[meteorite-list] Your First Meteorite - When did you Get It

From: Edwin Thompson <etmeteorites_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:14:42 +0000
Message-ID: <BAY155-w215BE2FC23CBEFAC1E89ED1C70_at_phx.gbl>

Hi Fred and list, Dr. Frederick Pough was an amazing man. I met him the same way during one of my early road trips when he was traveling the U.S. with a car trunk full of Allendes. He sold some to ASU and I remember Richard Norton telling me that he bought from him on that same selling trip. Fred wrote a number of books and he was in Mexico doing research on Volcanoes when Allende fell so he made it a point to go there on his long drive back home that year to recover meteorites. I think that Blaine Reed met him the same way. I know that he stopped at UCLA, ASU, Field museum and other places that he thought might buy them. Years later I bumped into him at a show in Reno, Nevada. We stayed in touch from then in 1992 until he passed away in '06. He had an amazing mineral collection, an amazing meteorites collection and a wonderful and huge collection of pre-columbian pottery from Central america that he collected on his many trips there to study and collect. I got to see the collections at his home just after h
e started selling it. Wow, it was rock heaven! I think that I still have a first edition of Richard Norton's Rocks from Space in which I got Fred to autograph the page Richard wrote about him. He was a very nice guy with a smile like the sunshine and simply a regular guy with a brilliant mind, very much like Dr. Bobby Deitz from A.S.U., big smile like a kid and brilliant mind. I remember that back then he wanted 50 cents to a dollar per gram for Allendes but some of them were over ten kilos each, more money than I could have dreamed of back then. Found this article about him on line:
 
Dr. Frederick H. Pough (1906-2006) assembled an impressive collection of over 800 gem specimens. A large portion of the collection was purchased by Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the rest was donated by Dr. Pough to the museum. The Pough Gem Collection was the product of over thirty years of acquisition.

Over the course of his life, Pough was a student, professor, curator, author and consultant of mineralogy. Dr. Pough was awarded a Doctorate from Harvard and taught mineralogy there for a short time. He worked as Assistant Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and later became chairman of their Department of Geology and Mineralogy. During WWII he worked for the Manhattan Project in Brazil. After serving as Director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, he worked as a consulting mineralogist and eventually established his own consulting firm, Mineralogy, Inc.
During the 1970s, Pough served as a consultant to the Section of Minerals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to assist with the expansion of the collection and the development of Hillman Hall. He was chosen as the recipient for the Carnegie Mineralogical Award in 1989. The award is given each year to an individual, group or organization who works to advance the ideals of mineralogical preservation, conservation, and education.
 
Oh yes, my first meteorite was a 272 gram Canyon Diablo from Nininger in 1969, it still has a piece of medical tape on it with the weight and the price; $1.00! Unless you can count the fragments of oxide crust that I picked up in the Willamette site with my mother when I was 5 years old in 1958. I gave most of those to Ron Hartman roughly 18 years ago to give to children he was teaching. Sadly the Willamette pit is now under someone's driveway.
 
Cheers, E.T.

> Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:30:55 -0700
> From: debfred at att.net
> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Your First Meteorite - When did you Get It
>
> Hello All,
> I obtained my first meteorite when I was attending graduate school at the U of Fla in the spring of 1969. I also had a rock shop called the ?Quarry? where I was working one morning in May when a gentleman drove up in a station wagon. He said he had just come from Mexico where he had purchased some minerals from the miners. I bought some native silver, topaz, and fluorite. He then pulled out a wooden box of black rocks he said were meteorites. Although I was in Geology graduate school, I had never seen or held a meteorite. I was interested in meteorites and had read Brian Mason?s 1962 book on meteorites. The black rocks were not magnetic, not very heavy, and didn?t look like the black and white pictures of meteorites in Mason?s book. The dealer seamed honest and the black color looked like it could be melted crust, so I bought an 86-gram stone for ten cents a gram. I believe the traveling rock salesman was 63-year-old Fred Pough and yes the
> stone was indeed an Allende meteorite that remains in my collection today.
> Best Regards, Fred Olsen
>
>
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Received on Fri 25 Jun 2010 01:14:42 AM PDT