Le Mans: Remember “Mr. Earthquake, a native of Brunswick | Richmond News Local

Growing up on a farm in Brunswick County during the days of apartheid, Waverley Johnson rose someone who rose above those barriers to get an education, serve his country and make a name for himself as a geophysicist and seismologist and the first African American president of the US Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center.

He introduced himself as Waverly, and his family called him Johnny, but everyone knew him as “Mr. Earthquake.”

His “insistence” was said by his niece Katrina Bender, when asked what she remembers most about her uncle. “He has faced many obstacles in his life, and has been able to overcome them all.”

A person died on February 10 in Boulder, Colorado, their home since moving to Colorado in the 1970s with the relocation of the National Earthquake Information Center, which he had helped found. He was 95 years old.

A funeral was held on Friday in Boulder. A memorial service will be held at Brown’s Funeral Home in Lawrenceville at 2 p.m. Saturday, followed by a reception at the Brunswick County Convention Center.

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One of 13 children, two of whom died at birth, Pearson grew up during the Great Depression in the Blackridge area of ​​Brunswick, southeast of the South Hill, between US 58 and the Virginia-North Carolina line.

When asked in 2002 by an interviewer at The HistoryMakers, the largest archive of African American video oral history, if money was “kinda short,” Pearson replied that there was no “kind of” about it.

“The money was short, very, very short,” he said. “We had no money. We had to do our best with what we had.”

From a young age, he and his brothers – the third and oldest of the boy – performed household chores on the farm: milking cows, cutting wood, feeding horses and pigs.

“I worked at a very young age,” he said in an interview with HistoryMakers. “We had to work to survive.”

With no public school available to him after the seventh grade—there were no high schools for blacks in Brunswick—the person’s father paid him to attend St. Paul’s Normal and Industrial School, which was a black high school and college, about 20 miles away in Lawrenceville. The tuition fee was symbolic, but it represented a great sacrifice for a family living on the edge of the abyss. He recovered some of his tuition fees by selling eggs from his family’s chickens to students who live on campus.

During his final year, someone drafted into the Army, and served in the Pacific near the end of World War II as part of the completely separate 93rd Infantry Division. He later served in the Korean War as well, earning the rank of Staff Sergeant.

He returned to St. Paul (later St. Paul’s College in the 1950s) and earned a degree in mathematics. He met Sarah Walker, who was also from Brunswick County, in St. Paul, and they married in 1954. They moved to Washington, where the person worked in construction before deciding he should look for another line of business. Based on his background in mathematics, he eventually took a job as a physics technician at the US Department of Commerce, which at the time included a department studying earthquakes.

The person’s job, he recalled in a 2016 interview with Brunswick Times-Gazette, involved changing drums on seismographs that recorded earthquake activity.

“I was seeing all these squiggly lines, some small, some big on the drums, and I became interested in knowing what they were and what caused them. I paid so much attention to everything and wanted to learn as much as I could. At this time I decided I wanted to make a career in seismology” .

While still working, he attended night classes at George Washington University and American University to qualify as a geophysicist. A turning point in his career came on March 27, 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude earthquake struck Alaska. The earthquake lasted more than four minutes and is the most powerful earthquake in US history.

Someone pointed out that the lobby was full of reporters when he went to work the next morning. While he was changing drums on seismographs, people were asking him questions, looking for answers about the earthquake. The person went upstairs to alert his supervisors, who said there was no one, so they brought him back and asked him to speak to the media. He ended up doing such a good job dealing with reporters’ questions, and has since become the go-to person to handle the press. He was also promoted to the position of geophysicist.

“He always said it was the earthquake that put him on the map,” Bender said.

In the early 1970s, he helped establish the United States Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center, which moved to Golden, Colorado, and in 1977 was appointed head of the Earthquake Information Center. He held this position until his retirement in 2006, at the age of 80.

“He was amazing, really just a wonderful human being,” said Jim Dewey, a geophysicist who was a colleague and friend of Pearson for nearly half a century.

In an interview from his home in Boulder, Dewey talked about a person’s involvement with various community organizations. He remembers him dressed as Santa Claus to ring the Salvation Army bell as a member of the Kiwanis Club. He also spoke often in schools, shared his life story and stressed the importance of education.

Dewey said that after the person’s wife, Sarah, who died in 2013 after nearly 60 years of marriage, the person used to come to dinner on Sundays and in the fall watch football. Dewey said Pearson was a big fan of football, especially from the Denver and Washington teams.

Did the person have a great personality?

“It was definitely big, but it wasn’t glowing,” Dewey said. “He was a nice guy with a wonderful life.”

In his role, the person was the face and voice of an earthquake epicenter whose job was to convey the gravity and complexity of earthquakes to a non-technical audience without losing their listeners in the scientific grass while not downplaying the gravity of the situation or panic. General. His colleagues said he walked the tightrope with great skill.

“He could speak plain English, which a lot of scientists have a hard time doing,” USGS public affairs specialist Heidi Koontz said in a 2018 interview with Boulder Daily Camera. “He was a master at it.”

Through it all, the person became known as “Mr. Earthquake,” a nickname his niece said he embraced warmly, though he never forgot his roots or renounced his modesty.

“I think he would be proud of everything he accomplished, of all the people he helped, of being such a good soldier, hard worker, and such a faithful man,” Bender said.

Dewey, now an emeritus scientist at the USGS, said he was pleased with an article about his friend that was in the works for the Richmond paper.

He said: “He is the son of my origin that people should know.”

Bender said the person had been living in an assisted living facility since 2019. He was survived by a sister and brother.

The reception following the memorial service will be held in Lawrenceville on Saturday at the Brunswick County Convention Center, which houses the James Solomon Russell/St Paul College Museum and Archives, which inducted someone into the Wall of Fame in 2019.

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