BEAUTIFUL, FRAGILE & COLORFUL CRYSTALS

STORY AND PHOTOS BY BOB JONES

This display at the Tucson Show shows the great variety of Arizona wulfenite. (Evan Jones collection)

The world’s most famous Tucson Gem and Mineral Show started in1955 in the Helen Keeling Elementary School, pictured above.

In part one of this series (December 2018 issue) we described wulfenite from several Arizona mines including the famous town of Tombstone, which is best known for silver and the gunfight at the OK Corral. Better know for wulfenite and rare copper-lead species is the town of Tiger and its Mammoth-Saint Anthony mine. Less well known, except among Arizona mineral collectors, is the Rowley mine which yields some of the prettiest wulfenite-mimetite specimens in the state.

You’ll have a chance to see and enjoy Arizona’s wulfenites at the world-famous Tucson Gem and Mineral Show®, which features wulfenite as this year’s theme. The choice of wulfenite is a good one since the city of Tucson is the center of well over 200 localities that have produced wulfenite.

Since the Tucson Show started in 1955 the city of Tucson has evolved through the decades to fast become a world mineralogy center. In 2020, when Tucson’s world known mineral event happens the new University of Arizona Museum will open in downtown Tucson, making the community an actual World Center of Mineralogy.

How could all of this happen? The first years of the Tucson Show were ordinary club events like so many others. In fact, 120 miles north of Tucson was the annual Phoenix mineral show that was the largest and most popular mineral show in the southwest.

The first important move the Tuscon club made toward growth was to move the show to February instead of the original April date. With a show in winter, the rest of the country realized Tucson was the place to be in February. It made Tucson more attractive to anyone living in the northern states when the show had moved to an old World War II vintage Quonset Hut on the Fairgrounds south of downtown Tucson.