The DailyHerald has a story about Wheaton College’s Annual Rock Sale held this year on April 6th, 2019.  For retired geology professor Jeff Greenberg, it’s his “swan song” from academia.

When you think of Wheaton College, here’s what probably doesn’t come to mind: the geology department’s rock and mineral collection.

In the lower level of the Meyer Science Center — the building most associated with displaying “Perry,” the school’s enormous mastodon skeleton — geology professor Jeff Greenberg is the encyclopedic mind curating a surprising and huge assortment of geological specimens.

Greenberg talks about rocks the way musicians talk about Hendrix or Bowie. Which is to say, his heart is in this collection.

He doesn’t need to consult records when he pulls gypsum from the shelf of a storage room and tells you its country of origin (Mexico) and the alumnus who donated it (Arthur Smith). Then he describes the crystal’s transparency — it could have been plucked from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — with as much enthusiasm as a kid starting his own rock collection.

“I tell anybody, what do you know best? What’s your hobby? What are the things you do? You get all nerdy about things, and for me, this is it,” he says.

Greenberg already has spent months preparing for a sale of thousands of items from the collection on April 6 to free storage space and raise money for student scholarships and fieldwork.

For Greenberg, who officially retired last school year, it’s his “swan song” from academia and the department he helped save from the brink of extinction in the mid-1980s.

“Undergraduate geology is pretty rare at small schools, especially Christian schools, and we didn’t get much support,” he says of his early career at Wheaton. “But it’s grown and done very, very well over the past 30 years, so my heart is here.”