ou know you have a winner when people you have never seen before crash your party. So, when the HGMS Program Director, Scott Singleton, announced a special arrangement to visit the HMNS Gold exhibit, and that it was open to “all your sisters and cousins and aunts,” people came from everywhere. In fact by the time it was all said and done, 120 of them made the rounds through the exhibit. My e-mail list got updated as never before because people finally had a reason to respond to my electronic request to “tell me if you are coming.”

For a teaser, we had a lecture at the clubhouse by Mark Mathner, Minerals Curator and Prime Mover in the great gathering in of treasures from all over the globe. He spun stories of gold records from Graceland, gold bars from Florida wrecks, and having the phone hung up on him by the Federal Reserve. There were pictures of the Ten Commandments movie throne and of mummy masks—and this was just the warm up. The crystalline gold even got Art Smith to come out of the library to look at the pictures.

The photos on the left are of the chair seen in the Ten Commandments movie, the Dragon gold crystal formation, an Egyptian mask, crystalline gold, an Indian bracelet, and the irreplaceable Gold Double Eagle.

Our Museum evening went off better than anyone could expect. Most of the crowd arrived for the 6 p.m. tour. The museum was most obliging in that they allowed us (HGMS members) to handle the money, the tour guides, and our entrance. I do think I have found the way to get rich—stand in front of closed doors to the museum and take $5 from every passerby. You would have thought we were giving away free samples rather than taking money. I felt like a bagman, filling up a satchel with money and having my heavies (Art “the Smart” Smith and “Mean” Dean Lagerwall) handing out betting slips (IMAX tickets) and putting the mark (HMNS entry sticker) on each mark. It was great. I highly recommend this. When we got upstairs, the staff were most obliging, to the point where I wanted to get out a screwdriver, take out the 400 oz London Good Delivery Bar, and take it home with me. The only problem would have been deciding on the ways I would have to have split it. I am sure that Norm Lenz would have demanded a club cut.

Let’s start at the beginning—gold in all its forms from lumps to crystals to sheets. Everyone liked the crystalline gold specimens called the “Easter Egg” and the “Dragon,” but Art Smith and Dean Lagerwall were fogging the glass of the case of unlovely rare black gold minerals. Steve Blyskal was taken by the potato patch: a display of worn gold nuggets the size and shape but not the color of potatoes. I guess he wants to do some gardening. Lots of the women liked the display of specimens with red and green gold colors.

The second room was all Sunday Bennett’s. She was wound up and spouting off stories about placer mining and sluice boxes and the various gold rushes. Ask her what it really means to “get shafted.” This room has the biggest nugget, the 32 lb “Boot” that was found by a metal detector. I predicted that the nugget was so big that it would look like a pipeline and be ignored. Brian Honsinger and “Mitch” Mitscherling both assured me that they would do no such thing and that they could figure out how to carry it off undetectably given the chance. Mitch wanted sheer mass and not some puny gold crystal.

The sunken treasure room was a real attraction to the treasure hunter crowd. Tom Lammers’ family could not pry him from this room, and they figured that they would come back in a week to collect him. I guess they were getting hungry for dinner. He looks rather nice in a glass case.

The room with the bars has a theme of gold as money, mostly. When I suggested that the Wells Fargo strong box filled with the 999 twenty dollar gold pieces was much more impressive than the case containing one of three 1933 St. Gaudens double eagles, David Temple said that I was hopeless. Stewart Murphy was observed planning how to mill a special screwdriver that could remove the screws on the cage for the 400 ounce touch bar. I tried to give a geochemical explanation of a homely ore specimen from the famous Witwaterstrand mines, and Norm allowed that I could spin just about any yarn I wanted about it.

The room with the Indian Wedding sari drew many admiring glances from everyone, particularly First Lady Lenz, but they were not sure they could live with the restrictions of a nonadjustable gold belt. Someone speculated that the women in the family must be married off when they get to the right size to keep the belt on rather than when they have a bridegroom!

“All that Glitters” really divided the group. It wasn’t just that there was a little age differential in the group drawn to the Beyoncé and Solange awards vs. Buddy Holly and Elvis. There was a distinct polarization in the group gazing at ol’ George’s belt, the Rockets’ trophy, and all those gold medals vs. those mesmerized by the Fabergé and Van Cleef & Arpel. Oh, were you the one who said you were going to have to talk to someone about getting that chair for your throne room?

The final room is a pretend trip to the Klondike. Our own Mike Reves looked the part as he got his hands dirty (clean?) in the gold panning trough. Diane Sisson and her little grandson spent the whole evening playing in the water, but at least he was happy. What is a grandmother to do? Our only real problem was that they wanted us to leave when the Museum closed—without taking any specimens home for further research.

If you were not able to be there on “our” night, do not despair. The exhibit remains on display through August 7, 2005.