[Rockhounds] RIP F. Donald Bloss

[DON HALTERMAN]

I just received news, before it will be made widely known, that the legendary mineralogist F. Donald "Don" Bloss passed away.  As with Len Morgan (a well-known east coast collector and micromounter) and Fred Pough, he passed just short of his hundredth birthday.  I was contacted by his PhD student and my M.S. advisor, Mickey Gunter, who thought I should hear it from a friend rather than see it pop up on the Internet.

Don Bloss was the father of modern optical mineralogy, and his books "An Introduction to the Methods of Optical Crystallography" and "The Spindle Stage: Principles and Practice" made optical mineralogy understandable and accessible to many people. His mighty "Crystallography and Crystal Chemistry" is a comprehensive and weighty volume that I cite often.

He spent several decades as a professor at Virginia Tech, and taught such notable mineralogists as former list member Henry "Bumpi" Barwood (RIP), as well as Bob Downs, Mickey Gunter, and Su-Chun Su.  

He was also an accomplished chess player, and often used chess pieces to illustrate aspects of crystallography in his books. 

I was introduced to him around 1999 by Henry Barwood, when I became interested in using the spindle stage for optical mineralogy and wanted to find a way to contact him and ask where I could get one, since by that time they were hard to find.  We began a correspondence, and one thing led to another, and we put together a spindle stage class held at the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago. He came out of retirement for that one last class, and he was about 80 then. That is where I met Don Bloss in person, as well as Tony Kampf, Su-Chun Su, Dan Kile, and Mickey Gunter.  Mickey wrote an article about the class that was published in the McCrone journal "The Microscope."  That is also where I met Bob Sacher, one of the principals of Cargille, the makers of refractive index liquids crucial to optical mineralogy... and I learned in no uncertain terms that they are not "oils"!  

I am particularly saddened because this marks the end of an era.  We lost Henry Barwood too soon, and though Don Bloss lived to the grand old age of 100, he had a sharp mind and still had contributions to make to the science community, and we've lost him as well.

He called his students his children, and I have tried for the last 20 years to make him proud.