Springfield Thunderegg Rock Club seeks donations for 67th annual show

Presenter: You are invited to join the Springfield Thunderegg Rock Club. Members are currently planning their 67th annual rock show, to be held in October, with all proceeds going towards scholarships for local students. Here’s the club’s newsletter editor, Amanda Smith:

Amanda Smith: We joined almost two years ago. What I like about the club is how welcoming everybody is, ’cause I’m very introverted, but everybody’s so nice.

[00:00:29] We have a wide range of ages. We have little kids to seniors, and we go out on field trips, like we go out to Southern Oregon a lot to go mining, go camping.  

[00:00:43] And the one nice thing is our club membership is: the cheapest membership in the state. And that’s one thing that we have strived to stay as. For a single person it’s $15 for a membership and that’s for the whole year. And that applies with your name tag. And then a family membership is up to four people. And all of our membership information is on our website as well: SpringfieldThundereggRockClub.org; it’s just our club’s name.

[00:01:15] So funny enough, it’s my husband who’s the huge rockhound. He is looking into going into geology for schooling, but he’s just a huge nerd. It’s a running joke in the club and our family. We call him The Nickipedia, but his family, they weren’t involved in the club, but they would go to the rock club show all the time. They’d go all over the state.

[00:01:42] His family have always been rockhounds. He’s a little bit more into like the little specimens and he has these little boxes called perky boxes. And what he likes to do is he likes to find the locality where they’re exactly from, like what mine, and then he writes the chemical compound down on them.

[00:02:01] We have a display case actually in the Springfield Library and a bunch of his perky boxes are displayed in there right now.

[00:02:10] Presenter: Amanda’s superpower is finding jasper.

[00:02:13] Amanda Smith: It is a running joke with my husband and I that I can find jasper anywhere, because right after our wedding, we went up to Crater Lake, and I was like, ‘Oh, here’s a shiny rock.’ And we’re not even in the caldera area. We’re like on the basin area. And I randomly found the jasper, which we were confused because it was so far up away from the water.

[00:02:38] ‘Cause jaspers, from what I can tell, are like tumbled rocks and you can typically find them on like the beaches or in like the muddy sandy area where the water is, because I typically find them out in Fall Creek.

[00:02:55] Presenter: Club members are collecting donations for the silent auction and will be publicizing the rock show at other events. Amanda Smith:

[00:03:03] Amanda Smith: We’re going to be talking about our upcoming club show that’s going to be in October.

[00:03:08] We are starting to do a lot more community events where we’re going to be at the Springfield Block Party to advertise our club and show. It’s on Sept. 5 from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., and what we’ll be doing is just talking about our club.

[00:03:25] We were just at Geo Fest at 5 Elements the other week. We will most likely be hanging out our grab bags again. We have children’s games.

[00:03:34] A lot of times people don’t know that we have a rock club or like they have a rock that they want to be identified and people at our club can do that.

[00:03:44] Also some people ask about like lapidary and like getting our rock cut. We don’t own the rock shop, but where we have our club meetings at Willamalane Adult Activity Center, there’s a rock shop there some of our club members do volunteer at, and you can get your rock cut there.

[00:04:05] So we have a Facebook page, we have our website or if somebody comes like to our meetings or just sees us out in the community, there’s always at least one person who can identify the rock, and if not, they just talk to everybody else in the club and now everybody’s trying to figure that out.

[00:04:25] And we have monthly meetings too, every second Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Willamalane Adult Activity Center. We’re not going to have one in August because we have our club’s annual picnic, but our next meeting will be on Sept. 9.

[00:04:42] One thing that our club does in the winter, because it’s too cold to go out doing our field trips, we typically try to do workshops. So there’s flintknapping, wire wrapping. I think it was last year, someone gave a presentation on how to do tumbling, and then sometimes during our meetings we have show-and-tells.

[00:05:03] We have geologists coming in, so it’s not always the same thing during our meetings.

[00:05:09] One of our last—not this last meeting, but a couple meetings ago—we had a author, Marli Miller. She’s a geologist and she has a couple books out. She came in, gave a presentation about Death Valley, and the geography and everything based off of it.

[00:05:30] We’ve received people’s estate sales. So like sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, my mom passed away and I don’t know anything about rocks. Would you come out and help me?’ Or like, ‘Would your club want to come out onto the sale?’ And that’s some things that we’ve received from the community before.

[00:05:52] And one thing that we love doing is we, a lot of the stuff for the grab bags are just donations that we’ve received, like tumbled rocks from people who just wanted to donate for the Kids’ Corner or a specific event.

[00:06:08] Presenter: You can support the Springfield Thunderegg Rock Club with donations for the grab bags or the silent auction, by visiting them at the Springfield Block Party Sept. 5, and by attending the club rock show in late October. All proceeds benefit local students. Reach out through their website, or email SpringfieldThundereggRockClub@gmail.com.