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| Best of Collectors |
Ralph CLARK
by Thomas P. Moore
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Thumbnail collectors are a breed somewhat apart from the larger
mineral-collecting community. They tend to have their own goals,
priorities and enthusiasms. But mineral folk of other inclinations
who don’t try to steer completely clear of the thumbnail world will
have noticed how commonly the name of Ralph Clark comes up in
discussions, and with what high respect the name is mentioned.
Ralph collects only thumbnails (specimens that would fit within a
one-inch cube), and his constantly evolving collection seems to stay
at around 250 specimens of amazingly high overall quality. Piecefor-
piece it is clearly one of the finest such collections on earth.
Indeed the jargon among many thumbnailers these days has evolved
to include the term “Ralph Clark specimen.” This is understood
instantly as denoting not that the piece is necessarily owned by him
but that the possibility of improving upon it defies the imagination.
A “Ralph Clark specimen” is the one you would take if you could
choose among all those of that kind which you have seen or might
ever expect to see. Now that is high praise! To understand this,
simply examine the photos shown here of “Ralph Clark specimens”
which happen actually to be owned by Ralph Clark. Any questions?!
Ralph is not a professional mineralogist, not a curator, prospector,
or dealer, not even a particularly wealthy man. He is an
“amateur” who came to serious mineral collecting from a successful
career in business. He now works—“works?”—close to fulltime
at cultivating his mineralogical knowledge, friendships, and
contacts while refining his connoisseurship so that he may keep
shaping and re-shaping his collection. Sitting down with Ralph
during the Tucson or Denver shows for a little “show and tell” is
always a high point. The specimens he has in his pocket can be
memorable enough, of course, but trading stories and listening to
Ralph tell about how he came by his acquisitions is always fun.
With only a little irony, Ralph himself likes to call the passion for
serious collecting “a healthy sickness,” but it is obviously much
more health and enjoyment than pathology as Ralph does it.
There are no special mineralogical antecedents in Ralph’s early
life: his father, John P. Clark, was a tractor salesman; his mother,
Mary J. Clark, a full-time housewife. Ralph was born (April 12,
1937) in Denver, and there he has stayed all his life except for a
three-year hitch in the Air Force and one business-related, two-year
stay in Dallas, Texas. At the Community College of Denver and at
the University of Colorado he studied electrical engineering,
business administration and consumer electronics. His career has
included 17 successful years with J. C. Penney in positions of
increasing responsibility in Product Service management, ranging
from Manager of their “pilot service center” in Denver, to District
Product Service Manager, and later Regional Product Service
Manager in Dallas, where he was responsible for planning, organizing, developing and implementing product services and meeting
business objectives and goals for a nine-state region. When J. C.
Penney decided to discontinue the Product Service branch of its
operations in 1983, Ralph went on to similar success working for
RCA as Manager of their consumer and commercial service
operations branch in Denver, then for General Electric (which
acquired RCA in 1986) as Regional Quality Assurance Manager
for their Major Appliance Division. His work there covered various
programs in quality assurance, replacement parts, customer relations, technical training, and consumer services in the field of
electronic and major appliance products for the company’s largest
geographic region. In 1989, when General Electric downsized their
operations and closed their Denver Regional Office, he chose to
retire from General Electric, although they had offered him the
option of moving to Louisville, Kentucky to continue with the
company.
Currently Ralph works a full-time job for a real estate management
company. Unpretentiously comfortable, and with three grown children (and four grandchildren) doing well on their own, Ralph
does not really need the extra real-estate money for normal living
expenses. In fact, he could just as well retire, but he enjoys using
the extra income for—you guessed it—building his mineral collection.
This has to be one of the best approaches I’ve ever heard of to
the archetypal problem of how a man might build a new, active,
interesting life after retiring from a successful business career:
Pursue the world’s best South African poldervaartite thumbnail!
(Hey, it’s more exciting than golf!)
JoAnn, Ralph’s wife of 45 years, has other interests herself, but
she is wholly supportive of Ralph’s passion for minerals and is
respectful of his concentrated pursuit of connoisseur thumbnails.
(Although I do remember him complaining wistfully about not
having found anything at the Tucson Show a few years ago . . . “My
wife would call it a ‘great show’!” he said with a warm laugh!)
It is always interesting to learn how someone first became a
mineral collector. In Ralph’s case the hobby had its origins in
family life. One day back in 1969 Ralph’s son Todd had come
home from first grade very excited by a “show and tell” (naturally!)
about fossils that one of the other kids had presented in class.
Ralph and JoAnn soon found themselves joining the Gates Rock
and Mineral Club and haunting rock shops during family trips.
Tumbling, cabochon-cutting, and other lapidary amusements eventually
gave way to crystal pursuits when Manuel Ontiveros, an El
Paso, Texas dealer in Mexican minerals, showed the Clarks his
personal collection, the first serious one they had ever seen.
Ontiveros pointed them toward the Tucson Show and was otherwise
very encouraging, but strongly advised that they should
acquire only high quality specimens, and not go “vacuumcleanering”
around the shows, merely scooping up pretty rocks in
quantity. Promptly disregarding that advice, the Clarks purchased a
flat of 20 Mexican miniatures for $20 from Ontiveros himself. But
they soon learned to do better.
In 1971 mineral dealer Richard Kosnar (“Mineral Classics”)
moved to the Denver area, and the Clarks, after seeing his ads in the
Mineralogical Record, paid him a visit. Ralph and his other son, Don, became friends with Kosnar. They accepted him as their
mentor in mineral collecting, and learned much from him. Although
Kosnar himself favored miniatures, Ralph and Don zeroed
in on thumbnails and began to build a serious, sophisticated, all-out
all-thumbnail collection. Todd lost interest in collecting around
1974, but Don and Ralph continued to build their first collection
until they sold it in 1977, just as Don was entering college. Today
Ralph admits that (like many of us who have ever sold our
minerals} there is a handful of pieces from his older collection that
he would love to have back again.
A hiatus set in after 1977, and Ralph ended up waiting until
1986 to begin collecting again, all on his own this time. The first generation
collection was fine enough to have won the AFMS
National Award for thumbnail minerals in 1974 and 1977. The
second-generation collection has scored six more major competitive-
display awards: “Best of Species—Thumbnails” at the Denver
Gem & Mineral Show in 1990 and 1993, “Best Master Minerals” at
the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show of 1991, the “Richard Pearl
Trophy” at the Denver Gem & Mineral Shows in 1992 and 1995,
and the AFMS National Award for thumbnail minerals in 1993.
Ralph has displayed about a dozen times at major shows, not
always competitively, but always effectively. His top 35 pieces, set
against black satin in his custom-built case, have made passing
showgoers stop as if having been suddenly nailed to the floor, their
minds filled with wonder and covetousness (“maybe he’d trade me
that one for my own best three dozen pieces . . .”).
The philosophy that underlies a collection of this sort is also
simple, and simply inferred, although Ralph states it well: “it
doesn’t take a fortune to build a significant collection . . . what’s
needed is a capacity to learn, a degree of expendable income, a
cultivated eye, and a singular passion to collect only what you
love.” What Ralph loves are mineral species that are essentially at
their best in the thumbnail size range, and not known to improve in
larger sizes. He does make exceptions: recently, for example, he
acquired some extraordinary thumbnails of Freiberg silver,
N’Chwaning mine rhodochrosite, Moroccan erythrite, and even
Dal’negorsk fluorite (the exquisite “invisible” octahedron on sphalerite
pictured here), all of which also exist in world-class miniatures
and cabinet specimens. And once in a while he can’t resist buying
very inexpensive and “ordinary” specimens simply because they
strike him as interesting in some way, or because they somehow
appeal to his aesthetic sense. Nevertheless, the really distinctive
and most impressive pieces in the collection are those which
combine rarity of species, exceptional form and/or crystal size (for
the species), absolute freedom from damage, and the most impeccable
aesthetics. Some of his pieces, small as they are, are arguably
the world’s best examples of their species! The big question that
always comes to mind is one that Ralph hears a lot: “How do you
do it?”
He does it through the constant activity and patient tenacity that
are Ralph’s real hallmarks as a collector. He is quick to point out
that, if you really seek the best of the best, you cannot be content
with just saving your money to be spent all within a few days, on
whatever happens to meet your eye at shows or on other spot
occasions. Rather, his approach is to keep up a constant flow of
inquiries, letters and follow-up letters, connections to connections,
etc., with personal visits as necessary, directed at potential sources
literally throughout the world. He has often pursued a particular
specimen for many years before finally acquiring it. Once, in the
company of his good friend Dr. Steve Neely (a cabinet-specimen
collector—no risk of competition between them), Ralph impulsively
made a quick trip to Germany in pursuit of some specimens.
He came back empty-handed but, typically, consummated some
years later the negotiations begun on that trip. Another German
experience Ralph likes to relate is the one about how, when he was
staying at the home of a German dealer just before the Munich
Show, he picked up a copy of the German magazine Lapis, and saw
there a color photograph of a blue euclase specimen from Zimbabwe.
It was specimen-love at first sight. At the show a few days
later, he located the stand of the dealer who owned the specimen,
“camped out” there for days of negotiating and sweet-talking, and
finally walked out of the show with the prize. The qualities of
“focus,” specific goals and priorities, plus flexibility, alertness and
open-mindedness are essential to his approach. People skills, too,
are important, along with rationality about working within a
budget, tact, warmth, and a fundamental generosity of spirit.
Sharing is one of the joys of collecting, and Ralph is always an
eager and complimentary audience when others want to show off
their own minerals. Likewise he hospitably welcomes appreciative
visitors to his own home, and is always up for a “show and tell,”
especially if the guest is a serious thumbnailer. (Weekends are best
for visits: remember, he still works more or less full-time to make
all this collecting possible.) He has no “mineral room” or other sort
of display facility in his home—just a dinette table, a strong lamp,
and a warm coffee pot. After all, one advantage of collecting
thumbnails is that you can have a relatively large and very
important collection, yet put the entirety of it into a couple of small
boxes easily stored in a safe-deposit box, to be carried out and
presented effortlessly, like servings of gourmet courses—which is
exactly how Ralph does it.
In his demanding specialty Ralph is one of today’s top collectors,
and knowing him is a treat, whether you are a fellow collector
of thumbnails or not. And if you are, well, a little humbling is good
for all of us sometimes.
This article was first published in the Mineralogical Record, vol. 33, no. 2, March–April, 2002 and is reproduced here with the expressed permission of Wendell E. Wilson.
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Ralph Clark, Tucson Show 1998; Cal Greaber photo.
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| Click On Picture To Go Back. |
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| Last update 03.12.2007 |
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