William Thomas Pecora II was born on February 1, 1913, in
Belleville, New Jersey, son of Cono and Anna Pecora (). Both parents were immigrants from
Sant'Arsenio, in southern
Italy. Pecora was the ninth of 10 children, four boys and six girls. In 1929, the year he graduated
Barringer High School, he was awarded a Charles Halsey Scholarship providing $1,000 annually towards education at
Princeton University, where he majored in
geology; he was awarded a
Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1933. After graduation, he stayed at Princeton for two years as a geology tutor. In 1933, while a student at Princeton, he won the intercollegiate
fencing competition. He was a member of the
American team to the
1936 Summer Olympics in
Berlin, where he competed in the
individual and
team foil. In the summer of 1934, Pecora was a field assistant to
Erling Dorf, studying
stratigraphy in
Montana and at the
Beartooth Butte Formation. Pecora started graduate studies at
Harvard University in 1935, concentrating on
optical mineralogy and
petrography under the professor
Esper S. Larsen, Jr. Larsen encouraged Pecora to look for a thesis study area in the vicinity of the
Bearpaw Mountains; Pecora received a grant form the Holden Fund to finance fieldwork in 1937 and 1939 on the mountains' western fringe. His doctoral thesis was a
petrologic study of the Boxelder
laccolith. After joining the USGS in 1939, his first assignment was in 1940—
D. Foster Hewett, head of the metals section at the USGS, frequently visited Harvard until the outbreak of
World War II. Hewett established the Strategic Minerals Program, and recruited Pecora, who was assigned to study
nickeliferous deposits in the western United States and in
Brazil, among other locations in North and South America. In total, Pecora and his colleagues described nine new minerals, including
whewellite. The significance of this work was described in a memorial to Pecora by Charles A. Anderson: Pecora was USGS director when the
Astrogeology Research Program began in 1963. Pecora also addressed the discovery of large reserves of oil and gas on the north coast of
Alaska in 1968. Under his direction, the Geological Survey made a careful study of the geologic aspects of the proposed pipeline route. From 1947 to 1967 he was a member of the
United States Civil Service Commission's Board of Examiners for Geology, concerned with the development and maintenance of standards in the selection of geologists for federal employment. He was an active member of the Survey's Pick and Hammer shows, which were presented annually to make fun of top survey managers. In 1970, Pecora expressed his opposition to burying the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, as it would be unsafe to place an underground pipeline in Arctic land He was appointed to serve as Under Secretary of the Interior in the
Department of the Interior by president
Richard Nixon on April 1, 1971. He died at age 59 on July 19, 1972, at
George Washington University Hospital after having surgery for
diverticulitis the previous month. A statement from president Nixon called him "a remarkable civil servant and an internationally respected figure in the scientific community". The mineral
pecoraite was named for him, as was the
Pecora Escarpment in Antarctica. ==William T. Pecora Award==