Paul Meltzer honors great-grandfather, a Stanford marine researcher Santa Cruz lawyer donates boat to CSUMB: SANTA CRUZ - The lives of Santa Cruz attorney Paul Meltzer and his great-grandfather, Harold Heath, barely overlapped, but the legend of the marine scientist and his adventures at sea lived on in the family history.
In honor of Heath, one of the first professors at Stanford, Meltzer recently donated a 46-foot Hatteras sport fishing yacht to the CSU Monterey Bay marine science program.
"I think [CSUMB} is doing wonderful work and it is a fantastic local resource," Meltzer said. "Their seafloor mapping program has been getting a lot of attention. I didn't know my great grandfather much at all, but he is a legendary figure in my family."
Heath, who owned a house in Boulder Creek, joined the Stanford faculty in 1894, working from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station and exploring the waters off the Alaska coast, Japan and Brazil among other, especially in the early 1900s, far-flung places.
Now, the CSUMB marine science staff and students will use the vessel bearing his name to complete a project mapping the sea floor of all of California's state waters as well as other research.
The donation came at a serendipitous time for CSUMB's seafloor mapping lab. The lab has finished the majority of its work mapping California's state waters, but there was one remote area between Piedras Blancas and the southern part of Big Sur that they could not reach with any of the boats in their current fleet. Just when Rikk Kvitek, the director of the Seafloor Mapping Lab, was about to pay to charter a boat for the expedition, Meltzer appeared.
"Currently the largest boat we have is a 34-foot aluminum catamaran. It's good for a day trip, but not suited for staying out at sea," Kvitek said. "For this part of the mapping project we need to stay at sea for four or five days at a time. This new vessel, among other things, is ideally suited for taking students and staff to sea to do data acquisition."
It will take about two months for the "Harold Heath" to be equipped with the sonar devices and other necessary equipment, and it should be ready for use toward the end of February, Kvitek said.
Once the seafloor mapping project concludes, the boat will be used as a base for launching smaller vessels, like jet skis, rigged with video equipment and other devices to conduct further research near coastlines and other hard to reach spots. Additionally, it will provide students with more opportunities to get out of the classroom and on to the open water, Kvitek said.
Even though Meltzer did not have the opportunity to get to know his great-grandfather, he wielded a significant influence on the generations that followed him. Many of his descendents went into the sciences, and all of Heath's children, including Meltzer's grandmother, went to Stanford for free thanks to his position as a professor. After his death in April 1951 he was honored at a memorial service by former Stanford colleagues.
"As a teacher he was pre-eminent: kindly, quizzical and inspiring ... He contributed greatly to Stanford's high position in the biological sciences," the memorial resolution reads. "This was recognized by his 'starred' position as one of the 1000 outstanding scientists (150 zoologists) in the first edition of 'American Men of Science.'"
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