Paul Bloom
For the last 33 years I have been on the faculty of the Department of Soil, Water and Climate at the University of Minnesota doing teaching and research in soil and environmental chemistry. I am married to Meg Layese, who is also a soil scientist, and we have two sons, Ben and Francisco, and an infant granddaughter.
"Paul and Meg with granddaughter Isley".
After FHS I attended the University of Minnesota with the goal of becoming a chemical engineer but I was not really very sure that this was right for me, and I wasn’t very well motivated and I dropped out. Before I completely left the University I joined a student group that travelled to Fort Valley GA in the summer of 1965 to do voter registration with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Dr. King’s organization), which began a lifelong commitment to social justice causes.
In 1967 I drove in my 1955 Ford to Eastern Montana to become a schoolteacher, in a town of 67 people just south of the Canadian border. The grade 1–12 school badly needed a junior and senior high science and math teacher and was able to hire a minimally qualified person under a one-year emergency authorization. The following year I taught science and math in small grade school on the Crow Indian Reservation.
I then headed to the University of Montana in Missoula to see if I could finally complete a college degree. I enjoyed studying and stayed on to complete a MS in chemistry and discovered I really liked doing research. Not willing to give up the enjoyable life of a grad student I accepted a research assistantship to study for a PhD in soil chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. It was there I met my wife, a grad student from the Philippines, and we had our first son. When I completed my PhD degree the University of Minnesota was looking for a soil chemist and I was lucky enough to be hired.
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