Mostly love jewelry (especially vintage sterling) and books (especially older medical guides, illustrated children's books, strange and unusual subjects) and older maps (local ones from the 40's and 50's that show old roads no longer used) and *anything* I have no clue what-it-is. I have a large collection of "what's its?" Mostly I love finding things that speak of a different era, speak of quality and craftsmanship and speak of lovely design. I've been accumulating stuff for more than 25 years. Sigh. Can't give any of it up. So...I'm a collector. Not a dealer. I grew up with a rock hound for a father and we spent our weekends doing three things: hunting for rocks, digging up ghost towns, enjoying the great outdoors. At that time, it was OK to dig up ghost towns, I promise. We never messed with the structures. Just found where the dump and the outhouse were and started digging. Amazing what you could find under remnants of an outhouse. Now, of course, archeologists do that. Yes, we have an archeologist in the family now. One of my daughters. Another daughter is in (take a guess) the jewelry business. The other daughter is a biologist who makes a living camping and backpacking in the great outdoors doing field research. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I guess. My 96 year old father loves to go estate saling and garage saling, the only kind of treasure hunting he can do now, so I take him every other weekend. I can see great knowledge here! Love it! And desire to help people of all kinds! Love it!
Thank you, KingofThings! All in the northwest, mostly...Idaho, Montana, Wyoming...some in Colorado and Nevada.
Hmmm...it's been a long time. Since the early to mid 70's. I'll have to ask my Dad :/ He has a better memory than I do...
Welcome to the board! My grandfather was a rockhound...and some of that got passed down to my father - and to a lesser extent to me. Glad you signed up here!
Thank you for the welcome! I find that I can identify rocks pretty easily and can often discern fake from real gems. I still love getting out and finding them...though most of the time I find fossils and rocks at garage sales now. It's amazing how many folks in my father's generation passed their booty to their kids and they sell it at garage sales...
The ones we went to were definitely out of bounds to civilians . At least they weren't reconstructed. Most people didn't know about them at the time. Now it's a different time and place.
Ones like Rhyolite and Goldfield shouldn't be for the most part. I've been to the 'town' on one of the the bombing ranges at NAS Fallon, NV. The buildings were gone long ago but there was lots of junk about. I think I still have bottles and fragments from there. The one that is supposedly on Area 51 is the one you'd like to see.
Oh you got to do what I would have loved to do. There was a man one street over who was a rock hound and had his shed set up as a lapidary shop. The discards were thrown in a pile for the neighborhood kids to dig through. We were only allowed to come once or twice a week and there was a limit on what we could take. That way all the kids could have some.
Ummmmmmm Fallon is not a nuclear test site. Though not all that far away from Area 51... But since you've noted this.... I lived in Vegas when tests were going on there and have had two perfectly healthy boys as well as three healthy grandchildren. However..... The boys' Mom, born in Nevada but further away, had fallen off her cuckoo clock balcony at some point in her childhood and her Mother personally warned me of this before I married her...so... I must've been at least partially nuts to marry her! AND to top it off... I am the second owner of my '69 Chevy stepside pickup which was a security truck at Area 51 and both my boys came home from the hospital in it. I've been driving her since 1975 and I'm perfectly normal. - Go for it Komo!
I've got some rocks from the tailings pile at the Franklin mine in NJ and they are quite nice to have. Janetkay, any news on the break in there????
Welcome! My dad a rockhound geologist, I was (am) a collector of many many things. Slowly downsizing!
You think? Maybe delusional too. Let me just say that if I agreed with you that you were perfectly normal, we would both be wrong! !
