I first met Jimmy Griffin back in Sept. 1961 as I began graduate work in anthropology at the University of Michigan. A few months before that, knowing that my weak undergraduate background in anthropology would preclude any standard departmental financial assistance during my first year of graduate study, he had written to offer me a sort of assistantship in the radiocarbon dating laboratory directed by himself and Professor Richard Crane. This half-time position paid only $1.50 per hour, modest even by standards of that time, but the $30 per week that it provided made all the difference for me financially, and so I came to Michigan.
As "radiocarbon clerk" for the 1961-1962 academic year, I was a sort of liaison between where the incoming samples were received at the Museum of Anthropology and where they were dated in the Dept. of Physics: I handled all the correspondence, assigned numbers to the samples, acknowledged receipt of the samples and notified customers of the results, walked the samples over and back from the Museum to the Physics Dept. laboratory, and wrote up short descriptions of each dated sample for publication in the next year's volume of Radiocarbon. In this context I was around the Museum quite a lot.
My desk was in the big room right across the hall from Jimmy's office and right next to the "coffee room," where regularly twice each day, at 10 AM and 3 PM, the Museum staff, students, and faculty curators would congregate to consider the affairs of the day. Jimmy typically presided at these sessions, with other veterans like Volney Jones in supporting roles, and the radiocarbon dates that I brought over from the lab every week provided much of the grist for the conversational mill. Even at the time I realized it was quite an educational experience, and those many hours around the coffee table remain as one of the fondest memories of my graduate career at Michigan. Over the subsequent years I have found that my fellow students of that era -- like Chuck Cleland, Henry Wright, Dick Ford, Bob Bettarel, Dick Wilkinson, Alan McPherron, Gary Wright, John Halsey, Dick Yarnell, and the late Dick Flanders, Roscoe Wilmeth, and Earl Prahl -- all have shared my fond recollections of those conversations. Jimmy certainly did not treat us as equals on these occasions -- we all knew who the boss was --, but he did make it abundantly clear that he regarded us all as budding fellow professionals and potentially worthy of his respect. I realized more fully later that this was an important part of the professionalization process.
I think that everybody who was around the Museum of Anthropology during the 1960s and early 1970s had the unforgettable experience (and often multiple experiences) of being called into Jimmy's big office for private conversations. On such occasions, Jimmy would typically be seated behind his large desk, and the other person would usually be invited to sit down on the faded purple sofa just in front. This was a very deep, soft sofa, and once seated there your eyes were at desk-top level, and your knees rose to about the level of your own chin. Jimmy would stare down at you from his vantage point on the other side of the desk, and proceed to let you know what you'd done wrong, or what he thought you should be doing differently. These were un-nerving and disconcerting experiences, and for me they continued well into the 1970s, right up until Jimmy retired in 1975. Nevertheless, as the years went by, I came to realize that there was much more bark than bite involved, and that Jimmy really had your own best interests at heart. He just had a unique way of showing it. He seldom gave direct praise: if he didn't comment explicitly about your Museum work, then you could usually assume he probably approved of it.
During my graduate work at Michigan I spent the summers in the Valley of Mexico, continuing fieldwork I had begun there with Bill Sanders during my senior undergraduate year at Penn State University. I soon became aware that there was a magnificent collection of archaeological ceramics from the Valley of Mexico right there in the Museum of Anthropology, most of it assembled by Jimmy himself during his fieldtrips to Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I made considerable use of this material, incorporating some of it into my own 1966 dissertation, and subsequently using it to train my own students for fieldwork in Mexico. Over the years, as I developed interests in other parts of Latin America, I came to realize that Jimmy had employed his enormous network of professional contacts to assemble type samples of pottery from many other places south of the Rio Grande -- the Viru Valley type collections are a particularly outstanding example. This was how the core of the Museum of Anthropology's Latin American holdings was formed.
It was during those same years that I came across the stacks of reprints of Jimmy's own numerous articles -- stashed in a large cabinet prominently labeled: "The Pickwick Papers: Keep Out or You'll Get the Dickens." Despite the sign, I always felt free to help myself to these reprints, some of which remain classics in Mesoamerican ceramic classification that I use to this day.
From time to time visiting dignitaries would stop by to give lectures. Jimmy usually knew these individuals personally, and he would typically host their visits and "assist" them with showing their slides (especially in the early days, before remote control cords came into use). Three events of this type stand out in my memory. The first was Prof. F. Clark Howell's lecture about his Paleolithic research in Spain. Shortly before the evening lecture, FCH, along with Jimmy, James Spuhler, and several other departmental "heavies," had supper together. They all arrived at the lecture slightly inebriated. As the talk got underway, Howell would continually lose his train of thought, and Jimmy would continuously get the slides out of proper order. That combination was an outrageously humorous one for us students in attendance, and I know that many who was there that evening still remember it well. At another evening lecture, Prof. J. Eric Thompson was speaking to us about his Mayan work. Jimmy was showing the slides, and he somehow got them mixed up and never could manage to get the illustrations fully coordinated with Thompson's talk, much to the latter's consternation. Another memorable occasion was Prof. Frank Hibben's talk on Pottery Mound -- when Hibben got to the slides showing the bulldozer cutting through the mound fill, I noticed that Jimmy visibly grimaced and sagged in his seat -- one of the few times I actually saw him at a loss for how to react. We all knew right away that he disapproved of using bulldozers for mound excavation.
Near the very end of my graduate years, about 1965, neutron activation analysis began to be employed in archaeological research. Jimmy, in collaboration with Prof. Adon Gordus of Michigan's Chemistry Department, was a pioneer in this research. He oversaw some of the first pilot studies of ceramics and obsidian, and he was instrumental in encouraging several graduate students (especially Gary Wright and Jane Wheeler) to pursue this work. I remember him saying one day that this new technique was "hotter than a pistol," and would revolutionize archaeological research. As with radiocarbon dating more than a decade before, he often knew a good thing when he saw it.
