Alfred Woodford; Geology Teacher at Pomona College

Alfred O. Woodford, founding director of the Pomona College geology department nearly 70 years ago and a teacher who trained many of the best-known geologists on the West Coast, has died at a retirement community in Claremont.

Don Pattison, a spokesman for the college, said Woodford, known to his colleagues and students as “Woody,” was 100 when he died Friday. He had retired in 1955 after an affiliation with Pomona that began in 1909 as a student.

A native of Upland, his father, Butler A. Woodford, was manager of the Sunkist Orange Assn., while his grandfather, Alfred P. Harwood, was a member of the Chaffey Land Co., which began developing the area that today is Ontario and Upland. The Harwoods were among the earliest supporters of Pomona College.

Alfred Woodford, who graduated from Pomona in 1913, enrolled there to become a soil scientist. But the embryonic oil boom then under way led him into geology. He began teaching geology in 1919 while taking graduate classes at UC Berkeley. After receiving his doctorate three years later he founded a one-man department.

Over the years its students came to include Rollin Eckis, former executive chairman of the board of the Atlantic Richfield Co., Roger Revelle, former director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography for whom UC San Diego’s Revelle College is named, and C. A. Anderson, former head of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Woodford’s special field of study included the rocks and minerals of Southern and Baja California, stream hydraulics and the history of geology.

When he retired he was given the Neil A. Miner Award, the highest award of the National Assn. of Geology Teachers. In 1963, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Geological Society of America, Woodford and some of his former students wrote “The Fabric of Geology.”

A widower, Woodford is survived by two daughters, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.