1928-1997

Wayne Pryor, Professor of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, died at home on Monday, May 12, 1997. Wayne had been fighting prostate cancer courageously for approximately two years.  He was born in Bellevue, PA and served in World War II in Germany. After completing his military service, he entered Centenary College in Louisiana, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1952. He then went on to the University of Illinois at Urbana for his MS degree and to Rutgers University for his PhD, completed in 1959. During this time period he also worked for the Illinois State Geological Survey as an associate geologist and hydrologist. After completing his PhD, he joined the Gulf Oil Corporation in Pittsburgh, where he worked as exploration geologist and sedimentologist until 1965, when he joined the University of Cincinnati. While a Cincinnati professor, he also received appointments as a Fulbright Fellow to the University of Heidelberg and as Crosby Visiting Professor of Economic Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

In his career at Cincinnati, Wayne taught 21 courses including sedimentology and petroleum geology. In his 32 years with the department, he supervised 19 PhD and 53 MS theses. Despite problems stemming from his struggle with cancer, he continued to teach, and was lecturing in his petroleum geology class until shortly before his death. Two MS students also completed their theses during 1997, so Wayne continued his teaching efforts at full speed until the end. In all of his courses, Wayne emphasized field trips, and many students will remember as their first introduction to the geology department his two-week trip to west Texas just before the start of the school year, and others will remember his Florida Bay trip as their introduction to modern carbonate environments. He was posthumously named as the first recipient of the Department's Teaching Excellence Award.  

Wayne's research covered a broad array of topics in sedimentology, including important work on all three major classes of rocks: carbonates, sandstones, and shales. In carbonate research, he and his students developed models invoking storm activity as the controlling factor for deposition of the Cincinnatian limestones. He had also worked extensively on Carboniferous sediments of the Illinois Basin, particularly the oolitic reservoir facies in the Mississippian limestones. In coarse clastics, he was a long-time advocate of using quantitative measurements on modern sands as a guide to understanding ancient sandstone reservoirs. He worked on point-bar deposits of the Rio Grande, Wabash, and Mississippi Rivers, and he and his students published many in situ measurements of permeability in these sands, relating their observations to bed form. In the last three years, he had been extending this approach to understanding reservoir heterogeneity to a study of Wisconsinan glacio-fluvial deposits of southwest Ohio and adjacent Indiana. In fine-grained clastics, Wayne was known as a proponent of the role of organisms in sediment deposition, a study that led to the publication of papers on Ophiomorpha as a sedimentological agent, to his co-authorship of the book Sedimentology of Shale, and to his AAPG Distinguished Lecture tour in 1982.  

Wayne was a Certified Petroleum Geologist. He was a member of the AAPG for more than 42 years and a long-time member and officer of the SEPM. His teaching and consulting activities led to geological adventures in a number of exotic places, including Venezuela and Pakistan, where he made grueling trips into the remote and rugged territory made famous by Rudyard Kipling. He brought intense enthusiasm to all of his endeavors. In addition to his teaching and research, Wayne was devoted to flying, scuba diving, and golf. He once said that scuba diving was the closest he could come to the experience of flying without an airplane. Golf is in some ways the ultimate geologist's sport, involving as it does detailed geomorphologic analysis and a very high ratio of ground covered (= geophysics?) for each completion (= hole drilled?). Plus, as in life, you get to spend a lot of time struggling with loose sand. 

In 1997, Wayne and Mary Lou accomplished one of his dreams: establishing and endowing a fellowship to benefit hardworking, financially needy undergraduate geology majors at the University of Cincinnati. The first award of the Wayne A. Pryor-Mary Lou Motl Fellowship was made in the spring quarter of 1997. 

J. B. Maynard May 21,1997