Materials are arranged in the order created during the interview process with the first file containing notes created before, during, and after the interview.
Accession No. PA.2001.0007: Max Brewer, 2001 May
[identification of item], Max Brewer Oral History, SPEC.PA.56.0088, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center Archival Program, Ohio State University
Contains audiocassettes.
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Processed by: Audrey Wimbiscus, 2020 October; finding aid written by: Audrey Wimbiscus, 2020 December
Max Clifton Brewer (1924-2012) was an Arctic geophysicist, geological engineer, and administrator. He had dual citizenship in the United States and Canada, and during World War II, he served in the meteorological program of the United States Army Air Force until his honorable discharge in 1944. After the war, he studied geological engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1950 with a bachelors of science. Prior to graduation, he conducted experiments in Fairbanks, Alaska, during the summers of 1948 and 1949 for the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In September 1950, Brewer moved to Barrow, Alaska, to lead geothermal studies there for the USGS. He married a Barrow local, Mary Lou, in 1954, and was transferred by the USGS to San Francisco, California as a result.
In the fall of 1956, Brewer returned to Barrow as the director of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL). He was the youngest, and ultimately longest serving director of NARL, which he led for 15 years. During this time, he helped establish 7 ice research stations, such as Charlie, ARLIS I and II, Fletcher's Ice Island, and T-3. At the same time, he worked as a professor of ice physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
William Egan, governor of Alaska, appointed Brewer as the first commissioner of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation in 1971. In this role, he worked to ease tensions between environmentalists and industrialists, particularly those who favored drilling for petroleum in Alaska. Brewer held this post until December 1974. Following this, he worked briefly for the United States Navy in the National Petroleum Reserve, and returned to the USGS in 1977, where he worked until his retirement in 1994. In retirement, Brewer traveled to China 8 times, where he shared his expertise in permafrost with the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Langzhou, China. Brewer was still actively publishing in scientific journals at the time of his death in 2012. A type of freshwater algae from Alaska,
The Max Brewer Oral History, dated 2001, contains notes, audio recordings, and transcripts of the interview between Brewer and Karen Brewster of the American Polar Society conducted in two sessions on May 5 and May 30 of 2001. This interview was a part of a series of polar oral histories sponsored by the American Polar Society and Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Major topics discussed include Brewer's formative experiences as a youth in British Columbia, Canada and Spokane, Washington, his memories of floating ice stations in the Arctic Ocean, his time as the director of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL), and other memories of his extensive career with the United States Geological Survey (USGS.)
Also available online:
Also available online: