Lucy Wendland Goodell

Lucy Wendland ("Wendy") Goodell, Dorothy's youngest child (and Arthur Newell Talbot's youngest grandchild ), was born at Loda, D1., in 1933. Like her older sister, she attended Uni High in Urbana and then Radcliffe, graduating in liberal arts in 1954. "I ndependent children we may have been," Barbara Fuller says, "but we sort of followed in our mother's footsteps -- even to the same dormitory, which I think is amusing."

After her graduation from Radcliffe, she worked in Washington, D.C., for several years. "She had a great time," Barbara continues. "This was a great time to be young and in Washington, I think. She worked a while for Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois. And then she worked for the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. Phil Talbot knew her at that time because he was in Washington then. She was a beautiful, beautiful woman. She was tall and slender like my mother, but with the most beautiful red hair and blue eyes. She turned heads all over the world."

Lucy was introduced to her husband-to-be Ivan Keiler Barnes by her cousin, Mary Westergaard, who had married Ivan's older brother, Hubert Lloyd Barnes. Lucy and Ivan were married in 1958.

Both Barnes brothers received doctorates in geology -- Ivan from Harvard, and Hu from Columbia. Ivan, who studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Tufts (1955) and geology as a doctoral student at Harvard (1958), became a geochemist with the U.S. Geological Survey. His work on water quality, volcanic activity and carbon dioxide levels took him all over the world. As Warren Goodell Jr. recalls, "Australia had some unusual water. Northern Russia had some unusual water. For extended periods of time the family would go with him."

Ivan eventually settled in Menlo Park, Calif., at the Geological Survey's western research office.

"Ivan was quite well known in his field," Barbara Fuller adds. For instance, he wrote the article on geochemical properties of fresh water in the 1974 edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica. "And he was quite a stubborn man."

Hu Barnes can attest to his brother's stubbornness. "Recognizing the need for isotopic analyses of waters in the geologic studies of the U.S. Geological Survey, Ivan applied for, and was assigned, funds to purchase mass spectrometers for such analyses," Hu recalls. "Foiled by administrators who correctly pointed out that there was no space for the new instruments, Ivan soon exhausted his not very extensive patience and, ignoring the absence of official approval, ordered the spectrometers.

"When they arrived, there still was no available laboratory space and he was told emphatically that he was out of order and that there was some question when the necessary space could be found. This time his patience was even more limited. He promptly ordered the carpentry tools and wood and continued himself, dawn to dusk and seven days a week, to construct two new laboratories including facilities for extraction lines for removing isotopes from samples and for housing the mass spectrometers.

"The consequences were a means of readily assessing isotopic tracer concentrations in his group's groundwater research, and somewhat frigid relations with Ivan's supervisors in the U.S. Geological Survey."

"He developed a mobile laboratory that he could drive up into the mountains," Warren Jr. continues. "One of the things he got involved in was a problem they had out there in the Central Valley in California -- they were getting lots of deformed birds."

"In his research on the controls of the compositions of groundwaters," Hu Barnes explains. "I van found that the Kesterson Reservoir and other ponds in the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley of California had about ten times the selenium concentration that had been reported by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He immediately correlated such high concentrations of this toxic element with observations of large numbers of dead and deformed waterfowl near these ponds.

"His group reconstructed the source of the selenium. It was derived by rock weathering caused by groundwater which leached out the selenium which was further concentrated by evaporation of the waters, leaving high concentrations in soluble crusts in soils. Where irrigation ditches crossed the soils, the selenium was dissolving from the crusts into the irrigation waters. The irrigation waters then emptied into the ponds and wetlands of the Refuge, where again evaporation increased the concentration. Plants, small organisms, clams, and birds absorbed and drank the contaminated water and were poisoned by the high selenium concentrations.

"Once the process was understood, it became obvious that the problem was widespread in California and extended, for example, also to San Francisco Bay. These results were not welcomed by the farmers of the region who now had to find other means of disposing of their polluted irrigation waters nor by other federal and state agencies who had not detected the risk to the biologic food chain in that region. It is now recognized as a problem in any area with high rates of evaporation of weathering water and where irrigation is used.

"Ivan was often asked to give talks on this and related problems because of his expertise on controls on the composition of groundwaters and their implications on methods of irrigation."

Lucy and Ivan had three sons: Michael George, Peter David and Andrew James. However, Lucy became ill after Andy's birth and died in May 1966, at the early age of 33, "when Andy was only 2 years old. The boys were 6, 4 and 2," Barbara recalls. In 1967, Ivan married Ellie Roberta Brown, a chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey,

who raised Lucy's children as her own. "Roberta became very much a member of the family," Barbara continues. "She adopted the boys. I still see her quite a bit." Roberta and Ivan also had a daughter, Susan Eileen, born in 1970.