byrd's first 
expedition to Antarctica from 1928 to 1930.  In 1930 he and 
his companions claimed an unexplored sector of Antarctica 
for the United States, but 25 years later Dr. Gould led the 
American effort to make that continent international.

From 1945 to 1962 he was president of Carleton College in 
Northfield, Minn. developing it into a major liberal arts 
college.

He held many leading positions in American science, 
including the presidency of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science and of the United Chapters of Phi 
Beta Kappa.  He was a member of the National Science Board, 
which advises the National Science Foundation and a trustee 
of the Ford Foundation and of the Carnegie Foundation for 
the Advancement of Teaching.

He was born on the family farm in Lacota, Mich. on Aug. 22, 
1896, and at 17 went to Boca Raton, Fla. to teach in a one-
room schoolhouse. Two years later, he went to the University 
of Michigan to study law and was offered a room in the home 
of Prof. William H. Hobbs, an authority on polar geology.

In World War I, he enlisted in the Army Ambulance Service 
and in 1917 and 1918 he served with the Italian Army in 
Italy and the American Expeditionary Forces during the 
Meuse-Argonne offensives.  On his return to Michigan, under 
Professor Hobbs's influence, he abandoned the law to begin 
studying polar geology.

In 1925, after graduating magna cum laude, he obtained his 
doctorate and, in the next two years, went on expeditions to 
Greenland and Baffin Land.  He was then recruited by Admiral 
Byrd for his first Antarctic expedition in which he set up 
an exploration base at Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf 
at the Bay of Whales.  Eager to wield his hammer on the 
newly discovered Rockefeller Mountains to the east, he and 
his party flew there from Little America in a ski-equipped 
Fokker.

Although they anchored the plane to the ice, a fierce 
blizzard lifted it into the air, it's propeller turning as 
though flying.  One of the party who had entered the plane 
to keep a radio schedule, looked out and, he reported later, 
saw Dr. Gould "hanging onto a rope attached to one of the 
wing tips.  He was blown straight out, like a flag."

The plane, torn loose, smashed against the mountains and 
Admiral Byrd had to rescue the party in a larger plane.

With five companions, Dr. Gould then led a dog-sledge party 
south to explore the Queen Maud Mountains and provide an 
advanced base for Byrd's projected flight to the South Pole.  
They followed the route used 17 years earlier when Roald 
Amundsen and his Norwegian companions were first to reach 
the Pole.  In a cairn at Mount Betty, named by Amundsen, Dr. 
Gould found one of Amundsen's notes.

He and his party marched east along the mountains until they 
were sure that having passed the 150th Meridian, they were 
beyond the sector claimed by New Zealand.  There in a cairn 
on a low peak, they left a note claiming this land as "a 
dependency or possession of the United States of America."  
They were not only the first Americans, they wrote, "but the 
first individuals of any nationality to set foot on American 
soil in the Antarctic."

By 1955 Dr. Gould had changed. In that year scientists from 
11 nations planning to send expeditions to Antarctica for 
the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 met at the 
Paris Observatory to decide who should go where.  Dr. Gould 
led the American delegation, and from then on the United 
States, like the Soviet Union, made no territorial claims in 
Antarctica and recognized none by others.  Subsequently the 
claims issue has largely remained dormant.

It was the Geophysical Year's "cooperative efforts in 
Antarctica, coldest of all the continents," he wrote later, 
"that witnessed the first thawing of the cold war."

For many years Dr. Gould was chairman of the Committee on 
Polar Research of the National Academy of Sciences and 
headed the Special Committee on Antarctic Research, an 
international body that coordinates efforts there.

In 1969 he and Grover Murray, a fellow member of the 
National Science Board, visited a deposit near the Beardmore 
Glacier where a vertebrate fossil closely resembling similar 
ones from South Africa had just been found.  It was firm 
evidence that the continents had drifted apart and that 
Africa had once been attached to Antarctica.

They excitedly radioed Washington that this was, "not only 
the most important fossil ever found in Antarctica, but one 
of the truly great fossil finds of all time."

As president of Carlton College, Dr. Gould became a champion 
of education that mingled science with the humanities.  He 
said he hoped that by doing so we could "recover the 
Renaissance."

During World War II he took two years absence from Carlton 
College to head the Arctic Section of the Air Force's 
Arctic, Dessert and Tropical Information Center.

In addition to numerous honorary degrees, his honors 
included the Congressional Gold Medal, the David Livignstone 
Gold Medal of the American Geographical Society, the Cross 
of St. Olaf, presented to him in 1949 by King Haakon of 
Norway, the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Medal, the 
Explorers Club Medal and the Gold Medal of the Chicago 
Geographical Society.

Dr. Gould's rugged features testified to a life out of 
doors.  His 1,500 mile sledge trip to the Queen Maud 
Mountains is described in his 1931 book, "Cold: The Record 
of an Antarctic Sledge Journey."

In 1930 he married Margaret Rice who is deceased.  There 
were no immediate survivors.

-from New York Times Obituary, Thursday, June 22 1995