User:Danika.mcdon05/Joan Marilyn Fleckenstein Mizer

Personal Life
Was born in Iona, Michigan on march 21, 1930 and Passed away on February 25th, 2014. Joan was the daughter of Jackson G. Fleckenstein and Renee (Perigo) Fleckenstein. Graduated from the Beatrice ( Nebraska) High school in June then entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology the following september. Later, Joan eventually married a classmate, Charles Mizer, during her geological graduate work. -In her past time Joan enjoyed fishing, hunting, skiing and harness racing.

-spent most of her free time outside.

-raced horses (against seasoned male racers exclusively)

Later in life she found purpose in breeding dogs, specifically English settlers. She’s known to breed some of the best bird dogs in Canada and the U.S, as her dogs are great hunters and companions. Her breeding efforts were purposeful, as she was a proponent in eliminating hip dysplasia, a disease that afflicted over one-third of all English settlers. Her efforts were well received as he was acknowledged by multiple OFA veterans. She was always happy to help, whether it was looking for a puppy, finding the appropriate setter for a breeding, talking about whelping, hunting, birds, medical difficulties, or placing puppies in just the right homes.

Her husband did complete the requirements for a degree in petroleum engineering at Mines, and accepted a position with the Standard Oil Company of California. Joan reluctantly resigned her position with the British-American to go with him to California. By the end of 1960 two children had come along, a girl in 1958 and a boy in 1959, and Joan was getting restless-increasingly dissatisfied with her duties as a housewife and deisour of returning to a job in the oil industry.

When she returned home to care for her childrens and hoping to fix her marriage divorce proceedings were initiated a year later and Joan and the children moved back to michigan. Joan left her children with her parents and decided to work on a Master of Arts degree in Education, concluding that she might as well prepare to be an earth science teacher in a secondary school if she could not find employment as a geologist.

- In 1968 she remarried, bought a house and then divorced six months later and completed her master degree.

Education
In order to receive her bachelor’s degree, she wrote a senior thesis titled “Alpha-particle radioactivity measurements of the Antrim shale of Michigan”

She was supervised by W.L. Whitehead who also helped her during her undergraduate years

- During her undergraduate she participated in the activities of the association of women studies as a Freshman  coordinating committee and Open House and Senior Week committees.

In the 1950’s women were not very enthusiastically received into the geology fraternity. Joan’s first bump was when she was not permitted to accompany her sophomore classmates to the summer field camp at Crystal Cliffs Nova Scotia because the ministry of mines did not approve M.I.T’s having women at the camp; so Joan had to satisfy the field training requirement by working alone in several areas in suburban Boston, which wasn’t a very satisfactory way of getting field experience. Joan had limited instruction and supervision as she would have at Crystal Cliffs

Career
Worked as a mathematician, electrical engineer, and draftsman She was hired by a local wildcatter to make reports on multiple drilling sites

By the end of winter 1954, she turned to a dream held since her childhood; she would train a horse of her own for harness  racing seasons and race it for just one summer.

At the end of their fall semester, she and her husband decided one of them should drop out for financial reasons. because she had an undergraduate degree and her husband did not, they decided she should be the one to drop out and get a job. She quickly found a good job at the British-American Oil-Producing company in Denver with the exploration division

After being a housewife for a few years. Joan returned to work in early 1961 as a research librarian in California of which Cal research was a subsidiary. Now they could work together, and Joan could work full time but a year later she had to give up her library position and devote full time and energy to the household.

After the divorce, she moved back to Michigan and after getting her masters she worked for Humble Research Company in Houston from June 1964 to December 1965 as a geological editor.