BY GEORGES PARDO

ON THE OCCASION OF Hollis Dow Hedberg's retirement from Princeton University in 1972, he was honored by a conference on petroleum and global tectonic. Robert F. Gohen said of him:

In the course of a lifetime of distinguished service to his discipline, service which has earned him international recognition and honor, he has attained first-rank standing in academic circles while simultaneously pursuing a successful career in the petroleum industry, most notably, since 1946, with Gulf Oil as a senior officer concerned with exploration. In short at once a man of thought and a man of affairs, he has built bridges between the theoretical and the practical, contriving lines of communication that reach from the realms of teaching and research to provide a basis for decision making and action in the world of affairs.

I will attempt to describe the life that is so aptly summarized by this quote.

In the summer of 1940, after my first year at the Instituto de Geolog ía, in Caracas, Venezuela, I was invited by my professor of stratigraphy, Dr. Ely Mencher (later of MIT) to join him an a field trip to eastern Venezuela. We stopped in San Tomé, the Mene Grande Oil Company (a subsidiary of Gulf Oil Corporation) main camp in the area. There we were greeted and guided through the geologic section along the recently built San Tomé-Puerto la Cruz highway