Millard Shepherd | Obituary | The Norman Transcript normantranscript.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from normantranscript.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Jim Langley
| 10:30 a.m.
My dear friend, Bruce Byers, left this earth way too early. I first met Bruce 25 years ago at his Subway shop in Santa Barbara’s San Roque neighborhood. I immediately liked his quick wit and congenial personality.
Later that year, Bruce invited me to a Kiwanis luncheon and a few months later he persuaded me to join the club. In turn, I invited him to join me at a CBMC of Santa Barbara (Christian Business Men’s Connection) breakfast meeting. We were both deeply blessed in joining these organizations.
What follows are some of my reflections on the life of an imperfect man.
When Bruce Byers brought home a piece of petrified wood he inherited after his father died in 2012, he didn’t plan to make it the subject of a new area of research. His father had collected the hunk of rock in Bears Ears, Utah, in the 1980s and had long used it as a doorstop. But with the 210-million-year-old fossil newly situated in his home, something niggled at Byers. The ancient log looked to him like it had a fire scar (
below, on right), a wood growth formation that happens at the base of a tree in response to a low-intensity ground fire. A patch of live tissue under the bark is killed, and the tree grows scar tissue curled around the wound in response. Byers recalls, “I thought, ‘This is interesting. I’ve never heard of a fossil fire scar.’”