Historic Snippets: Rock Hound

A small, colorful, mounted slice of petrified wood presented to me upon the completion of my first year at Wadsworth Publishing Company sits on a shelf above my desk. It may have been the article about the Hayward Boy Paleontologists in the December 1943 issue of Life Magazine that was the beginning of dad’s interest in rock and fossils that he passed along to my brother Jim and me. Wesley Gordon, teacher and avid rock collector, took a group of his students on a collecting trip to the Bell gravel pit in the Irving-ton District of Washington Township known locally to be rich with fossils. On the first day of digging the twelve boys uncovered a lower jaw of a camelops, an ancient ancestor of the modern camel that began an extensive fossil dig that lasted more than ten years and retrieved tens of thousands of important speci-mens.

Dad took us to the slopes of Mt. Diablo where we collected shell fossils deposited millions of years earlier by an ancient inland sea, and trips to San Francisco’s Ferry building to see the seventy year old State Mining and Mineral Museum’s collection of rocks and minerals. Family trips to Southern California often included a visit to Disneyland’s Mineral Hall to view the display of florescent rocks and the parks seventy five million year old petrified tree truck. The Knott’s Berry Farms Rock shop and collection of “thunder egg” geodes was a “must see” as was Dire Wolf and Saber Tooth Tiger fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits. We enjoyed road trips, and stopping at highway rock shops and Jim recalls a trip to Virginia City where dad pointed out a young man picking up rocks from an unpaved parking lot for sale in one of the nearby gift shops. The Castro Valley Gem and Mineral Society and the Alameda County Fair’s Annual Rock and Min-eral shows were not to be missed and “Geology” was one of the first of the twenty one merit badges that I earned during my Boy Scouting years..

I had the opportunity to visit Yellowstone National Park for several weeks in the Summer of 1958 with the Yellowstone Science Expedition operated by my High School Biology teacher and former Yellowstone Park Ranger Wally Hennessy. Wally led us on treks to remote thermal and geological features including Obsidian Cliff, a remnant of a one hundred and fifty thousand year old slow moving viscous lava flow that became an important source of tools and weapons of the local indigenous people. We were also guided up the steep slope of Specimen Ridge through scattered needle and leaf fossils for close views of several four hundred million year old petrified trees, still standing remnants of a succession of primeval forests.

Digging roadside fossils, visiting rock shops, scrambling up volcanic mountains, and a career of making books are now cherished memories that instantly flash back with a single glance at that piece of petrified wood.