Don Bauer Collection

Don Bauer’s Notebook Sand Collection

by Julian Gray

Don Bauer was a resident of Beaverton, Oregon, and a long-time member of the ISCS. He passed away in late 2022 and his family contacted the ISCS to ensure the collection Don had carefully amassed would be put to good use.

The collection was well cared for and was stored in a unique and orderly manner. When Don moved into a two room retirement apartment in 2017, he downsized his collection by putting the samples into small resealable bags and in turn storing the bags in plastic pages intended for baseball cards. (Bauer, Don. “How to Downsize a Collection.” The Sandpaper, Winter/Spring 2017)

The collection of almost 500 samples was contained in seven 3-ring binders. Within each notebook were typed sheets summarizing the contents by state or country, locality name, date collected (month and year), and source. The collection was organized by geographic regions: USA, Europe, Africa, Asia, Canada, South America, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands. “Rocks, stones, and shells” that Don found in samples were stored in separate bags and housed in one of the binders. The collection comprised a wonderful assortment of sand locations.

The first sample in Don’s collection was acquired in September 1975 and was personally collected in Lincoln City in his home state of Oregon. (This is the sand in the header above.) The collection grew gradually and more sand acquired by acquisitions from others rather than being personally collected. Don collected only 45 samples himself (38 from the USA and 7 from overseas) while 126 samples were contributed by ISCS members like Brian Dear, Leo Kenney, Bill Beasy, Susie Fox, and Steve Benton. The remaining 300+ samples in the collection came from friends and family members. The last entry in the catalog was in 2018. That sand was noted as coming from a shipment of heavy mineral sand from the Democratic Republic of Congo being offloaded in Coos Bay, Oregon.

Don was clearly trying to obtain a sand sample from each of the 50 United States, and he did remarkably well with that goal. His collection contained samples from 43 states. Don also did well with international localities, ultimately collecting samples from 107 countries.

Editor’s note: Don was one of the first people with whom I traded sand. His kindness and generosity set for me the tone of the sand collecting community. It was bittersweet looking through Don’s collection and seeing samples I sent him 20 years ago, now neatly annotated and cataloged. (LPK)