Sam's Mineral Musings

Dryer for what we had paid for the entire load. I would love to have any 10 of those flats back now to sell or to put into my collection. The 13 flats were sold, at a considerable profit, to shops around the valley. The 3 "high grade" boxes  were sold at the Tucson Show that year. I recently spoke to the dealer who bought them and  asked if he might still have the flats and he answered yes. I offered to buy them for double the amount that he had paid, but he just chuckled and changed the subject. In 1978, thieves broke into my folks house while they were away and stole or destroyed a lot of my folks property and in addition, my mineral collection.  You can believe that my heart was broken.The "floater" Vanadinite was crushed into the carpet. The Cerrusite was smashed in the driveway. The thief was indiscriminate in his destruction but soon got what he deserved, gunned down by police in Indiana in another incident. I didn't collect anything for several years. Les and Bob Lane and a few others worked on a prospect in Utah .  Along with Bob and some helpers, I started cleaning, boxing and pricing the Azurite as it came down from Utah. I dreamed in blue from looking at all that Azurite. Bob offered me some of the flats to sell at Rockazona and the Flagg show about 9 years ago. This started my road back to collecting and dealing in minerals. I refreshed my friendships with Les and Wayne, started building another inventory, and attended sales and shows as a dealer again. With help from Bob Jones and Les, I had a booth at the Tucson Show for several years, but eventually decided that I did not want to be a retail dealer any more and my inventory was purchased by the Foundation.
I now deal on a wholesale basis to shops in the Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Sedona areas .We have several mail order customers and that end of the business is building today. In conclusion, I encourage anyone to look at all the aspects of mineral collecting, lapidary arts and earth science. As a profession, or a hobby, there is no other activity that brings such a wide area of interests together in any number of groups  and clubs. I wish to thank all of those people who have remained as my friends throughout this journey in the mineral world.

mer and an even smaller chisel. I had him move aside and proceeded to demonstrate the method we had used to drive an 80 foot tunnel in this mine. I used my 3 pound crack hammer and pounded the heck out of this boulder. As the rock yielded to my blows, a yellow/orange streak appeared. I took out my screwdriver and probed this area. All at once, almost like a slot machine payoff, brilliant, dark red, Vanadinite crystals were literally pouring out of this crack! I was so excited. I dropped almost all of the loose crystals into the waste at my knees. I called for my partner, and we cleaned out this pocket, which yielded a whopping 50 field wrapped flats plus a few oversized pieces covered with top-grade Apache Vanadinite. I was able to keep a "floater" that was of 1/4 -1/2 inch solid Vanadinite crystals. This was one of the best miniatures ever found at the mine. The sale of this lot of flats was lost in controversy. I continued to collect with Wayne in Arizona ,Colorado, Utah, Mexico and South America , and built a wonderful collection through purchases and trades and the generosity of Wayne and Les. Wayne called me one day and said that a huge pocket had been discovered at the Flux mine and we were going to help dig it out. Part of this pocket of Cerrusite is on display at the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum (look in the cases along the stairway). This pocket yielded some of the nicest crystals I have ever seen from this locality. The largest section of this pocket was purchased by the National Museum, the Smithsonian, just to put it in perspective. Of course a good piece went into my collection. My collection held some of the best of its kind at that time. I had made friends with a miner in Bisbee, named Dick Graeme. Dick called me one day and said to get my tail down to Bisbee. He had to clear out his basement. I went down with a friend and we hauled back a carload of ragtag boxes containing treasure from Bisbee. We sorted the minerals and separated them by grade. Dick had warned us not to expect much from this load. We had paid less than $300 for all of it. Well this pile ended up to be 48 flats of field wrapped Bisbee Azurite and Malachite. We had reserved another 13 flats of the better material and 3 flats of the best. We sold the 48 flats to Bob

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