by George B. Barbour

November 1, 1962

Bucher's father was a Lutheran pastor who came from the Rhineland to minister to the welfare of the German-speaking communities in Southern Ohio, first at Akron where Walter Hermann Bucher first sounded off in 1888, and then on Mt. Auburn. In those days, German was still the current language in a number of the Zinzinnati schools but before Walter was of high school age, the family moved back to Germany. After gymnasium Bucher studied at Heidelberg, getting his Ph.D. in 1911. His first love was paleontology, though the nearness of the Rhein-graben to Switzerland extended his interest to Alpine structures and to Zurich, where his Hanna had her home.

Returning to Zinzinnati in 1913 he regained touch with Nevin Malanchthon Fenneman who saw in him just the gifted fellow needed in the department to bring order into the chaos of Cincinnati Ozarkian stratigraphy that was being pawed over by Schuchert, Ulrich, Bassler, Foerste and their kind. But instead Walter nearly broke Fenneman's heart by developing a morbid passion for cryptovolcanics and other tectonic abnormalities. One December, he stole one of his children's Christmas tree ornaments – a large colored glass bubble that hung from a branch by a wire hook through a narrow hole. Bucher filled it with water, corked the small hole and left it on the window overnight. By morning it was frozen, but as the ice froze and expanded the glass had split in a pattern of cracks, which Walter decided were the counterparts of the major rift system in the Earth's crust. This sent him off like a hound dog on the trail of answers to the questions of orogenesis – some of which he still hasn't settled thirty years later.

Fresh from the groves and beer gardens of Heidelberg, Walter's tongue was nothing strange to citizens from Über der Rhein. But it added piquancy to the ice that left ground moraine below the snout of the Aletsch glacier to warn that "she slid down hill on her bottom". It was cryptovolcanicity that lost Walter from Old Tech. One of Douglas Johnson's students had ideas about Jeptha Knob, an alleged cryptovolcanic center in Kentucky. Before accepting the thesis Johnson came to inspect it and invited Bucher, Rich, and others in the department to guide him to Adams County, where Bucher's ability to stick to his guns in the face of Johnson's organized multiple hypothesis attack showed him at his best. Next spring he gave a course on tectonics at Columbia and soon after was offered a permanent desk in Schermerhorn Hall.

In the early days, the department was N.M. Fenneman with W. Bucher and Otto von Schlichten. Earl Case in geography was joined in 1929 by A.E. Sandberg in petrology. Short period appointments in economic geology were held by Theiss, Behre, Tuck, and others, but in 1932 John L. Rich came in permanently as Professor of Economic Geology. Attendance was required at a journal club seminar every Monday afternoon, when upper class and graduate students gave summary reports on periodical articles. When the reporter had finished, Dr. Fenneman might interject a sly barbed critical aside while the others jumped in on all four feet. The student got out of the line of fire while the big guns blew off point blank. Those were the days.