A Conversation With...
Dr. Grady Blount

Q: Where did you grow up and how did you get here, (A&M-CC)?

A: I’m from Corpus Christi. Mostly I grew up here. But my dad was regular Army, so we moved around a lot. I attended 17 different K-12 schools, but we always came back to Corpus which is the hometown of my family. I started living on my own at age 14; for a time I even lived in a “pup” tent in a field while I finished working my way through high school. Nowadays it would be called “homeless”, but in the 60’s it was just called “tough luck”. My older siblings were busy with their own lives then and they knew I could take care of myself. It sounds heartless today, but this was not an unusual situation in those days. I went to court and got emancipated at age 16. That made things a lot easier. I worked as a dishwasher, a house painter, a roofer, a movie projectionist, and a printer’s apprentice during those years. Eventually I got a job in radio that led to my first career as a broadcast newsman. I was a network correspondent during the first launch of the space shuttle in 1981 and I interviewed John Young and Bob Crippen before the launch. That encounter inspired me to finish up at Del Mar and then transfer to CCSU. After graduation with a degree in Geology and a minor in Computer Science I worked as a Mudlogger and as a Geophysical computer programmer for a while. When the bottom fell out of the oil business, I started graduate school at Sul Ross State University in West Texas; then went to UT-El Paso, and eventually Arizona State, where I earned a Ph.D. in Planetary Geology. My first teaching job was at the University of North Dakota. I spent five years up there in the north country and loved it. But I always stayed in touch with the old “CCSU” crowd. In 1993 I moved back here to take care of an elderly uncle who ended up living with us for many years. He died recently at age 93. So I started here and ended up here, but it was a long strange trip in between.

Q: What motivates you and has helped you become who you are today?

A: Reading is the short answer. The most passionate moments of my life have come while flipping the pages of a really good book. Two books I still recommend are “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Bob Pirsig and “The Dreams of Reason” by Heinz Pagels. Both of those books are about big ideas. And motivation is something that requires big ideas. When I was in graduate school I used to have a poster with the quote “You will never know how far you can go unless you risk going too far”. That poster pushed me a lot over the years and taught to challenge myself. What motivates me the most right now is the desire to help my students change their lives. I came from a hard-scrabble background and nothing much has changed for a lot of my students today. Corpus is a still a poor town and most of the kids in South Texas still come from poverty-ridden backgrounds. Education is the only thing that broke the cycle for me. That is what I preach: Invest in yourself and reach for a better tomorrow.

Q: What makes you passionate about your field and teaching students?

A: I’m basically curious. And curious people learn things. If you don’t have an interest in learning, college is nothing but a big bore. To succeed in college you have
got to be curious and open to learning new things. In many ways, learning new things leads to more complex questions; and that leads to thinking on a deeper level. It’s the difference between consuming information and actually understanding it. College is about making that transition. A good professor is one who guides you through that journey. When I was at Del Mar I had a professor named Strickland. He taught Introductory Algebra. But he never talked about “math”. He would tell stories. And through those stories, students would get turned on to the idea of using numbers to solve problems. One evening he walked into class and asked us what the word “nothing” meant. We spent an hour talking about nothing and about what you have when you take nothing away from nothing. We really understood the idea of a complete absence of anything. With five minutes left before class was over, he walked over to the blackboard and drew a giant zero. I learned more about numbers in that one evening than I had learned in 12 years of primary school. I became passionate about zero and about what happens when you get closer and closer to that number. If you aren’t passionate about the number zero, then you haven’t had a really good math teacher yet. That is what a good teacher can do. They change the way you think and help you exercise your mind.

Q: What course(s) are your favorite to teach?

A: Remote Sensing, which is the intense study of images of the Earth taken from space. The reason it is so much fun is because we get to delve into what it means to “sense” something. Before we can really talk about what an orbiting camera can do, we need to have a pretty firm grasp on what our own eyes can do. It turns out that most people have never considered this question, so it is always great fun to show students what a great remote sensing instrument they have sitting on their faces.

Q: What co-curricular activities are you involved in, and how can students become involved with you in those activities?

A: I’ve got a couple of research projects going on right now that students could get involved in. I’m going to be directing the new Ph.D. program, so I’m going to be very busy. However, about five years ago, we did some faculty/student activities like a beach clean-up twice that year, and in ’97 we chartered a bus for the students for several weeks and participated in a flood victims relief clean-up. I’ve also sponsored the Filipino Student association and the Environmental Science club. Student organizations are a great way to teach students about getting involved. If you are going to be successful, you are going to spend the rest of your life doing things you don’t “have to do”. That means volunteerism has to become a habit early on.

Q: Outside of TAMUCC, what extracurricular activities are you involved in; what do you do for fun?

A: I don’t have much free time. We live on a 13-acre ranchito (little ranch) and my wife and I have twins, so most of my time is booked up weeks in advance. Keeping up the land and raising the kids is a full schedule all by itself. I’m active in the Sons of the Republic of Texas and I really enjoy anything to do with Tejano history. I also raise donkeys. They are very observant animals - very territorial, and they’re smarter than dogs or cats combined. If a donkey thinks you’re the enemy, they’ll attack. They’ll also protect their owners. Most people don’t know that about burros. They are amazing animals.

Q: Who inspired you the most or had the greatest impact during your collegiate experience which directed you to your field of study?

A: People who inspire you are role models. None of us are born with values. We learn them from the examples set by other people. We admire them and that leads to inspiration. For me, that would be Anwar al-Sadat, the former President of Egypt. In my lifetime, he stands out as the most courageous man I have ever seen, so I guess I learned courage as an important value early in my life. John Kennedy also affected me a lot when delivered his famous “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” speech. I must have learned my values of public service from him. So courage and public service are two values that have inspired me a lot over the years. In the end, those are the values that drive many teachers; the desire to give back no matter what the odds are. When I was a kid, my stepfather taught elementary school in migrant labor camps around Robstown. If that doesn’t inspire you then you don’t have a heart.

Q: What is your greatest achievement and whom do you attribute this to?

A: My greatest personal achievement has been getting my family back into the middle class with a comfortable socio-economic situation. The reason that’s important to me is that my parents gave me nothing material. From the age of fourteen I had to do it all myself. Some people may think this sounds romantic. It isn’t. The fact is, poverty sucks. I was about 10 years old when I figured out that we were poor and I never wanted my future family to have to live that way. A bag of pinto beans and a block of salt pork may build character, but I wanted more than that for my kids. It would be easy to say that I did it all myself, but the fact is that I was basically a lazy kid. My grade school teachers over at Fannin Elementary were the ones who kicked me in the butt. Everything keeps coming back to education. This was Dr. Hector P. Garcia’s mantra and it’s true.

Q: What question does the study of Environmental Science attempt to answer?

A: Environmental Science attacks the most fundamental questions about this planet Earth. How did it get here? How did it evolve over time? What makes it function today? How is it going to develop in the future? It’s sad to me that so many people think earth is just a big dead rock. Quite the contrary, the environment of Earth is complex and flourishing. Understanding it is something that we have just now begun to do. Earth is a completely amazing planet. Environmental Science studies it.

Q: Wouldn’t be caught dead wearing?

A: Those pants that “sag” down off your butt. Give me a break.