"Sue" at the Field Museum in Chicago (Wikipedia)
Years ago, I was a member of a really great book club here in Springdale. But nothing stays the same. Covid hit like a bomb and that was the end of the book club. Besides, nearly all of the people who made the book club great are dead now. So many people I feel privileged to have known, aren’t around anymore.
I used to do a written book review every month. It was my solution to my itch to write. When the book club went away, I had to find another way to feed my writing addiction. That was part of the reason that I started KinesavaROCKS.
I met Craig Childs when he gave a talk about his book here in Springdale. I bought my copy directly from him. You can still buy his book online!
My book review linked below is also an explanation of what my dad did and why he did it as a rockhound collecting rocks out on the desert. Not an apology, but an explanation. I don’t think my dad had anything to apologize for.
My dad was a leader of rockhounding in our part of the state and a past president of the Utah state association of rock clubs. He was a very close friend of Don Burge, the founder of the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah. (You should visit. It’s great!) Don was the discoverer of the only Velociraptor dinosaur that looked like the one in Jurassic Park. When Spielburg made the movie, the only known Velociraptor was about the size of a dog. But the Utah Raptor Don found was as big as the one in the movie so Don rescued the movie from being a total lie. (It’s maybe a 90% lie now.) My dad was on the first Board of Directors of the museum and the last time I checked, his name was on the plaque outside the door. He gave his best fossils to the museum.
The West was a different place back when my dad collected rocks. People today and people who never lived here don’t understand that.
Change is hard. In the case of native American artifacts, the 60 year old family doctor for 30 years in the small, southern Utah town of Blanding, Dr. James Redd, committed suicide in 2009 because he had been charged under the antiquities act with “stealing, selling and trading Indian artifacts” (Wikipedia). Peter Larson, head of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, served a prison sentence for a gaggle of crimes that could be proved in court in connection with collecting and selling fossils in 1995.
Those are the sounds of cultural change turning the corner away from the past.
With my dad, it was something to do out in nature with his friends on weekends and when he was between jobs as a construction carpenter. By the time Larson was convicted, long after my dad had made his last trip into the desert, it had become a money business. The Tyrannosaurus named “Sue” – now in the Field Museum in Chicago – was sold at auction. The final cost to the Field Museum: $8,362,500 (Wikipedia).
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