Stories in Stone (27 page)

Brown further benefited from Lamar’s location, a little over 125 miles west of the hundredth meridian and less than thirty-five
miles from the Kansas border.
When travelers driving U.S.
Route 50, often called America’s Main Street, happened upon the
petrified wood station, they knew they had left the moist East behind and crossed into the arid West.
Hell, the wood out here
was so dry it had turned to stone.

“I think they look like warriors crossing the plains,” said Carolyn Peyton.
²¹
She was referring to the thirty-two-story-tall windmills arranged in parallel rows across open ranchland, twenty-five miles
south of Lamar.
One hundred and eight of the white towers, each with three 112-foot-long blades, have been erected on nearly
twelve thousand acres of land, most of it owned by the Emick family.
Peyton, who grew up in Lamar and arranged this little
expedition, was standing with Greg and Val Emick, who have driven us out to look for petrified wood on their property.

It is perfect country for windmills, windy, gently rolling, and treeless.
Prickly pear cactus, yucca, and sunflowers are the
tallest plants growing amid weathered grasses.
Not much moves out here besides the turbines, cows, and grasshoppers, and at
least one tarantula.

“People occasionally try and steal the petrified wood.
Recently someone tried to put these full rounds into his pickup,” said
Emick.
²²
He was referring to three bathtub-sized petrified logs resting on the ground.
“They crushed the back end of their truck,
which is how we caught them,” he added.

“Do you have time to see another log?” he asked.
“It’s a bit of a drive.” Back in his V-10 pickup, he drove out a dirt road,
through several gates, one of which I almost electrocuted myself on, crossed a dry, rocky wash, and finally abandoned the
road to head cross country.
He stopped at a mostly buried petrified tree, unseen until almost stepped on.

Brown, black, and white, the log had eroded like an onion, revealing ring after annual ring of growth.
Emick walked off its
length and determined that it ran aboveground for forty-five to fifty feet.
Hundreds of smaller pieces had trickled down the
hillside below it, looking as if the tree had recently died and decayed into pieces.
One chunk the size of a baseball had
a creamy, translucent texture, warmed by the midday sun.
It weighed about twice as much as a baseball and its fossilized bark
felt like a dried orange peel, in contrast to the smooth, layered growth rings.
The nearly perfect fossilization of the ancient
tree made the connection between the living and the long dead especially palpable.

Emick guessed that Bill Brown acquired his petrified wood from somewhere around this site.
Frank Phillips purchased his twenty-four
tons of petrified wood from property about a mile west of here and a 1931 booklet places the petrified forest on what became
Emick land.
That publication refers to one log that was a hundred feet long and six feet in diameter.
Because the exact spot
of Brown’s acquisition of his building materials will never be known, it presents a geologic conundrum.

When did the trees live?
That is the 50-million-year question.
Did they grow 150 million years ago in a dinosaur-rich savannah
or 120 million years ago in a hilly landscape of fast streams or 100 million years ago, as a sea began to invade North America?
Part of the problem can be summed up by one geologist, who said about the area, “I haven’t seen enough petrified wood of that
quality to build a bird house, much less a gas station.”

The question is interesting because that 50-million-year period witnessed one of the great events of evolution.
The appearance
of angiosperms, or flowering plants, was as dramatic as that of trees 250 million years earlier.
Encased seeds allowed flowering
plants to spread across the globe, filling niches never attempted before by their naked-seeded cousins, the gymnosperms.
Angiosperms
led to a burst of evolution, as pollinators and consumers evolved to feed on nectar, pollen, fruit, and seed.
Flowers responded
in kind, trying either to encourage or discourage visitors.
We now reap this revolution in evolution: Almost every plant we
consume is an angiosperm.

Close-up of petrified wood, William Brown’s gas station, Lamar, Colorado.

Angiosperms also filled the world with new aromas and new colors.
Paleontologists suspect that some of the dinosaurs were
colorful, because their modern descendants—birds—are, but greens and browns still dominated the palette 150 million years
ago.
With the evolution of flowers around 132 million years ago, the landscape brightened with hues rarely seen before on
land.

No matter when Brown’s trees once lived, water carried them some unknown distance, perhaps tens of miles but more likely much
less.
A few trees probably remained intact but the majority broke into smaller sections, as you would see along any modern
river.
After they settled, most likely on the inside of a bend where the river slowed or possibly in a logjam, fine-grained
sediment quickly buried the downed timber.
Groundwater rich in silica infiltrated the wood.
The silica impregnated and replicated
the tree’s structure.
More sediments piled atop the tree-rich beds of sand, converting it to a sandstone.

As with so many other aspects of the history and geology of the gas station, paleontologists cannot tell what species the
trees originally were.
The best guess is some type of conifer but nothing more specific than that.
They could be an angiosperm
such as a magnolia or cottonwood, but probably not; gymnosperms dominated the planet’s flora long after flowering plants appeared.
No one has studied the petrified wood well enough, however, to say for sure.

I like to think that Brown’s trees lived after angiosperms evolved.
They grew in a grove near a fast-flowing river.
Perhaps
a herd of herbivorous dinosaurs grazed nearby, eating some of those newfangled plants with their colorful flowers.
A few insects
buzzed around, also periodically checking out the flowers.
Wind blew gently through the trees.
Geologists can be romantics,
too.

Although Frank Phillips couldn’t buy Bill Brown’s gas station and never had anyone build him a copy from the petrified wood
he bought in July 1939, he did become the owner of a new petrified wood building.
On November 28, 1939, Phillips turned sixty-six.
His employees, who called him “Uncle Frank,” celebrated their boss’s big day with parties and a parade.
Gifts arrived from
around the country.
They included a portrait, numerous items emblazoned with the Phillips corporate logo and the number 66,
two very ugly lamps, and a small model of a gas station.

Bill Quinn, the Lamar agent for Phillips Petroleum, station managers Gene and Blynne Smith, and tire distributor Red Mathews
built the twenty-four-by-thirty-inch replica of the Lamar building.
It had taken them several weeks to assemble.
They first
built a plywood mock-up and then headed south to the petrified forest to collect buckets of petrified wood chips.
After putting
together the model, they added a sign that read.
The Only Petrified Wood Station in the World, two pumps, several cars, and
a smartly dressed mechanic.
According to Quinn, no other present “thrilled him [Phillips] more than the miniature petrified
wood service station.”
²³

Uncle Frank put his little gas station on display at his ranch,Woolaroc.
It sat out for many years until Woolaroc opened as
a public museum.
The model didn’t survive long.
The public liked it too much.
Greasy little fingers picked at it, breaking
off souvenirs and stealing them, says Woolaroc’s director, Ken Meek.
He doesn’t know exactly when but thinks the model was
thrown out sometime in the 1950s, after Frank Phillips died.

Bill Brown’s petrified wood building remained a gas station until he died in 1957 and then it stood unused until 1962, when
James Stagner converted it to an office for the Lamar Tire Service.
Stagner still owns it but hasn’t used the building as
an office for many years.
He said that people still stop by and want to see it.
Most are respectful and just take a few pictures
and leave, but some want more.
“A couple of kids once drove up and asked for a crowbar so they could pry off a piece.
We told
them to hold on so we could get two crowbars and we would pry off a piece of chrome from their car,” he said.
“They left without
any wood.”

After talking with Stagner, taking photographs, and exploring the building, I got in my rental minivan and drove north.
I
stopped at a gas station about an hour later.
It was a typical modern station found near highways across America.
No one came
out to help me.
I paid for my gas with a credit card inserted at the pump and got back on the interstate.
Bugs still covered
my windshield.

8

T
HE
T
ROUBLE
WITH
M
ICHELANGELO’S
F
AVORITE
S
TONE
—C
ARRARA
M
ARBLE

Clearly it is a miracle that a stone, formless in the beginning,

could ever have been brought to the state of perfection which

Nature habitually struggles to create in the flesh.

—Vasari,
Lives of the Artists

Nothing the best of artists can conceive

but lies, potential, in a block of stone,

superfluous matter round it.
The hand alone

secures it that has intelligence for guide.

—Michelangelo

O
NE MIGHT THINK that an architect named Stone would know better.
One also might think that a company that depended upon geology
for its fortunes would know better.
They didn’t.
Like so many others before and after them, Standard Oil Company of Indiana
and its chairman, John Swearingen, and architect Edward Durell Stone had been seduced.
Not by money or sex, the typical agents
of temptation, but by stone.
In particular, they had succumbed to the allure of Carrara marble.
They made a big mistake.

In an age when skyscrapers covered in glass and steel dominated architecture, Stone rejected the “hygienic austerity” of human-made
materials.
He favored the “classic purity of the all-white building” with its “accumulation of history,” and no stone better
met this requirement than an “ageless material,” such as marble.
¹
Taking a less aesthetic approach, Bonnie Swearingen, John Swearingen’s wife, said, “We’re going to bring [the marble] all
the way from Italy to Chicago.”
²
Standard Oil’s new headquarters would be in her words a “mountain of marble,” piercing the Windy City skyline with the world’s
tallest marble shaft.

Stone and Standard gave in to marble for a simple reason.
No material has as glorious a pedigree.
For over five thousand years,
humans have relied on the dignity, prestige, and beauty of marble.
Whether in sculpture or architecture, East or West, public
or private, sacred or profane, small-scale or monumental, marble bestows qualities found in no other stone.
Use of marble
signals that the artist or architect has achieved a certain status in life and can afford the stone of Michelangelo, of the
Parthenon, of the Taj Mahal.

Construction on Standard’s headquarters began April 6, 1970.
Engineers describe the design as tube construction, with a central
core for elevators, mechanical shafts, and emergency stairs, surrounded by a structure of steel and concrete.
On the exterior
hung a curtain wall of 44,000 marble panels, which served little purpose other than an aesthetic one.
Each panel weighed between
275 and 350 pounds and ran on average 50 inches high by 42 inches wide by 11.4 inches thick.
Four stainless steel anchors
bolted to the building held each panel in place.
The anchors looked like four hands with bent fingers wedged into four grooves
on the panel’s top and bottom edges.
Because the groove was wider, deeper, and longer than each anchor, the panels could move
slightly.
After hanging the panels, builders caulked the grooves around each slab, so that from the outside you could not
see the anchors.
Nor could water get behind the panels and weaken the anchor system.
³

Standard Oil’s employees moved into their 1,136-foot-tall, marble-encased headquarters in December 1972.
The honeymoon between
man and marble lasted only one year.
On December 26, 1973, a 350-pound marble slab plummeted from the eighty-second story
and walloped the Prudential Building across the street.
A windstorm two months later dislodged another slab, which destroyed
a car on the street.
Neither incident injured anyone.

Responding to a new city ordinance, Standard, now known as Amoco, made its first detailed inspection of the slabs in 1979.
Over two thousand panels had cracks and seven had bowed convexly one-half inch.
Workers replaced the potbellied panels with
new ones and repaired the cracks.
Amoco also hired Texas A&M professor John Logan as principal geology consultant on the building.
His specialty was studying how rock responds to temperature and pressure.

“The panels were intimidating.
Anything that failed could be catastrophic,” said Logan, now a geology professor at the University
of Oregon.
⁴
He immediately set up temperature probes around the building to monitor it twenty-four hours a day.
Ever since Lord Rayleigh
in 1933 had shown that marble weakened as it was heated, geologists had known that thermal cycling warped marble.
Logan also
removed several panels from the building, took them back to his lab in Texas, and baked the rocks at three different temperature
cycles.
In all the tests, panels suffered a rapid loss of strength, which then tapered to a gradual loss.
He also observed
that larger temperature differences in cycles led to more pronounced loss of strength.

Coincident with Logan’s testing, employees continued to notice cracks and bowing appearing regularly in the panels.
Inspectors
in 1989 found almost 8,300 panels with cracks.
On many, a slight tap with a hammer expanded the crack from a fine, vertical
line to a crescent shape prone to failure.
Worse, maximum panel curvature had increased to 11.8 inch.
In agreement with Logan’s
hypothesis that daily temperature changes weakened the panels, approximately 80 percent of those most warped panels occurred
on the south and east sides of the building, the two areas that received the most direct sunlight.
Tests further showed that
an average panel had lost 40 percent of its original strength and that weaker ones had suffered a 75 percent decrease.

“Despite the numbers, there were no significant issues that panels would fail.
They had stabilized after their initial loss
of strength.
I think there was no scientific reason to replace all of the panels, if Amoco practiced good maintenance,” said
Logan.
But science was not the only concern and lawyers got involved, concerned that even one failed panel might fall and
injure someone.

“When a person comes in and says forty-four thousand pieces of marble on your building have to be removed, you go ‘whomp!’
Well, after I picked myself up off the floor, we said there has got to be some other solution besides removing the marble,”
said Roger Hage, a vice president of Amoco, to a building conference in 1993.
⁵
Engineers initially thought workers could cut each panel in half vertically and horizontally and bolt the four newly created,
quarter-size panels to the building, but when they realized they would have to drill over 700,000 holes and caulk 176,000
panels, Hage’s team abandoned their resistance and began to look for the best way to replace the marble panels.

Amoco first secured every panel to the building using two white stainless steel straps per panel.
After considering options
ranging from replacement on an as-needed basis to full replacement with aluminum, Amoco decided to remove every marble panel
and put up new two-inch-thick granite slabs.
They came from a quarry in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where Logan had made a
detailed geologic map to determine the best rock.
He also took slabs and blocks back to his lab and heated, soaked, warped,
and weighed them.
On site, more technicians checked the panels before they were attached to the building.
“They were probably
the most tested granite panels in history,” said Logan.

The recladding project took four years from 1988 to 1992.
Contractors designed and built a canopy to protect the public at
ground level, erected a monorail system at five levels for moving panels and people, and installed hoists to raise and lower
the granite.
They replaced a floor and a half of panels per week, finishing in November 1991.
Caulking ninety miles of stone
and dismantling all equipment lasted until July 1992.
Big Amy, as the building had been nicknamed, remained open throughout
the process.
(Once known as Big Stan, for its connection to Standard Oil, it is now called the Aon Center, after its principal
tenant, the Aon Corporation.)

After removing the panels, which weighed over six thousand tons, Amoco received more than two hundred requests to use the
marble.
Five hundred tons went to a small company that made clocks, awards, and trinkets.
The items sold at the Amoco headquarters
for between $150 and $250.
Nearly forty-five hundred tons ended up as golf ball–sized landscaping materials at various Amoco
refineries.
The final one thousand tons, crushed into fist-sized pieces, went to a local university as a lining for a pond.

Like a nagging sore, problems with Amoco’s marble didn’t end with its dispersal.
One year after Governors State University
lined their pond, hundreds of stocked bluegill, carp, and crappie died in the shallow water, right in front of a popular patio.
Initial press reports focused on whether the marble or adhesive on the panels was responsible, but a study later revealed
that a bacterial infection killed the fish.
The marble was finally off the hook.
⁶

* * *

If you want someone to blame for Amoco’s marble problems, you have to look no further than Michelangelo.
Whether in sculpting
or architecture, he exploited the brilliance and luminosity of marble as few have ever done.
His work gave marble, particularly
Carrara marble, the prestige that made it the material to use in corporate boardrooms, prestigious law firms, and rarefied
social clubs.
Marble good enough for Michelangelo had to be good enough for Standard Oil.

Michelangelo first became attracted to stone at a young age, or so he told his biographer Vasari.
“Giorgio, if I have any
intelligence at all, it has come from being born in the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I took the hammer
and chisels with which I carve my figures from my wet-nurse’s milk.”
⁷
Like so many others, his first experiences were hammering his local rock.
Born in 1475 in Caprese, about fifty miles from
Florence, Michelangelo spent his early years in the quarrying village of Settignano, where the stone carvers, or
scarpellini
, worked a blue gray sandstone known as
pietra serena
.

Suckled on stone or not, Michelangelo did not start as a sculptor.
His father apprenticed the youngster to the great fresco
painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.
Michelangelo soon surpassed his master, who recommended his protégé to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the
head of Florence’s ruling family.
It was in Lorenzo’s garden that Michelangelo discovered marble, at the age of fifteen or
sixteen.
Lorenzo was a renowned patron of the arts, with a rich collection of Greek and Roman sculptures, plus a resident
sculptor, Bertoldo di Giovanni, a student of Donatello, the greatest sculptor of the early to middle 1400s.

Again,Michelangelo’s precocious ability aided his development.
Vasari described how the young artist so impressed Lorenzo
with his first effort in sculpting—a copy of a faun—that Lorenzo invited Michelangelo to move into his house, gave him fine
clothes, and allowed him to sit at the family dining table.
Perhaps apocryphal, the faun has never been found, but Michelangelo
did begin to work regularly with marble in the Medici garden.
He remained in Lorenzo’s care for two years, until his patron’s
death in 1492.

Over the next dozen years, while living in Bologna, Florence, and Rome, Michelangelo completed as many as ten sculptures.
These include the
Sleeping Cupid
, which he dirtied up and tried to pass off as a Roman antique, and his first surviving life-size piece, a fleshy, staggering
Bacchus
.
He also traveled to the quarries in Carrara, seventy-five miles east and north of Florence, for the first time to find a
piece of marble.
Out of a brilliantly white, crack-free block he carved the sublimely holy Vatican
Pietà
.
Next came his colossal
David
, hewn from a block of Carrara first quarried in 1464, and later dragged through the mud to Florence and worked by two other
carvers, before sitting outside in Florence for over three decades.

What unites his work, particularly the
Pietà
,
David
, and later
Moses
, is that Michelangelo had transcended his medium.
He had become an alchemist, turning stone into living beings.
When you
look at any of these great statues, it is hard not to think that you are looking at works carved of flesh and cloth.
Every
fold, every muscle, every feature is so realistic that you expect David or Moses or Mary to become animate and to tell of
the great thoughts revealed in their faces.
It feels as if they are present.