[Rockhounds] RIP F. Donald Bloss

[Steve Weinberger]

Don,

Thank you for letting me know.

Steve Weinberger

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 2:33 AM DON HALTERMAN <donhalterman at comcast.net>
wrote:

> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Rockhounds mailing list
> Subscription Services:
> http://rockhounds.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/rockhounds_rockhounds.drizzle.com
> List Usage Policy:
> http://Tomaszewski.net/Kreigh/Rockhounds/Rockhounds.shtml
>