[4] In 1955, after serving two years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hay began his career in academia when he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge as an assistant professor.
The Berkeley Geology and Geophysics Department at the time included the world’s greatest concentration of distinguished petrographers, Professors Howel Williams, Francis Turner, and Charles Gilbert.
[6] Hay’s work also provided the definitive geological framework for two famous hominid-bearing sites in East Africa, Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, and discovered the mega-replacement of Cambrian-Ordovician strata throughout the U.S. mid-continent by low-temperature potassium feldspar.
[4] Hay’s work at Olduvai Gorge and the establishment of a detailed understanding of that complex stratigraphy took twelve years of field study.
The following is an excerpt from Hay’s acceptance speech for the Leakey Prize in 2001:“My acquaintance with Olduvai began in 1961 with a look at rock samples which my colleague Garniss Curtis brought back for K-Ar dating.
… I thank you very much for this honor today, and I wish all of you the same enjoyment in your work that … I experienced at Olduvai Gorge.”[4]Hay died of pulmonary fibrosis on February 10, 2006, at his home in Tucson, Arizona.