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Robert L. Folk was born Sept. 30, 1925 in Shaker Heights, Cleveland, Ohio. His mother played the piano and painted, while his father grew up as a West Virginia farm boy until he became an attorney in Cleveland. RLF started collecting and attempting to identify rocks at age 5, and his parents encouraged his interest in geology and science in general. In high school he was the classic recessive bookworm. Ineligible for the draft because of asthma, he entered Penn State College in 1943 and joined the Nittany Co-op where he met his wife Marge Thomas; they married in 1946. He received all three degrees at State Penn, working mainly under the effulgent P. D. Krynine who taught him powers of observation. His Ph.D. on Ordovician carbonate rocks (1952) launched him into a leading role in the field of petrography and classification of carbonate rocks. After one year with Gulf Oil Co. (research on modern sediments out of Pascagoula, Mississippi) he began teaching at the University of Texas in 1953. He has published on many aspects of sedimentary rocks, from textures to petrography. His interest in limestones led him to study travertines of Roma (1979); that led to the study of rock-forming bacteria, and, in 1988, to Viterbo and the revelation of the controversial objects known as nannobacteria.
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