Charles Lum Drake ’45

On July 8, 1997, the class lost a distinguished member when Prof. Charles L. Drake died of a heart attack at his home in Norwich, Vt. Chuck entered Princeton from Chatham [N.J.] H.S. and took his degree in geology in 1948 after service as a staff sergeant with the 79th Engineers, seeing combat in New Guinea and the Philippines. Chuck then joined the geophysics laboratory of Columbia U., where he obtained his Ph.D. In 1950 he married Martha A. Churchill, upon her graduation from Smith, and they had four daughters.

Chuck joined Columbia's Lamont Geological Observatory and became chairman of Columbia's department of geology. After 20 years at Columbia studying the ocean floor with voyages on their research vessel and dives on the French bathyscaphe Archimede, he joined the earth sciences department at Dartmouth, teaching oceanography and geophysics and doing desert oceanography on the Colorado River system and Lake Powell. Chuck was president of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, and served on the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology for Pres. Bush along with Princeton Pres. Harold Shapiro.

 

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In addition to his wife, Martha, Chuck is survived by three daughters, Mary Layton, Pace Mehling, and Susannah Drake, and four grandchildren. Chuck would want it noted, in a Princeton memorial, that a major claim to distinction is that he was one of the few who stole the clapper from the bell tower of Nassau Hall. Pictured (l-r) with the clapper are Chuck, Al Taylor ’46, Jimmy Lipscomb ’45, and Phil Wood ’46.

The Class of 1945