I’ve been sitting on this for over a month. Well, not sitting, more cobbling together thoughts and experiences from over 15 years of knowing, learning from, and working with Dr. Jim Westgate.

Jim passed away on April 25, 2022 from complications caused by a stroke on April 3. Since the family’s announcement on his facebook page I’ve watched the memories roll in from scores of people–some I know, and some I don’t. And that, I think, is the crux of Jim’s life and career; a meeting point for so many different networks working towards the same goal, if not together.

There are many who knew Jim far longer than I did, and likely some he had a greater impact on, but to say my life would not be where it is now without him is not hyperbole.

When you read Jim’s obituary it mentions all the courses he taught at Lamar. I managed to take them all. The first one was by complete happenstance because his Historical Geology course was the only one that fit my schedule. That class led me to taking his meteorology course, then environmental geology, then paleontology. By then I was practically living in the Vert lab on the second floor of the geology building.

He asked me if I’d be interested in doing some paleontological fieldwork in Utah one summer and that started my career and training in the Eocene. Thousands of pounds of sediment and dozens of micromammal fossils later I was presenting our research at the Texas Academy of Science and Sigma XI. The latter of which I won a medallion.

By the time Jim was my official mentor for my McNair Scholars project (more of our work in Utah) I had been working with him and studying under him for years. I helped him lead Chautauquas through the Big Thicket near were I grew up. We canoed and kayaked the Neches River, and worked so many Dino Days in conjunction with the Texas Energy Museum.

It was Jim who suggested in 2007 I could do the tours and setups for the mineral exhibits that were on loan from the Houston Museum of Natural Science to the Lamar Geology Department. It was Jim who gave me a box of fossil replicas to take to elementary schools and provide some on the spot paleo show and tell.

I travelled with Jim more than I had travelled in my entire life. Mostly around the United States but also to England and Germany twice. By the time I arrived at OU I had had more presentations in more places under my belt as an undergrad than many of the graduate students I met here.

Even after I made it to OU I still worked with Jim. He called me up to ask if I would like to do an SVP field trip with him in 2015. I flew down and it was just like old times driving the truck and the vans stopping and looking at road cuts, wading through bays, rivers, and surf in the wild and then inspecting building materials for fossils.

We talked a few times a month via facebook or texts. More frequently during Oklahoma’s severe weather season. I’d get a text that would say something like “radar’s showing some heavy bands coming through OK, you’ll probably get a warning soon.”

I last saw him after my son was born on a worldwind trip down to the Gulf Coast and back. He gave me a book about explorations in Africa. I talked to him the Wednesday before his stroke. Shared an article from the University Press there at Lamar (where incidentally I had been in before thanks to working with him) that I was interviewed for a Mary Anning article, and told him about our upcoming Mary Anning exhibit I am working on up here. Last thing I told him was he would have to stop by on his next Field Geology of Texas course trip. He sent a thumbs up.

There is so much more in between all of that. He wasn’t just my subject mentor, he helped me navigate college as a first gen student. He was one one of the first people who not only saw how my brain worked and that I was smart enough to go places, but actually gave me the tools and the confidence (and experience) to go through with it.

How do you memorialize the person who introduced you to John McPhee and Stephen Jay Gould? Fundamentally changed my direction (or lack of direction) in life? Putting me with the mineral displays started my work in exhibits, I am now the exhibits coordinator at OU Libraries. That bank box full of fossil replicas turned into my own Paleo Porch Mini Mobile Museum (which whenever I finally finish this dissertation will get back into schools again).

He’s the reason I am working on a dissertation at all. Sometimes I felt (and maybe still feel) that I let him down not going into solid vert paleo–not because he ever gave me one inkling of a notion to feel this way–and into history of science instead. But at the same time I always felt like he was proud of what I was doing. And as a first gen student having someone understand what all was going on and not letting your expectations cloud reality was worth more than anything.

He taught teachers, and I saw his passion and his knowledge expand to fill the classroom and spill out all over the field. He was the first to tell you that “science is a verb.” He always mentioned the teamwork in every single accolade I saw him receive. It was never about him, he was the catalyst. By teaching teachers and those teachers teaching their students he had a compound impact on education in Southeast Texas.

I don’t know that there is anyone who knew (or shared) more about Gulf Coast paleontology than he did. The lost to the field is incalculable. The loss to his friends and family is immeasurable. There are still things coming up where I catch myself about to text him (Did you know the Magic School Bus has a human evolution book?!?).

We were also part of a boom turned bust story back in 2008. Post Hurricane Ike we were looking through the remains of one of Jim’s colleague’s homes that had been destroyed and found a mammoth tooth. They’ve been found before on the coast especially after storms. This one, however belonged to a elephant handler from the Houston Zoo whose home was also destroyed. We found this out when we returned to the beach with a news crew to film and some of the previous owner’s friends came to see what the filming was for.

We had talked in late March about my wife setting up her first saltwater aquarium and how much work it took for his daughter Erin to get hers going.

With Jim it was always more than the classroom. That was just where the administrative stuff took place. That’s something I am forever grateful for because when you think like that everything is an opportunity and so many things he’s shown and taught me I am now showing and teaching my son. And the reason that I have a job in exhibits now, and relationships across multiple disciplines across campus is because Jim gave me the vocabulary to speak to them and the bilinguality of taking the complex and making it accessible. But, maybe greater than this, the reason that my son will have even more opportunities than I did in a place that I never dreamed of being is because Jim saw my potential. Never controlling or overbearing, just gentle nudges and direction and let you go on your own.

While Jim was in the hospital I was talking to some friends about him. They said something pretty profound as I was thinking about the loss of institutional and discipline knowledge that would pass away with him. And they said something like “the first thing you think is the loss the next generation will face not having them, until you realize that you are the bridge to the next generation.”

Even if I started now I could never hope to have an impact on as many people’s lives as Jim Westgate did directly or indirectly. There are so many instances of Jim’s dry humor coming out (and coming across as seriousness which made it even funnier) that it’s hard to pick one or two instances that could really sum it up. The one I think comes closest would be any time someone asks what time they needed to be up the next morning he would say “you can sleep as late as you want, but the van leaves at 7:30.”

Goodbye Jim Westgate. A part of you is in everything that I do and I hope I have a fraction of the impact you did. And I am still not forgiving you for not telling me that any mention of any lyric of Alice’s Restaurant would send Dana Cope into a full perfunctory field rendition of all 18.5 minutes of the song.