Nancy Twinkie sees Red:

Nancy was busy with her career s a TV Newscaster so for several weeks after the water snake episode we didn’t see each other.  There was a mine in West Cummington that produced rhodonite belonging to an old time miner named Anson Betts that had operated the mine during the 1920s for flux t the steel mill in Worcester, Massachusetts.  This steel mill belonged to US Steel where they made steel to address the New England Market.

At the time I had negotiated a lease for the mine and was in the process of pumping out the water when Nancy told me over the phone she had the following weekend free, and wondered if we could go prospecting again, so when I told her about the mine she got really curious.  The following Saturday morning I picked her up at home with the back end of my pickup truck filled with mining gear, and off we went up into the Berkshires to West Cummington. 

Before we went to the mine we stopped at the old farmhouse Anson Betts called home with his wife.  Anson was ninety-eight years old, but was as spry as a man that was forty years younger, so when he met Nancy he was on his best behavior.  Mrs. Betts brought us coffee that we drank with Anson before we repaired to the mine.

Anson as a young electro-chemist invented a way of electroliticaly refining the lead ores at Trail, British Columbia that is still used today as the Betts Process.  Several weeks later I was sitting in as a guest at a class in economic geology at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut where the professor just happened to be teaching a class about lead ore, and kept mentioning that the late Anson Betts was a graduate of Yale in 1894.  I finally raised my hand to advise the professor that Anson Betts wasn’t late, and we had coffee with him Saturday morning. 

After leaving the Betts house we went down to the lower mine next to the Plainfield Rd.  This was the mine I had leased because it had nice raspberry pink rhodonite even though it was covered with a black layer of manganese dioxide that is known as pyroluisite.  The mine itself was a small open-pit mine that was only about 50 feet deep and had been excavated into the side of a hill for about 100 feet.  Most of the rock we could see was covered with a film of pyroluisite with only a few splotches of ping showing through where some rock hounds had been at work.

While I was tending to the pump Nancy went rummaging around in the back of my truck where she found a sledge-hammer that weighed 8 pounds.  With a hammer that size you can do some serious damage, and Nancy walked up to an outcrop in the mine, and gave it a mighty whack with the hammer.  Nothing happened, but I should imagine Nancy’s teeth were probably rattling.

Some of the largest deposits of rhodonite in the world are in the Ural Mountains where it was mined as a gemstone and for making decorative items suck as the columns in a church or it was also used as a sargophus for Czar Alexander II.  The miners also used chunks of rhodonite as anvils for forging steel.  Its tough!