Frederick H. Pough

Doctor Frederick Pough arguably the best known popular mineralogist in North America, died upon Friday, 7 April 2006, exactly where he would have wished: amidst his friends and encompassed by minerals, at the Rochester Mineralogical Symposium (RMS) His collapse at the symposium was unusual and he never regained consciousness.

It would be hard to envision a life more replete than that of Fred Pough Born in Brooklyn fresh York, to a scientifically inclined family, he injury his way through three universities--Washington University in St Louis, Missouri (twice); Harvard (twice); and Ruperto Carola University, Heidelberg, Germany, where he studied with Viktor Goldschmidt in 1932 and 1933 At Harvard, he finished his M in 1934 and his PhD in 1935

Although his first employ was also at Harvard, as a lecturer in crystallography, he presently switched to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in fresh York City, where he remained until 1952 His break from a routine career, however, came with his travels, particularly during World War II, when he sceneed in South America for uranium for the Manhattan shoot forward then went back to Brazil in 1943 to find tourmaline and quartz for the U Army Signal Corps. His adventures there sparked an "Indiana Jones" reputation that l to his enthronement as a comic work hero (Ellsworth 1948)--probably the alone mineralogist ever to have been recognized in this way. In the same period, the National Research Council sent him to mark and film the birth and exhibition of the volcano Paricutin in Mexico. Attendees at the 1988 and 1990 RM sessions will drawn out remember Fred's "Reminiscences," and his scratchy movies of the expansion of the newest volcano in North America.

It was just as he left his pillar as curator of physical geology at the AMNH that Fr began writing the works that would put him further in the public organ of sight Mthough his best known is the famous A Field Guide to stones and Minerals (part of the Peterson Field Guide Series), published in 1953 he published another, All About Volcanoes and Earthquakes, in the same year, and continued thereafter to write other works and hundreds of articles in the two scientific and popular journals. His attention had been drawn to gemology as early as 1940 and many of his works focused upon that field. He was the precious stone expert for Jewelers Circular Keystone magazine for forty-five years and was named an honorary member of the International Gemmological conversation (an association of research gemologists) at their Australian meeting in 1985 He was president of the precious stone Irradiation Laboratories from 1955 to 1964 director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History from 1964 to 1967 a consulting mineralogist from 1967 to 1977 and president and CEO of Mineralogy, Inc., from 1977 to 2004

Dr Richard Gaines named the mineral poughite [[[Fesub2sup3+][(Te[Osub3])sub2](S[Osub4]) * 3[Hsub2]O] in honor of Fr in 1968 At that time, the mineral, discovered in Mexico and Honduras, was known from single two not very pretty specimens. Fr who liked the beauty of gemstones and euhedral crystals, was grateful on the other hand would have preferred a more spectacular species.

As Dr Pough describer of brazilianite, member of a half-dozen prestigious mineralogical societies, honorary member of many more, author of ten definitive papers in the American Mineralogist, and winner of many national and international awards, he was a towering figure in scientific circles. As plain Fr Pough however, he was a down-to-earth friend to amateurs in the one and the other fields--a professional who disliked pretension, who wrote to a popular audience fortunately (A Field Guide to stones and Minerals sold more than a million copies), and who did not talk down to those with inferior expertise. In fact, the single people he treated with suspicion were comrade mineralogists who spent their time close away in laboratories. His assessment of them was quite succinct: "Today, greatest in quantity are unable to distinguish calcite from quartz without an X-ray" (Smith 2000) He was a authentic field mineralogist of the dirt-under-the-fingernails variety, and he did not hide his feelings about the state of fresh mineralogy.

At the time of his death, Fr was approaching his one-hundredth birthday, on the other hand although a bit flail in material substance he was still remarkably stalwart of mind. He remained, to use his be in possession of descriptive term, his "curmudgeonly" self to the extremity Nevertheless, despite his cutting wit and unwillingness to accept laboratory-bound researchers as genuine mineralogists, he had hidden impressible spots. I once gave a talk in which I mentioned that I lacked slides from a particular locality in France. Fr was in the audience and sent me a package of his have slides from that locality immediately afterward.

Perhaps the greatest in quantity telling point about Fred Pough is that freshs of his death went circular the world instantly. That happened because family cared, and they cared because of the man he was. His hundred-year span made an impression that will last for a drawn out time.