John Laurence Kulp

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Dr. John Laurence Kulp, aka J. Laurence "Larry" Kulp, according to Wikipedia, was a 20th century biochemist that led major studies on the effects of nuclear fallout and acid rain.  He was a prominent advocate in American Scientific Affiliation circles in favor of an "Old Earth" but against "flood geology".  He was also involved during World War II with the secretive Manhattan Project.

Early Life and Ancestry

Kulp was born February 11, 1921, and raised in Trenton, NJ, initially the first seven years in the upstairs of a beauty salon his grandmother owned. His parents were John C. Kulp (1876-1966) and Helen Konover Gill (1877-1961). They married at the age of forty, and Laurence was born soon after. With relation to a possible Gill connection to the Brethren, Helen's father was Clarence Newell Gill (1854-1928), and grandfather Bennington Gill (1817-1899).

Kulp's father, John Kulp, was a practical engineer who spent a year at MIT in the early 1900's, and supervised the installation of electrical generators around the country. Larry's great-grandfather, Philip Kulp, emigrated as a young child from Berlin, Germany. Larry's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shaw, emigrated from Liverpool, England, and was one of the first business women in Trenton, New Jersey with a hair dressing shop. Her family traces back to Eglinton castle (now part of a state park) in County Ayr, Scotland in the thirteenth century, via the Montgomery clan.

Elizabeth's ancestors emigrated to a farm in Allentown, New Jersey about 1650, which they farmed until the late 1800's when they sold the farm and moved into Trenton.

In 1928, Larry's father got a new position as supervisor of a rug factory, that relocated the family to Springfield, NJ, a suburb of Newark and Elizabeth, to the neighborhood of Passaic, where his family stayed until his mother's death in 1962. His father's job ended with the 1929 crash, and after a number of years of deep financial struggle, his father eventually got a job as an assembler at the ADT electrical alarm factory in New York, while Larry was in college, although he was present at every one of Larry's home baseball games.

Larry had a generous aunt, Claire Oliphant, who was president of the American Legion Auxiliary National and outfitted him with clothes annually until his college years through the hard times. She was also president of a national women's patriotic league that supported Roosevelt, etc., and with her political influence was able to help the family keep their home.

Larry served as president of his senior class, as well as captain of the football team his senior year, and in the senior play, a detective story, "The Night of January 16". He also enjoyed playing baseball, starting with sandlot baseball and semi-professionally when there wasn't a high school team.

Post-Secondary Education

Just prior to his conversion, his aunt Claire was pushing for him to let her use her connections to go to West Point and then join the Army. After his conversion, there was an senior English teacher who had an after school Christian club, and convinced him to become pacifist, which turned him against West Point, a brief contention with his aunt and mother as only 5% of his peers went to college, until some of his science teachers convinced him to attend a Methodist seminary up the road called Drew University with a (then) new bachelors program, which offered an academic scholarship of half his tuition, and he attended while living at home, and hitchhiking then carpooling to school. He worked off the rest of his tuition thru various jobs at the college, initially grounds work, then assisting the librarian.

Larry's first class at Drew University was chemistry, under Cleveland Jordy, who inspired him to eventually endow a chemistry scholarship in his name.

College Baseball

He also had a classical languages professor named Sherman Plato Young who was a great baseball coach of that era, who in his younger years had played awhile for the New York Giants under John McGraw. Larry earned his first baseman by his second year at Drew under this "Doc Young", and that season they won sixteen out of eighteen games against schools like Columbia, Princeton, Dickinson, etc., and he batted about .400, with no strikeouts or errors at first base, which attracted the firm offer of a New York Giant farm team that summer of 1940, which he turned down in favor of a Bible conference in southern New Jersey where he served as one of four camp counselors.

At this Bible conference camp he met two young men who were attending Wheaton College, where he decided to attend his last two years of college, his first time west of the Delaware River, on faith, and he hitch-hiked two days to arrive there. He achieved a free room in exchange for maintaining the grounds, and sought an additional job as a dishwasher where he earned enough to pay his tuition, and for his books. He ultimately graduated second in his class.

After Wheaton, he took a summer job with Allied Chemical in Buffalo, which was one of the oldest, largest dye manufacturing plants in the country, and assigned to the National Aniline Division. With his A's in chemistry at Wheaton, he was able then to continue on at Ohio State with full scholarship aid for his graduate work, and then on to Princeton where he obtained his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945.

While at Princeton he was initially assigned by H.S. Taylor, a strong Catholic, to work on the Fischer-Tropsch process, which meant creating gasoline from hydrogen and carbon monoxide. He also had opportunity along with some major nuclear scientists (Fermi, Edward Keller, Wheeler) to attend a small, informal seminar in the physics department taught by Albert Einstein.

After Princeton, in the summer of 1945, he was recruited by Dr. Taylor into the Manhattan Project part-time for a few months at the Nash Building at 130th and Broadway, with a chief scientist of George Joris. Then he studied part-time at Columbia University, and upon receiving the Kemp fellowship, he studied full-time there.

Marriage and Family

Larry met his first wife, Helen DelGuidice, while at Wheaton College, a zoology major, artist and later medical technician from Franklin Lakes, NJ, that he married in 1944.  They divorced in 1987, and Larry was remarried later that same year to Naomi Stanley, from Puyallup, WA, a graduate of Oregon State University and the author of "Wagon Wheels and Wild Roses: Heirloom Recipes and Oregon Trail Stories from the McCaw family, 1847-1995", published in 1996 by Wild Rose Press.

Larry had at least four children: Elizabeth, Ellen, John and James, and a step-son Steve.

Teaching career

From 1946 to 1947, while teaching full-time at Columbia, he taught a science survey course two nights a week at the Nyack Missionary Training Institute under the presidency of Dr. Thomas Moseley. Nyack was a major educational training school for Christian Missionary Alliance young people. The course included training in geology, biology, astronomy and other sciences. The circumstance of his hiring was an attempt to get accreditation, and they looked favorably on his background at Wheaton College. He later had a number of technicians work for him part-time while students at Nyack, he remembered them as very hard working, honorable young people.

In 1948, Larry served as a charter instructor, then assistant professor in the first graduate-level geophysics institute within Columbia University, of whose graduates went on to start graduate programs at other major universities, initially including the Universities of Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, Yale, Princeton, and Brown, as well as smaller universities such as the Universities of British Columbia, Georgia, Renssalear Polytechnique Institute, Whitworth, and Memphis State. Three or four of his students were elected to the National Academy, more than any other one of the schools that offered a Ph.D. in geochemistry, in his era. Dr. Kulp stayed at Columbia until 1965 when he left to serve as president of Teledyne Isotopes, a nuclear science and engineering company he had prior served as a principal founder of the Board of Directors. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Washington. 

Scientific career

He served as vice-president for research and development at the Weyerhaeuser Company, director of research of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, a consultant in environmental and energy affairs, and owner of Teledyne Isotopes. He also served as a long-time director of Lamont Geological Observatory while at Columbia University. His primary field was radiometric dating, and a pioneer in the field of Carbon 14 dating, and established the second American research centre for Carbon 14 at Columbia University in 1950.

Church background

Kulp was brought up as a "practically atheistic" Episcopalian, although in an interview he indicated that his parents were faithful attenders, and professed in the tenets at least nominally, and his mother encouraged Larry to go to Sunday School, and also to an evangelical camp, Camp of the Woods, his junior year in the Adirondacks, in an effort to steer him from a young people's dance band he had started in Springfield.

As he could play the trumpet very well, he was able to get in as a counselor, though he was a young atheist at the time, and it was at this camp that he made a profession of faith, and upon returning home to start his senior year of high school, he joined a camp friend's Bible church, which has been described as an "exclusive Plymouth Brethren assembly". He also spent two subsequent summers staffing at the camp, and his last year he was conductor of the 85-piece concert band.

He spent several years with the Brethren, including presumably at Wheaton, Ohio State, and also at Princeton, which is where he continued activity with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship which he was introduced to at Ohio State. It is unclear when he broke away from the Brethren, but during the summer internship with Allied in Buffalo, he was involved at the First Baptist Church.

Later in life he identified as Presbyterian, but regarded himself as close to a secular humanist.

The American Scientific Affiliation

In 1945, Kulp joined The American Scientific Affiliation, an association of evangelical scientists concepted by Irwin A. Moon (1907-1986), a science itinerant associated with Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, who in 1941 convinced Moody president William H. Houghton (1887-1947) to invite a number of scientists to Chicago, which included:

  • John P. Van Haitsma (1884-1965), a biologist from Calvin College
  • Peter W. Stoner (1888-1980), a Congregational mathematician from Pasadena City College
  • Irving A. Cowperthwaite (1904-1999), a Baptist industrial chemist from Boston
  • Russell D. Sturgis (1897-1969), a Baptist chemist from Ursinus College
  • F. Alton Everest (1909-2005), a Baptist electrical (radio & television) engineer on the faculty of Oregon State College in Corvallis, a co-founder with Irwin Moon of the Moody Institute of Science.

Via the ASA, Culp was credited as one of the first American fundamentalists trained in geology, and it is claimed he "contributed more than any other scientist to splitting conservative Protestants into self-consciously separate camps of "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists". Another Brethren who served in the ASA with Kulp was Russell L. Mixter who, along with J. Frank Cassel, helped lead the ASA away from its anti-evolutionary stance.

Young Life and Fuller influences

According to an interview in 1985 as noted by George M. Marsden in "Reforming Fundamentalism", in the early 1950's, Dr. Kulp assisted Jim Rayburn of Young Life in founding the Young Life Institute, in Colorado, a summer school for training its leadership at a roughly seminary level.

It was associations with Young Life where he was influenced to join the Board at Fuller Theological Seminary, from fellow Young Life board member C. Davis Weyerhaeuser, and Paul Jewett, a regular teacher at the Young Life Institute, as well as a confidant to the Fuller family. Dr. Kulp rose to leadership at Fuller seconded only to Weyerhaeuser, according to Marsden. Kulp played a prominent role, along with Weyerhaeuser, Billy Graham and others in the election of long-time Fuller president David Hubbard.

Later Life and Death

Kulp remained physically active later in life, even playing regular tennis with younger people when he was 75. He died on September 25, 2006 at the age of 85, as the result of a logging accident at Whitaker Lake, in Speculator, NY, while living in Puyallup, Washington. Memorial services were at the Westside Presbyterian Church, Ridgewood, NJ, with requested donations to the J. Laurence Kulp Scholarship in Chemistry fund at Drew University, Madison, NJ.

Also See

Sources

All sources retrieved 15 August 2019

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