Joel was a student at Marshall College. In 1936, he took Archaeology 223, under Professor Indiana Jones, and accompanied the class on a field trip to the Hopi caves in Arizona. Professor Jones considered Joel to be a responsible student.
One afternoon on the expedition, Joel was part of the group when Eva correctly identified a pot shard as an example of early Hopi clay art. After Lucy Giles embraced the professor for saving her from a scorpion, Joel listened to two other female students grumbling about Lucy's successful advances. When a rock slide threatened Warren, who had climbed up the slope on his own, Professor Jones put Joel in charge of the rest of the class and get them clear of the rock slide. After the slide had covered the overturned truck hiding Jones and Warren, Joel may have expressed his doubt at their survival, but cheered when the two emerged. When the class was threatened by two armed men claiming to be from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he may have stammered for his professor to help, and Jones, shielding his students from the strangers, told Joel to stay calm.
When the class was later forced to pack up and leave the dig site, Joel and Eva served as the expedition's drivers to Tucson.
Behind the scenes[]
Joel could be one of two male students on the field trip, as Jones refers to Joel in two places, possibly identifying two different individuals: a young man in a light-brown cap and slight mustache, or a taller young man with glasses and dark brown hair.