Obituary: Forrest “Boots” Cureton (1932-2020)
Last Updated: 13th Jan 2024By Tony Nikischer
Forrest “Boots” Cureton
(1932-2020)
Photo taken during our train trip through Europe in 1993 where we visited mutual contacts at major museums.
Christmas Eve 2020 brought great sadness with the passing of Forrest Ellsworth Cureton II, renowned mineral dealer and world traveler who specialized in supplying rare species to collectors and dealers. He passed away quietly in his sleep after suffering a stroke some two weeks earlier.
Most of us knew Forrest as “Boots”, a nickname he was given by his dad the first time he laid eyes on him in the hospital. His father suggested that his son’s feet looked just like little boots (because of a high instep). The name stuck, and even his mother and sister never called him anything else.
I became acquainted with Boots in 1974 as I was beginning my career as a mineral dealer. He was, at first, my competitor, as we both focused on rare species for systematic collectors. Our relationship evolved into a strong friendship, and he quickly became one of my most trusted suppliers. In the ensuing years, he was my mentor in many ways, perhaps incidentally, but our friendship certainly prepared the way for the eventual sale of his business and inventory to me when he decided to retire some twenty years later.
Getting a call from the “F. Cureton II and Sons” mineral company in Stockton, California was always a special treat, and it was for a long time Forrest’s primary means of selling uncommon species to other dealers. He would run down his list of new arrivals during a call, citing size ranges and “cost to you” prices for various lots, and it was only necessary to give him a flat dollar amount per species to trigger a shipment of his choosing. I was rarely disappointed with what he supplied. Delicate specimens such as wulfenite arrived in large boxes of powdered detergent to prevent damage, far better than the sawdust used by many other suppliers at the time. Soft tissue wrap with a thick newsprint outer shell was his common alternative for lesser specimens, as no one had yet figured out the now-widespread use of dry cleaner plastic often seen today. We often joked about the enhanced cleaning abilities of his soap-embedded specimens.
His phone calls typically resulted in what was termed “the war of the lists”. Most of the species dealers relied on mailing lists in those pre-Internet days. Those of us who bought material from Boots knew that others were getting those phone calls as well, and we collectively found that, “The first dealer to list a species wins, and there is no second place.” In the U.S., his dealer outlets included Excalibur, Mineralogical Research (Sharon Cisneros), Howard’s Minerals (Howard Belsky), Si and Ann Frazier, Filers, Minerals Unlimited (Scott Williams and later Ralph Merrill), Burnham’s, Girdauskis Minerals, Boodle Lane, Dave Garske, Ward’s Natural Science and many others. His international cliental included Hans Wilke, Geomar (Toni & Wim Klein), Renato & Adriana Pagano, and many more of the big names in systematic mineralogy in Europe, Japan and Australia. Only a few of us are still standing today, and with rare exceptions, mineral lists by mail are largely a thing of the past.
Forrest married Barbara in 1979, and Cureton Mineral Co. was the new business name. They relocated to Tucson in 1983, and I had the pleasure of staying with them on many occasions while participating at the Tucson show. Boots had his routines and his foibles. It was clear to me that he was a “neat freak” and “creature of habit”. An early riser, often before daylight, he would don a pair of his ever-present brown pants, race over to “the business” (a cinder block building next to his home on the outskirts of Tucson), long before anyone else was stirring. It was here that the Cureton Mineral Company empire was housed. The first order of business was to stoke the wood-burning stove, followed by a pot of coffee, always accompanied by his favorites, Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini or other classical composers. He worked quickly, getting specimens trimmed, orders packed and inventory arranged as needed. Hours were often spent at the microscope, carefully studying material, adding green arrows to specimens for the more obscure things as needed. All counters would be swept clean after trimming, and Boots would go so far as to sort his packing peanuts by color, never wanting to mix two colors in a customer’s shipment.
One year, I presented him with an “identification key” for packing peanuts, giving them fanciful names and providing him with a diverse number of styles and colors of assorted Styrofoam and cornstarch peanuts mounted on a board to facilitate his sorting routine. Boots could take a joke, and a good-natured laugh was had.)
Nights in Tucson at the Curetons’ were always entertaining, not only at the annual Cureton Tucson parties, but at other times as well. Feeding the javelinas, coyotes and other creatures at the edge of their desert property was a favorite pastime. Eating great gobs of vanilla ice cream was a required dessert on a nightly basis. Story telling with famous mineralogical dinner guests like Gene Foord, Andy Roberts, Peter Bayliss, Dick Erd and others was a common occurrence.
Intense negotiations at gun point with machetes drawn between the owners of Excalibur and Cureton mineral companies resulted in a successful deal. Photo taken by the late Renato Pagano at one of the Curetons' famous Tucson parties in 1992.
I recall one such dinner in which the conversation drifted into a long and detailed discussion of amphibole mineralogy. It was my wife’s first trip to Tucson, and the dinner likely cast doubt in her mind if this was really the life and mate she had chosen. Boots recognized this, and he later sent her a boxed collection of some 16 different amphibole species to commemorate her trip. We still have the collection and enjoy the memories it evokes.
Reminiscing and playing with the cats could be counted upon after dinner. (Boots loved cats, despite his complaining of their hair on his brown pants, and over the years, he and Barbara had many with unique names. My favorites were Pilot, Co-pilot and Bombardier, their names significant reflections of how Boots threatened to treat them with flying lessons if they annoyed him – but he never did.) Karen and I once presented Boots with a mounted specimen of “poohturdite”, the type locality being the Cureton litter box, carefully documented with an X-ray spectra and detailed discussion of its physical properties. On display at one of the annual Cureton parties, mineralogical greats such as Dick Gaines, Fred Pough, Skip Simmons, Frank Hawthorne and others delightedly marveled at the sample and its documentation.
Forrest developed friendships with many museum curators, professors and mineralogists, both by mail and during his many travels overseas. While he prolifically collected in the field, he did not have his own access to analytical equipment. His contacts in the scientific community were often glad to run analytical work for him, however, as he had donated material to them or their institutions that often resulted in new mineral descriptions or crystal structure refinements previously lacking. The mineral curetonite was named in his and his son Michael’s honor in 1978, and he also supplied the type material for others such as mcalpineite, dickthomssenite, and esperanzaite, all for which he was a co-author in the original mineral description. In addition, he was a co-author for the crystal structures of a number of species, including redledgeite, daqingshanite-(Ce), and hummerite, and he supplied the material for the solving of crystal structures for simonkolleite, billietite, fichtelite, gagarinite-Y, curite, cheralite-(Ce), compreignacite, blatterite, burangaite, and ojuelaite, many of the samples sacrificed from his personal systematic collection which later found its way to both Harvard (type specimens) and the University of Arizona.
Much to his dismay, Forrest Cureton was the only mineral dealer I ever knew for whom a new verb came into use. I suspect it was either coined or spread by the late Pete Dunn at the Smithsonian, often known for his frequently unforgiving attitude toward most mineral dealers. It was not uncommon for species dealers to trim specimens, going from one rich hand specimen down to several thumbnails, for example, in order to increase the available supply of a given rarity. Loose crystals were often placed into gelatin capsules or other small containers so they would not be lost, and the process of trimming such specimens down to smaller sizes came to be known as “curetonizing” a sample. While Pete Dunn’s attitude eventually softened, he could be “prickly” in his criticism by his own admission.
Surprisingly, Boots became a prolific mineral supplier while still working full time in what we referred to as “his real job” for the California Department of Highways and Transportation, his employer for nearly thirty (30) years. Boots emerged as an avid field collector, spurred on by the demands of his curiosity, access via his “real job” to promising field sites, and his growing mineral business. His first experience with an actual mineral he collected was a great embarrassment to him, however. Believing he had found gold in a pile of granite chips, he began smelting his “ore” samples at work (then at Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation in 1950), only to discover Fool’s Gold (pyrite) was all he had. Determined to learn more about minerals, his mentors Jack Parnau (parnauite) and Norm Pendleton (pendletonite, later discredited as karpatite) were responsible for giving gave him a strong push toward field collecting, and that interest also led to incredible travels around the world searching for minerals.
Forrest had four sons, Forrest III, David, Michael and Christopher, and all were interested in minerals as youths. David was tragically killed in 1967 at the age of 19 by a cave-in at Gold Hill, Utah, while field collecting. It was a terrible blow to the family that also soured the other boys’ interest in field work. Despite this tragedy, Boots maintained a love of field collecting, using every opportunity to explore and collect in the nearby California-Nevada region, eventually reaching around the world in that interest. Forrest and Barbara traveled extensively during 1980-1994, acquiring specimens in some 43 countries during that period. Boots was in Moscow when “the curtain” fell, and they even visited China in 1984 before most mineral dealers had an inkling of its eventual importance.
Among Boots’ most memorable collecting trips occurred in 1978, when he took a leave of absence from his job at the California Department of Highways & Transportation and embarked on a three month field collecting marathon to Australia, Borneo, the Philippines and Fiji. Specimens of gold tellurides from the Emperor Mine on Viti Levu in the Fiji Islands were a big hit, as were many Australian rarities he acquired during that trip. (To this day, I still have large dynamite boxes filled with specimens from Australia and elsewhere that became part of my inventory many years later.)
Hercules dynamite boxes filled with bulk minerals collected by Forrest Cureton that now reside in the Excalibur warehouse.
Perhaps his most renowned rare species coup came during that “down under” trip that included a purposeful stop in Borneo. Boots had read about a new mineral, sarabauite, that had been discovered near the town of Bau, Sarawak State, in the northwest portion of Borneo Island in Malaysia. The area also produced excellent native arsenic, as well as moderately good specimens of stibnite. The sarabauite was striking, deep red in color, and richly scattered in white calcite and creamy wollastonite matrix. No one, aside from a few scientists in the U.S. and Japan, had ever seen a sarabauite specimen. Boots wanted it, and he went to get it. He shipped back several thousand pounds (!!) of sarabauite, arsenic and stibnite from Borneo, and to this day, it is still a one-locality mineral some forty-five (45) years after its original description. I would venture to say that virtually every specimen of the mineral residing in collections worldwide today, was originally handled by Forrest Cureton.
A specimen showing numerous red veinlets of sarabauite collected by Forrest Cureton in 1978 at the type locality in Borneo. The specimen matrix is predominantly calcite, with minor, creamy wollastonite.
By 1993, Forrest had been offering minerals to collectors and dealers for more than four decades. By then, the workload of the Cureton Mineral Company, shared by just Forrest and his wife Barbara, had become overwhelming, with long hours and no additional help. They decided to sell the business and retire, offering it to me as a likely prospect to take it over. It was a life-changing offer, and we met (Forrest, Barbara, myself and my wife Karen) in Santa Fe, New Mexico that summer to hash out the deal. We spent a week there sharing a condo, travelling a bit, collecting at the Harding Mine, and thoroughly enjoying the time together as the deal took shape. On January 1, 1994, the Cureton Mineral Co. business became Excalibur’s.
Unlike many transfers of ownership, this was not a slap-dash agreement without extensive preparations for continued success. The payment of the note over the next five years depended on it! In anticipation of the sale, Boots carefully documented his sources and clients, providing me with a book (literally) of his many contacts around the world, suppliers and customers alike. Further, we took a trip together to introduce me to his European contacts in Vienna, Berlin, Helsinki, Prague and Munich, essentially spoon-feeding me his advice and counsel as we went. We packed up the inventory after the 1994 Tucson show and drove it to Peekskill, NY. Boots and Barbara spent several weeks there, integrating the inventories of the two companies. The rest is mineral dealer history.
Always ambitious and with a strong work ethic, Boots had other interests, often spurred on by simple happenstance. He saw “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1964 and became interested in karate. After extensive screening by the local Sherriff’s Department, he was accepted into the only school in Stockton, California that taught it. Within a year and a half, he had earned a black belt, and he soon took over ownership of the school as head instructor and teacher. One of his assistants and top students, Ron Marchini, went on to become a world champion and one of the top karate tournament fighters of all time while studying under Boots. As his “real job” and the mineral business began to make greater demands on his time, Boots sold the karate school to Ron in 1967.
Some additional Forrest Cureton work history is noted in the Mineralogical Record label archive summarized very briefly here. After working as “lab rat” for Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Company for three years (1950-1953), Forrest joined the California Department of Highways & Transportation (CalTrans) as a Senior Engineering Aid. He advanced through numerous positions, (Resident Engineer, Highway Maintenance Superintendant etc.), retiring in 1982 as the Environmental Engineer for CalTrans in his district. For more details, see: (https://mineralogicalrecord.com/labels.asp?colid=742).
After retirement, Boots volunteered for 23 years at Empire Mine State Historic Park. He also recreated the crusty old miner down in the shaft on Living History Days at the Park….a good fit! He would become the buying agent for their gift shop, and eventually became a member of the Board of Directors. His buying agent position expanded to include other museum gift shops, a job I would very happily describe as the best one could ever hope for: looking for and buying minerals with someone else’s money!
Boots is survived by the light and love of his life, Barbara, his loving wife of 41 years. He also leaves behind a large family that includes three sons, five grandsons, eight great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons, and countless friends in the science and mineral communities.
Rest in Peace, my friend.
Tony Nikischer
Excalibur Mineral Corporation
(1932-2020)
Forrest Cureton
Christmas Eve 2020 brought great sadness with the passing of Forrest Ellsworth Cureton II, renowned mineral dealer and world traveler who specialized in supplying rare species to collectors and dealers. He passed away quietly in his sleep after suffering a stroke some two weeks earlier.
Most of us knew Forrest as “Boots”, a nickname he was given by his dad the first time he laid eyes on him in the hospital. His father suggested that his son’s feet looked just like little boots (because of a high instep). The name stuck, and even his mother and sister never called him anything else.
I became acquainted with Boots in 1974 as I was beginning my career as a mineral dealer. He was, at first, my competitor, as we both focused on rare species for systematic collectors. Our relationship evolved into a strong friendship, and he quickly became one of my most trusted suppliers. In the ensuing years, he was my mentor in many ways, perhaps incidentally, but our friendship certainly prepared the way for the eventual sale of his business and inventory to me when he decided to retire some twenty years later.
Getting a call from the “F. Cureton II and Sons” mineral company in Stockton, California was always a special treat, and it was for a long time Forrest’s primary means of selling uncommon species to other dealers. He would run down his list of new arrivals during a call, citing size ranges and “cost to you” prices for various lots, and it was only necessary to give him a flat dollar amount per species to trigger a shipment of his choosing. I was rarely disappointed with what he supplied. Delicate specimens such as wulfenite arrived in large boxes of powdered detergent to prevent damage, far better than the sawdust used by many other suppliers at the time. Soft tissue wrap with a thick newsprint outer shell was his common alternative for lesser specimens, as no one had yet figured out the now-widespread use of dry cleaner plastic often seen today. We often joked about the enhanced cleaning abilities of his soap-embedded specimens.
His phone calls typically resulted in what was termed “the war of the lists”. Most of the species dealers relied on mailing lists in those pre-Internet days. Those of us who bought material from Boots knew that others were getting those phone calls as well, and we collectively found that, “The first dealer to list a species wins, and there is no second place.” In the U.S., his dealer outlets included Excalibur, Mineralogical Research (Sharon Cisneros), Howard’s Minerals (Howard Belsky), Si and Ann Frazier, Filers, Minerals Unlimited (Scott Williams and later Ralph Merrill), Burnham’s, Girdauskis Minerals, Boodle Lane, Dave Garske, Ward’s Natural Science and many others. His international cliental included Hans Wilke, Geomar (Toni & Wim Klein), Renato & Adriana Pagano, and many more of the big names in systematic mineralogy in Europe, Japan and Australia. Only a few of us are still standing today, and with rare exceptions, mineral lists by mail are largely a thing of the past.
Forrest married Barbara in 1979, and Cureton Mineral Co. was the new business name. They relocated to Tucson in 1983, and I had the pleasure of staying with them on many occasions while participating at the Tucson show. Boots had his routines and his foibles. It was clear to me that he was a “neat freak” and “creature of habit”. An early riser, often before daylight, he would don a pair of his ever-present brown pants, race over to “the business” (a cinder block building next to his home on the outskirts of Tucson), long before anyone else was stirring. It was here that the Cureton Mineral Company empire was housed. The first order of business was to stoke the wood-burning stove, followed by a pot of coffee, always accompanied by his favorites, Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini or other classical composers. He worked quickly, getting specimens trimmed, orders packed and inventory arranged as needed. Hours were often spent at the microscope, carefully studying material, adding green arrows to specimens for the more obscure things as needed. All counters would be swept clean after trimming, and Boots would go so far as to sort his packing peanuts by color, never wanting to mix two colors in a customer’s shipment.
One year, I presented him with an “identification key” for packing peanuts, giving them fanciful names and providing him with a diverse number of styles and colors of assorted Styrofoam and cornstarch peanuts mounted on a board to facilitate his sorting routine. Boots could take a joke, and a good-natured laugh was had.)
Nights in Tucson at the Curetons’ were always entertaining, not only at the annual Cureton Tucson parties, but at other times as well. Feeding the javelinas, coyotes and other creatures at the edge of their desert property was a favorite pastime. Eating great gobs of vanilla ice cream was a required dessert on a nightly basis. Story telling with famous mineralogical dinner guests like Gene Foord, Andy Roberts, Peter Bayliss, Dick Erd and others was a common occurrence.
Tony Nikischer and Forrest Cureton
I recall one such dinner in which the conversation drifted into a long and detailed discussion of amphibole mineralogy. It was my wife’s first trip to Tucson, and the dinner likely cast doubt in her mind if this was really the life and mate she had chosen. Boots recognized this, and he later sent her a boxed collection of some 16 different amphibole species to commemorate her trip. We still have the collection and enjoy the memories it evokes.
Reminiscing and playing with the cats could be counted upon after dinner. (Boots loved cats, despite his complaining of their hair on his brown pants, and over the years, he and Barbara had many with unique names. My favorites were Pilot, Co-pilot and Bombardier, their names significant reflections of how Boots threatened to treat them with flying lessons if they annoyed him – but he never did.) Karen and I once presented Boots with a mounted specimen of “poohturdite”, the type locality being the Cureton litter box, carefully documented with an X-ray spectra and detailed discussion of its physical properties. On display at one of the annual Cureton parties, mineralogical greats such as Dick Gaines, Fred Pough, Skip Simmons, Frank Hawthorne and others delightedly marveled at the sample and its documentation.
Forrest developed friendships with many museum curators, professors and mineralogists, both by mail and during his many travels overseas. While he prolifically collected in the field, he did not have his own access to analytical equipment. His contacts in the scientific community were often glad to run analytical work for him, however, as he had donated material to them or their institutions that often resulted in new mineral descriptions or crystal structure refinements previously lacking. The mineral curetonite was named in his and his son Michael’s honor in 1978, and he also supplied the type material for others such as mcalpineite, dickthomssenite, and esperanzaite, all for which he was a co-author in the original mineral description. In addition, he was a co-author for the crystal structures of a number of species, including redledgeite, daqingshanite-(Ce), and hummerite, and he supplied the material for the solving of crystal structures for simonkolleite, billietite, fichtelite, gagarinite-Y, curite, cheralite-(Ce), compreignacite, blatterite, burangaite, and ojuelaite, many of the samples sacrificed from his personal systematic collection which later found its way to both Harvard (type specimens) and the University of Arizona.
Much to his dismay, Forrest Cureton was the only mineral dealer I ever knew for whom a new verb came into use. I suspect it was either coined or spread by the late Pete Dunn at the Smithsonian, often known for his frequently unforgiving attitude toward most mineral dealers. It was not uncommon for species dealers to trim specimens, going from one rich hand specimen down to several thumbnails, for example, in order to increase the available supply of a given rarity. Loose crystals were often placed into gelatin capsules or other small containers so they would not be lost, and the process of trimming such specimens down to smaller sizes came to be known as “curetonizing” a sample. While Pete Dunn’s attitude eventually softened, he could be “prickly” in his criticism by his own admission.
Surprisingly, Boots became a prolific mineral supplier while still working full time in what we referred to as “his real job” for the California Department of Highways and Transportation, his employer for nearly thirty (30) years. Boots emerged as an avid field collector, spurred on by the demands of his curiosity, access via his “real job” to promising field sites, and his growing mineral business. His first experience with an actual mineral he collected was a great embarrassment to him, however. Believing he had found gold in a pile of granite chips, he began smelting his “ore” samples at work (then at Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation in 1950), only to discover Fool’s Gold (pyrite) was all he had. Determined to learn more about minerals, his mentors Jack Parnau (parnauite) and Norm Pendleton (pendletonite, later discredited as karpatite) were responsible for giving gave him a strong push toward field collecting, and that interest also led to incredible travels around the world searching for minerals.
Forrest had four sons, Forrest III, David, Michael and Christopher, and all were interested in minerals as youths. David was tragically killed in 1967 at the age of 19 by a cave-in at Gold Hill, Utah, while field collecting. It was a terrible blow to the family that also soured the other boys’ interest in field work. Despite this tragedy, Boots maintained a love of field collecting, using every opportunity to explore and collect in the nearby California-Nevada region, eventually reaching around the world in that interest. Forrest and Barbara traveled extensively during 1980-1994, acquiring specimens in some 43 countries during that period. Boots was in Moscow when “the curtain” fell, and they even visited China in 1984 before most mineral dealers had an inkling of its eventual importance.
Among Boots’ most memorable collecting trips occurred in 1978, when he took a leave of absence from his job at the California Department of Highways & Transportation and embarked on a three month field collecting marathon to Australia, Borneo, the Philippines and Fiji. Specimens of gold tellurides from the Emperor Mine on Viti Levu in the Fiji Islands were a big hit, as were many Australian rarities he acquired during that trip. (To this day, I still have large dynamite boxes filled with specimens from Australia and elsewhere that became part of my inventory many years later.)
Dynamite boxes filled with minerals
Perhaps his most renowned rare species coup came during that “down under” trip that included a purposeful stop in Borneo. Boots had read about a new mineral, sarabauite, that had been discovered near the town of Bau, Sarawak State, in the northwest portion of Borneo Island in Malaysia. The area also produced excellent native arsenic, as well as moderately good specimens of stibnite. The sarabauite was striking, deep red in color, and richly scattered in white calcite and creamy wollastonite matrix. No one, aside from a few scientists in the U.S. and Japan, had ever seen a sarabauite specimen. Boots wanted it, and he went to get it. He shipped back several thousand pounds (!!) of sarabauite, arsenic and stibnite from Borneo, and to this day, it is still a one-locality mineral some forty-five (45) years after its original description. I would venture to say that virtually every specimen of the mineral residing in collections worldwide today, was originally handled by Forrest Cureton.
A specimen showing numerous red veinlets of sarabauite collected by Forrest Cureton in 1978 at the type locality in Borneo. The specimen matrix is predominantly calcite, with minor, creamy wollastonite.
By 1993, Forrest had been offering minerals to collectors and dealers for more than four decades. By then, the workload of the Cureton Mineral Company, shared by just Forrest and his wife Barbara, had become overwhelming, with long hours and no additional help. They decided to sell the business and retire, offering it to me as a likely prospect to take it over. It was a life-changing offer, and we met (Forrest, Barbara, myself and my wife Karen) in Santa Fe, New Mexico that summer to hash out the deal. We spent a week there sharing a condo, travelling a bit, collecting at the Harding Mine, and thoroughly enjoying the time together as the deal took shape. On January 1, 1994, the Cureton Mineral Co. business became Excalibur’s.
Unlike many transfers of ownership, this was not a slap-dash agreement without extensive preparations for continued success. The payment of the note over the next five years depended on it! In anticipation of the sale, Boots carefully documented his sources and clients, providing me with a book (literally) of his many contacts around the world, suppliers and customers alike. Further, we took a trip together to introduce me to his European contacts in Vienna, Berlin, Helsinki, Prague and Munich, essentially spoon-feeding me his advice and counsel as we went. We packed up the inventory after the 1994 Tucson show and drove it to Peekskill, NY. Boots and Barbara spent several weeks there, integrating the inventories of the two companies. The rest is mineral dealer history.
Always ambitious and with a strong work ethic, Boots had other interests, often spurred on by simple happenstance. He saw “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1964 and became interested in karate. After extensive screening by the local Sherriff’s Department, he was accepted into the only school in Stockton, California that taught it. Within a year and a half, he had earned a black belt, and he soon took over ownership of the school as head instructor and teacher. One of his assistants and top students, Ron Marchini, went on to become a world champion and one of the top karate tournament fighters of all time while studying under Boots. As his “real job” and the mineral business began to make greater demands on his time, Boots sold the karate school to Ron in 1967.
Some additional Forrest Cureton work history is noted in the Mineralogical Record label archive summarized very briefly here. After working as “lab rat” for Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Company for three years (1950-1953), Forrest joined the California Department of Highways & Transportation (CalTrans) as a Senior Engineering Aid. He advanced through numerous positions, (Resident Engineer, Highway Maintenance Superintendant etc.), retiring in 1982 as the Environmental Engineer for CalTrans in his district. For more details, see: (https://mineralogicalrecord.com/labels.asp?colid=742).
After retirement, Boots volunteered for 23 years at Empire Mine State Historic Park. He also recreated the crusty old miner down in the shaft on Living History Days at the Park….a good fit! He would become the buying agent for their gift shop, and eventually became a member of the Board of Directors. His buying agent position expanded to include other museum gift shops, a job I would very happily describe as the best one could ever hope for: looking for and buying minerals with someone else’s money!
Boots is survived by the light and love of his life, Barbara, his loving wife of 41 years. He also leaves behind a large family that includes three sons, five grandsons, eight great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons, and countless friends in the science and mineral communities.
Rest in Peace, my friend.
Tony Nikischer
Excalibur Mineral Corporation
References
Article has been viewed at least 1309 times.
