The Phoenix Gem and Mineral Show

If you were to drop by the Valley of the Sun's splashy spring rockhounding exhibit, known more formally as the Phoenix Gem and Mineral Show, here's what you might see:

fished, and worked on the Valdez oil spill. He owns a gold mine near Cave Creek. Those were some of the things I saw at last year's gem and mineral show sponsored by the Maricopa Lapidary Society. ("Lapidary" is cutting, grinding, and polishing precious or semiprecious stones.) I can't guarantee that all of them will be on hand at this year's event March 4 to 7. But there'll be a lot of other things just as eye-catching.

This rock-hound extravaganza has been a local happening in Phoenix for no less than 44 years, and, as rock hounds will tell you, it's one of the best in the West.

Consider: geologists say there are 2,500 or so different minerals in the world. Arizona has about 650 of them (Arizona is "prime rockhounding territory," says Gordon S. Fay in his book The Rockbound's Manual; Harper & Row, N.Y., 1972). I'd guess that very nearly all those 650 pieces of the planet show up, in some form or other, at the big Phoenix gem show.

Counters glitter with boxes and bins jam-packed with sapphires, rubies, garnets, aquamarines, tourmalines, beryls, Jasper, jade, peridots. You can see azurite, malachite, calcite, cuprite, selenite, wulfenite, wavelite, glauberite, zeolite, thenardite.

(Favorite rock-hound joke: Leaverite that's the rock you lick to see what it would look like when polished, and if nothing comes through, you "leave 'er right" there.) The list of earth-spawned goodies to be seen and bought goes on and on.

The variety is endless. There's a phantasmagoria of colors and shapes.

Stroll around the show, and you'll see oddities and labors of love like:

Different col-ors and pat-terns just like real hot-air bal-loons. Only these, if you tried to fly them, would sink like, well, a rock.

Winchester Richard, former music supervisor for the Washington Elementary School District in Phoenix, makes them. "You just roll it and roll it on the grinding wheel until you evolve something," he explains.

Contemplate interesting rocks and the things made with them, and you just might encounter interesting people: the people involved in their creation. I did that at last year's show.

There's Peggy Sill. She's confined to a wheelchair. Rheumatoid arthritis. Lost the use of one hand. Yet she makes butter-flies out of Mexican agate (one of the rock-hound magazines calls her the "Butterfly Queen"). And she has carved ships out of Arizona onyx.

And the Finches, Inez and Dan of Mesa. They do "bottle art." This involves different colored sands that have been packed into bottles and, with brass wires, meticulously moved around, layer on layer, to become pictures: a couple of fighting deer, a delicate butterfly, Japan's Mount Fuji.

It's agonizingly slow work, sifting, straining, rolling the sand until it's very fine, then manipulating it, grain by grain, until the picture is just right. But, explains Inez Finch, "We're having such a good time."

And Sam Redman of Sao Paulo, Brazil. His college roommate was the son of a rich Brazilian coffee, oil, gems and Redman moved to Brazil to help him mine the gems, mostly emeralds, which he comes to shows like this to sell. They're jewels of choice these days, or, as Fortune put it, "the investment stone of the future" more coveted, by some, than diamonds.

But mining emeralds can be chancy. Redman's mine has been invaded by cov-etous locals brandishing machetes and guns. "We even have to buy back some of our stuff from our miners," says Redman. "It's part of the overhead."

Talk to some of these interesting peo-ple at the show and you'll understand

MINERAL

the deep enduring appeal of rock-hounding. It is, after all, a hobby (and, in some cases, a business) that has attracted some 10 million devotees, turning a nat-ural resource into a national pastime. How come?

"From time immemorial," says Jack Greathouse, former president of the Maricopa Lapidary Society, "there has been a fascination with jewels. In addition to that, you have people today who are more than ever conscious of Nature. They are amazed to find that a simple rock can have trapped within it so much beauty. All this plus the fact that some people are just natural collectors. They like nice things. There's a little bit of collector in everyone. When you were a kid, didn't you pick up pretty stones?"

"It's just using what the good Lord gave you to use," Toby Byars said as we talked over the din of several hundred people elbowing through the show. Byars and her husband, Joe, specialize in fine works in wood. They spent 90 hours turning a three-inch-high bowl of iron-wood, mesquite, and bloodwood, inlaid with silver.

Rock hounds, though they may work alone at their diamond saws and grinders, tend to be gregarious folk. They dote on field trips, winding through the desert and the hills in caravans of four-wheel-drive vehicles and pickups, gathering rocks, and swapping stories around campfires.

Wayne Fernyhough, veteran valley broadcaster ("I installed the first station in Mesa: KGYL"), elaborates: "I love to be out-of-doors. I see so many things that most people never see: cactus, places where Indians have lived, places many people don't know are there. And there's just something about picking up a little rock and letting it tell you a story as you research it."

How do you get into rockhounding and maybe, someday, end up in that select honor guard of exhibitors at the gem and mineral show?

Bone up on rocks. The public library has books and magazines on rocks and the lapidary art. Find a magazine that fits your needs and subscribe to it.

Join a rock-hound club. Just about every community of any size has one.

Start with a few basic items: geologist's hammer, steel pick, chisel, safety gog-gles, magnifying glass, and a guide to rocks and minerals with color photos.

Then, as you get into the sophisticated minutiae of lapidary work, you can go for the diamond saw, grinder, polisher, and the like.

Start taking field trips, preferably with experienced rock hounds. Learn to read the rocks. Where to dig? Old mines, riverbeds, gravel pits, road excavations.

And take in the big rock-hound show this month. Look at all those pretty things. Talk with the artisans who make space shuttles out of quartz and houses out of gems. Visit with the septuagenarians and octogenarians whose lives have been stretched and enriched by rockhounding.

Then you'll understand why Carl Spangenberg, current president of the Maricopa Lapidary Society, says, "Rock hounds are special people, and they live forever."

WHEN YOU GO.

The Phoenix Gem and Mineral Show will be held March 4-7 at the Mountain Preserve Reception & Conference Center, 13th Street and Dunlap, Phoenix. Hours: Thursday, 1:00 to 6:00 P.M. (morning reserved for schoolchildren). Friday and Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. Sunday, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Admission: adults $3, children free. (50-cents-off coupons available at Phoenix's Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum, rock shops, and many offices.) For further information, contact Carl Spangenberg, president, Maricopa Lapidary Society, (602) 955-6906.