Erle Conrad Donaldson

Erle Conrad Donaldson passed away peacefully on Monday, May 12, 2025, in Bartlesville, OK. Erle was born December 30, 1926, in Tela, Honduras, to Erle H. Donaldson and Dorothy Drew Flynn Donaldson. Erle, who was known as Connie until he joined the Army Air Corps in 1945, grew up in both Nicaragua and Honduras. His father worked for two of the fruit companies operating in those countries during that time.

Connie was a strong-willed, wild little kid, who made friends easily, learned languages quickly and had great curiosity. Early on, through befriending and playing with the little boys, whose families would come set up to sell goods, during tourist season, near where Connie’s family lived in Nicaragua, Connie learned several languages. His first language was Spanish; he also learned the Miskito language of the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, as well as the Kuna language of the Kuna Indians of the San Blas Islands off of central Panama, He also learned the sing-song dialect of English spoken on the Bay Island where his mother’s family lived.

He didn’t see the need for school studies but enjoyed playing pranks, bringing little friends to school with him, such as a frog in his pocket, then putting the frog in the sandbox for the girls to find when he was instructed to put the frog outside. He often ended up sitting in a front corner with a dunce cap but had fun turning around to entertain his schoolmates while being “disciplined”.

When Connie was eight years old, after a hurricane brought a virulent banana disease to Central America, the company where his father worked began to fail. He and his mother went to his mother’s island to live with his Grandmother, Hester Diamond Flynn, and his adopted sister, Lenora. Erle’s much older brother, Ernie, stayed with his father, trying to save some part of the banana farms.

His Grandmother was simply known as “Grandma” all over the island. She was the one islanders turned to when they had a medical problem. She had an old medical book for reference but used herbs of a wide variety. Grandma also cooked for many people on the island.

Connie attended Spanish grade school on the island, was given chores and assigned to help his uncle, Norman Flynn, (known as Uncle Kaiser), who fished, hunted and farmed to provide food for Grandma, her household and all those she cooked for.

Connie who continued his wild ways, enjoyed playing with the other little boys on the island, but he was also very faithful in all the chores he was given to do for Grandma and Uncle Kaiser. He had one day free of chores: Saturday.

One day, when he was 9 or 10, a yacht dropped anchor just off the island. It belonged to one of the fruit companies. Several young men who worked for the company had taken the yacht out for a sailing vacation.

As soon as the yacht dropped anchor, Connie plus a bunch of his friends, who all had small boats known as dories, raced out to the yacht to try to make some money off the Americans. The young men asked if they could get in one of the dories to paddle around. At this, all the boys pointed at Connie, because they knew Connie’s dory didn’t have a keel.

Connie and his friend were invited up onto the yacht while several of the young men tried hilariously unsuccessfully to stay upright in Connie’s dory (aptly named the SentateBien, or the Sit-Down-Good).

Connie had lots of questions for the young men, who he found out were engineers working for the fruit company. He’d never heard of an engineer, so that brought many other questions about what they did and how they became engineers. Somewhere in all those questions and answers, Connie learned that to become an engineer, one had to go to college. What was college? And so on.

The yacht stayed moored by the island for three days, during which Connie followed the young engineers all over and continued to pelt them with questions.

After they left, Connie moped. He went around in a fog, not at all the cheerful, wild boy everyone knew. He was thinking.

There was a reason why he’d lived his life so far as if nothing in the world mattered. He hadn’t seen any purpose for his school studies. He thought all there was for him in the future was to be like his Uncle Kaiser, who did work hard and was a good provider but the kind of work he did wasn’t that interesting or challenging plus, it didn’t require schoolbook learning. (Connie’s Dad worked on the mainland at this time and often had to travel when he was younger.)

These young engineers had a completely different kind of work. And they seemed to have purpose in their lives. He had found out through all his questions, the path to gain such intriguing, meaningful work was through “college”. The path leading to college was to study hard, do your homework, learn all you could, then get to the USA and study at a college.

For three days after the young engineers left, Connie thought about these things. About all he’d have to give up, as well as what he’d have to change in his life to eventually get to study in a college.

After those three days spent thinking, Connie abruptly changed his young life. He gave away the things which had been precious to him, such as all his baseball things: gloves, bat & ball; the two perfect wooden tops he’d carved; most of his marbles (he was a champion marbles player, one the adult men would bet on); all the materials he’d used to build a playhouse, etc.

He began to use his evenings to complete his homework, and study. Connie also asked his Grandma if he could take English lessons. There was a lady on the island who taught English to a few paying students. His Grandma, however, wondered if he was sick because the English lessons were on Saturday mornings, Connie’s only day with no chores to do. He wasn’t sick though and began spending his Saturday mornings learning proper English.

Connie graduated from Spanish grade school when he was 12 years old, at the top of his class. (He had been at the bottom of his class.)

His father then told him to come to La Lima, a city on the mainland where he worked, to attend the fruit company’s American school. So, he attended two years at the American school which went up to 8th grade. During that time, he had extra classes in English (his classmates made fun of his English pronunciation and spelling), and he read many books from the company library. He discovered Readers Digest Condensed Books and read many classic tales as well. Any word he didn’t know, he simply looked up and learned.

After the American school, his father got him an apprenticeship with the electricians who worked for the fruit company. Connie promptly ordered a correspondence course from DeVry University to study to become an electrician. By 15 or so, Connie had passed the American licensure exams to become a full-fledged electrician. He also had ordered books on how to repair appliances, wire homes, etc. Connie worked as a professional telephone lineman and appliance repairman for the fruit company for almost two years.

During that time, he had heard of an American school up in the Honduran mountains run by a Dr. Brocious. One day, someone who knew of his interest in that school, came over to tell him Dr. Brocious was at the company hotel looking for potential students. Connie immediately took leave from work, went to the hotel, found Dr. Brocious and requested to be taken on as a working student. But Dr. Brocious, on finding Connie was only 16 years old, asked to speak with his father, who at the time lived five miles out of town on a citrus research farm.

The next day Erle H. Donaldson came into town to meet Dr. Brocious. His father agreed to pay Connie’s tuition so he could go as a paying student.

Two weeks later, Connie joined a mule train with Dr. Brocious and other boys of all ages from many villages in the area as well as the bay islands. Some of the boys, Dr. B had rescued off the streets. They made their way up into the mountains to the school, called Malcotal (orchard of malcote trees), near a place called Minas de Oro, (which was long since defunct as a gold mine).

Connie enjoyed his studies at Malcotal where he found he enjoyed chemistry, among other subjects. He was also introduced to Shakespeare, whom he continued to read all his life.

During his time at Malcotal, he heard that a GI Bill providing a college education to veterans was signed into law in the United States. His new goal became to join the US military.

Connie turned 18 at the end of 1944 and got his papers in order. After finishing at Malcotal, he went to the island to say goodbye to his family. Then he found a job aboard a Norwegian ship which had been transporting bananas in the Caribbean during WWII, as an assistant to the (usually drunken) huge Norwegian cook (all the Norwegians seemed to be very large). Erle was six feet tall, but very skinny from having barely survived malaria. Erle sailed with the ship back and forth to USA ports, saving his money and plotting where and how to jump ship. He eventually jumped ship in Charleston, SC, was caught & carried back by two huge Norwegian sailors and told to go to his room. But Connie just grabbed his laundry bag and casually walked back down the ramp telling the guard he was going to get his laundry done. This time, he stayed in his room in a boarding house until the Norwegian flag, which he could see from his window, had disappeared. The ship was on its way back to cold freezing Norway.

Connie found the war had just ended and recruiting stations were closed, but he had registered for the draft, so he found work in a paper mill in Charleston (which is still there today). He was called up in December, volunteered for the Army Air Corps, and became known as Erle instead of Connie.

Erle, after Basic Training, was flown directly out to Kwajalein Atoll, where as a lineman, he singlehandedly repaired the crazy phone system left over from the war. He was then sent to Alaska to work on building radar stations but had fortunately received training in finance and administration at a training command in between. Thus, God rescued him from having to spend nearly two years out in the cold Alaskan weather. He did payroll and administration in a warm & toasty office for those years instead, although he did pay an Eskimo to create a complete traditional Inuit for him, including mukluks and a fur-rimmed hood.

After being honorably discharged in 1948, Erle wound up back in Charleston, worked in the paper mill, then with the SC National Guard until the start of the next school year. He enrolled in The Citadel Military College of South Carolina as a veteran, rather than as a cadet. After his first year of college, he enrolled in summer school at the Citadel, in 1950. And that summer just happened to be the first summer any female students were allowed to attend classes at The Citadel.

On the first day of summer school, Erle noticed Grace Louise Miller leaning against a pillar across the quad. He told the friend he was with, Leverett, that he was going to go ask that pretty girl by the pillar for a date. Leverett replied, “This I gotta see”, and the two of them walked across the quad and Erle asked Grace out for a date. They were married four years later. (Interestingly, Grace had just told her friend “See that skinny guy walking across the quad? I think he’s cute.”)

Neither of them ever took summer classes again.

Erle earned a BS in Organic Chemistry at The Citadel, then an MS in Organic Chemistry at the University of South Carolina, on a scholarship.

After he graduated, Erle & Grace decided to move to sunny California to settle down (like so many other GIs). They put Erle’s camping supplies in the trunk of his 1948 Ford, piled all their belongings in the back seat of the car, with Erle’s cat, who had crawled in his window from a tree branch as a hungry kitten and adopted him. They camped by the side of the road as they traveled through the south. While in Houston, the car broke down. With Grace five months pregnant, Erle walked down the street from where they were staying, applied to two different companies, got a job at the second and started work that same day. Their first four kids were born in Houston.

Erle began his career working at the refinery of Eastern States Petroleum Company, which he nicknamed “Eastapet”. He was given a lab which contained five routine analytic labs, two of which operated 24/7. Two years later, he was transferred to the research laboratory as Pilot Plant Chief Chemist. During this time, Erle discovered he enjoyed chemical engineering more than just chemistry. He enrolled in night school at Houston University, graduating in 1961 with a BS in chemical engineering.

In 1961, “Eastapet” was being sold to Signal Oil and Gas, a company from sunny California. Signal Oil offered Erle a job at four times his Eastern States salary, but he and Grace didn’t want to raise their family in Los Angeles. Erle instead sought out a research job with the government because he had learned that when a scientist worked for a private company, their research papers were delayed at least five years before being published. Erle wanted his research to help the country, rather than just his employer. He found a job offering at what was then called the Bureau of Mines Research Center in Bartlesville, a small city in Oklahoma, in petroleum research. He and Grace happily moved their family of six to Bartlesville, even though his new job required a significant cut from his “Eastapet” salary.

The young family arrived in snowy Bartlesville on December 5, 1961. Their young children were surprised to be visited by Santa Claus himself that Christmas. (Charlie Bopp, who worked at the Bureau of Mines, became Santa for all the children of the BoM employees until he retired).

Erle enjoyed his work at the “Bureau”, as he called it, starting out in a basement laboratory working under Dr. Calvin J. Riggs, who took him all over Oklahoma and Kansas, teaching him about petroleum and rocks, etc.

Erle was an out-of-the-box thinker. His research often led him to consider ideas that had been disregarded or discarded because of previous settled research. Erle didn’t let anything like that stop him. If he saw or thought of something interesting which presented possibilities, he pursued it. And he published what he discovered through the research. Sometimes this led to a big uproar among the audience of scientists at the conventions and conferences where he would present his papers. One of his early papers after coming to the Bureau of Mines caused just such an uproar. The convention where he presented it was held way up in the Rocky Mountains. The subject was “wettability”, a term Erle had coined. His paper was presented in the morning. There was such a loud and long “discussion” after his presentation, (during which one scientist had stood up and remained standing, proclaiming “I Agree With Erle” after every scientist who loudly proclaimed that Erle’s research couldn’t possibly be accurate), that those in charge of the convention put the “discussion” on hold until the evening. The scientists then ran out and called their employers, telling them about Erle’s research findings. Their companies flew their senior scientists and engineers out to the conference for the evening session, which was also raucous but apparently fruitful.

This was in the early 1960s. Much research has been done since then, building on Erle’s initial work, but that paper on wettability is to this day often cited in present day research.

The scientist who repeatedly proclaimed, “I agree with Erle”? He became a lifelong friend and collaborator with Erle.

That was the beginning of Erle’s long and illustrious career in petroleum research. He continued to turn out ground-breaking research, and it wasn’t unusual for the discussions after one of his presentations to erupt in similar fireworks to that first one. Erle didn’t mind though, the wild little kid inside him from long ago thought it was fun.

Erle published hundreds of research papers. At first with the American Chemical Society (ACS), then more often with the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE). He was published in other national and international professional juried scientific journals as well.

He rose to become the Assistant Director of Research at the Bureau of Mines in just a few years. The Bureau pushed and pushed to make him Director, but Erle refused to step into purely administrative work, (no matter the pay increase), insisting on continuing his laboratory research, so he became the Assistant Director and continued with all his research.

In 1964, Erle & Grace’s youngest child was born. There were problems during the birth and both the child, Frank, and Grace nearly died. Thankfully, both survived, but they were told Frank would likely have trouble with cerebral palsy (CP), and to watch his development closely.

When it became clear that Frank was having physical challenges and did have cerebral palsy, Erle made a plan. He and Grace divided the work that would be involved in helping Frank overcome as much as possible and learn to thrive despite the CP. Erle took his education, Grace took on the physical aspects. Grace took Frank to physical therapy sessions three times a week, then guided him in doing his PT exercises 4 – 5 times daily. Erle, for example, taught Frank to try to do whatever he wanted, but that some things would not work for him, so to just drop that idea and try something else. Erle also was involved with both sons, Vince and Frank, in Boy Scouts. Both earned the Eagle Scout Award and were part of the Order of the Arrow.

Of course, Erle also continued to pull pranks, just as he had as a kid. Sometimes as Assistant Director, he was even asked permission by others to pull pranks (innocent fun ones, nothing nefarious)! But he, at times, got blamed for a prank pulled by someone else (such as the “Cuckoo Clock”). No one would ever believe he was innocent.

Once when he and a colleague were working on something in the computer room (this was when computers took up an entire room), someone came in to tell the two of them and two others who were working in the room that some secretaries were going to come in soon to start learning about using the computer. This was too much of a temptation. Erle and his colleague went over to the computer and gave it directions as to what to print the next time a key was touched.

When the secretaries came in a short while later, they were kind of reticent to sit down and type anything. One brave secretary, however, sat down and began to type. Immediately though the computer sprang to life and typed out a message: “GO AWAY, I’M TIRED”. The secretaries were shocked, (this was a little bit before AI), but the instructor merely looked around for the culprit. Erle and his friend kept their heads down, trying not to laugh, but the other two in the room just pointed at them.

Erle continued all his life long to pursue learning. He started studying for his PhD part-time in the late 1960s at Tulsa University, graduating in 1975. He studied various subjects just on his own as well, attaining a graduate level of knowledge. One of those subjects was microbiology, which he branched into in the 1960s in relation to his petroleum research. By the 1970s, he was holding symposiums on microbiology in petroleum research, as well as publishing on it.

In 1983, the Bureau of Mines Research Center in Bartlesville was sold to a private company. 70% of the research personnel quickly found jobs in other places around the nation. Erle was offered jobs by several companies, but he had long wanted to teach. Oklahoma University (OU) had made him an offer two years prior, which still was open. So, he stayed on to help with the transition, then at the end of 1983, he and Grace moved to Norman, Oklahoma, where he began teaching at OU in the petroleum engineering department.

In 1992, Erle left OU and was promptly hired by the Dean to assist in setting up petroleum research departments at universities in several countries, both in Indonesia and in South America. He continued to do consulting for many years in many countries.

In the early 1990s, Erle and his friend, Dr. George Chillingar of USC, co-founded a new scientific journal entitled Journal of Petroleum Science and Technology. It became a leading journal in Petroleum Science. Erle was Senior Editor for its first twenty years.

At this time, Erle also began writing and publishing textbooks. He’d seen the need for an overall textbook on Petroleum Science. He coined the word “petrophysics” which became the title of his first book. He also asked another professor to write a few chapters, Dr. Djebbar Tiab, whom he’d met at OU. When the book was in the editing phase, Dr. Tiab asked Erle if he would mind if his name could be listed first on the book. Erle, knowing he had no need for further accolades in his field, but Dr Tiab, who was much younger, was still in the middle of his career, said yes, that would be fine. And it remains that way to this day. The fifth edition of Petrophysics was published just last year.

Erle often did things like that. If anyone had contributed to one of his research projects, he would put that person’s name on the paper he presented. The same with his students. He always gave credit to his students for the work they did. Once, he even sent one of his students, Saeed Mogarabi, to the United Nations to present a paper for him. This was of great help to his students and some of them have stories to tell of what happened because of that.

Books: Petrophysics-Theory & Practice of Measuring Reservoir Rock & Fluid Transport Properties, Wettability, Hydro-Fracturing Explained… Enhanced Oil Recovery I & II, Subsidence Due to Fluid Withdrawal, Microbial Enhancement of Oil Recovery, and Microbial Enhancement of Oil Recovery, Recent Advances.

When Erle retired from OU, he and Grace moved to the small town of Wynnewood, where Grace had found work that she enjoyed after earning a degree in social work at OU. Both enjoyed small town life and got involved in all kinds of things in their little town, including Kiwanis, Masons, church life, writing articles for the newspaper, and so much more.

Erle had always wanted to find five wooded acres. He and Grace found a beautiful house a little out in the country from Wynnewood, with five densely forested acres behind it. He happily began steadily clearing the brush and trimming branches up to 8’, creating (as well as finding old) paths through the wood, where he and Grace enjoyed walking in the evenings. They spent the next three decades there and thoroughly enjoyed the people and the town.

During these years, he spent some time travelling every year, doing domestic and international consulting.

Erle and Grace also became excellent square dancers, starting in Bartlesville in the early 1970s, and continuing well into their 80s.

When their five children were young, the family went camping, but after a windstorm at the Little Sahara State Park, they switched from a tent to a pop-up camper-trailer. After most of the children had graduated and left home, they switched to a VW pop up van, and so on. Eventually they travelled in RVs, which got bigger and longer as the years went by. The last one they had was 38’ in length. They travelled all over the country through the years.

Erle also took the family canoeing on the rivers of Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, which was enjoyed by all. Ever an islander, being on the water was something Erle loved.

Erle told many humorous stories about his life, and all who came in contact with him enjoyed listening!

Erle Conrad Donaldson was preceded in death by the love of his life: Grace Louise Miller Donaldson; his son: Frank Conrad Donaldson; his parents: Erle H. and Dorothy Drew Flynn Donaldson; his brother: George Ernest Donaldson; and his adopted sister: Lenora Donaldson Whitefield.

Erle is survived by his children: Vincent Erle Donaldson and his wife, Annelise, Julia Drew Donaldson, Carolyn Louise Donaldson Morgan and her husband, Jon, Linda Marie Donaldson Clanton and her husband, Doug; his daughter-in-law: Elvia Garcia Donaldson; his grandchildren: Seth Henry Morgan and his wife, Claire, Lindsay Grace Morgan and her partner, Dylan, Melanie Joy Clanton Woods and her husband, Morris; and his great grandchildren, Hazel Grace Morgan, Ruth Jo Morgan, Myrah Bella Woods, and Mina Rey Woods.

A Memorial Service celebrating Erle’s life will be held at East Cross Church, 820 S. Madison Blvd on Saturday, June 21, 2025, @ 2pm in Bartlesville, Oklahoma with Pastor Chad Perciful officiating. Prior to the service, at 1:00 PM, in the church lobby, the family invites friends and family to a gathering to visit and share stories. After the service, the family invites friends and family to visit and have appetizers. All are welcome to come. Arrangements are under the direction of Arnold Moore & Neekamp Funeral Home. Online condolences may be left at www.honoringmemoriesbartlesville.com.