Hollis Dow Hedberg (May 29, 1903 – August 14, 1988; nickname: "El Doctor Hedberg") was an American geologist specializing in petroleum exploration. His contribution to stratigraphic classification of rocks and procedures is a monumental work which received universal acceptance. The firm he worked for, the Gulf Oil Corporation in Venezuela, trusted his findings and explored what had until then been uncharted territory. As a result, they reaped huge benefits from their petroleum findings. Hedberg taught at Princeton University from 1959 until his retirement in 1971. He was awarded the Mary Clark Thompson Medal by the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. In 1975 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London. Hedberg won the Sidney Powers Memorial Award in 1963.
Early life Hollis Dow Hedberg was born on 29 May 1903 in Falun, Kansas. He belonged to a small Swedish community and his parents lived on the second floor of the house. At that time Kansas experienced the worst flood in its history. His father, Carl August Hedberg, born in Sweden came to the US as one of four children. His mother, Zada Mary Dow, was of Scottish-English descent. He had an older brother, James, and a younger sister, Carol. His initial years were difficult; he worked in the fields. He learned how to whistle as a boy at age 8. Overtime, he developed a skill for whistling, which became one of his hobbies and traits later on in life, while ploughing fields with horses. He came from a musical family: his father played violin, his mother the piano, his brother James the viola, and he played cello. They were fond of reading books to one another.
Education Hedberg joined the Falun elementary school in 1909 and attended Falun Rural High School from 1916 to 1920. After graduating from high school, in 1920 he was admitted to the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Initially he was interested in journalism but later decided to study geology. His college study was interrupted when his father died in 1921 forcing him to return home to run the farm. He resumed his studies in 1922 and in 1925 completed his BA degree in geology with a distinction as a Phi Beta Kappa key. He joined Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1925 and in 1926 was awarded an MS in geology. In 1924 and 1925, he enjoyed a summer internship as a field assistant for the Kansas State Geological Survey. In 1926, he contributed a technical paper on "The Effect of Gravitational Compaction on the Structure of Sedimentary Rocks" based on his investigations at the University of Kansas. He put forward a theory that porosity in shales was an index of pressure metamorphism liable to indicate the presence of oil, years before the approach was documented in the literature. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1937.
Career His first employment in 1926 was as a petrographer with the Maracaibo laboratory. He worked in this capacity for Lago Petroleum Corporation, a Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil. In June 1926, he travelled to Maracaibo, his first business trip outside the United States. He wrote letters to his mother every other day as he was very close to his family. Fond of travel, he went on tours almost every week. When in the Misoa River area, on the eastern part of Lake Maracaibo, he almost lost his life in a flash flood in the Ryan River during an intense rainstorm. Based on his field investigations during this period he propounded the theory that correlation and dating of rocks could be undertaken without the help of fossils which he documented in a paper titled "Some Aspects of Sedimentary Petrography in Relation to Stratigraphy in the Bolivar Coast Fields of the Maracaibo Basin, Venezuela" (1928)".
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