December 12, 2013
ESCONI old-timers may remember Allan Mitchell of Iowa City, Iowa, who died on November 22, 2013 at the age of 101. He sold and/or donated large amounts of interesting micro material to the micromount group on several occasions in the 1980s and was a familiar name to that group at that time. After retiring from a long career as a chemical engineer with Shell, first in California and then New York, Allan retired to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where he operated Microminerals International. He subsequently moved to be near family in Iowa City. In 1994 he felt he had done all he could with minerals and decided to sell his large (10,000 specimens) and sophisticated micromount collection while he could enjoy putting it into the hands of other collectors. Word got out that his collection was for sale, which led to rumors then that he had died. His wife, Wilma, died in 2009, after which Allan moved first to Williamsburg, Virginia, and then to Auburn, Maine, where he lived at the time of his death. Allan’s obituary from the Iowa City Press-Citizen can be accessed at www.press-citizen.com/viewart/20131202/NEWS02/312020006/Henry-Mitchell-101. For more on his involvement with mineral collecting, see his entry in the Mineralogical Record’s Biographical Archive, www.mineralogicalrecord.com.
I met Allan while still in college in Iowa City and became well acquainted with him after returning the Iowa City area in the late 1980s. He encouraged me greatly as I was getting into micromounting, and it was he who put me in touch with ESCONI while I lived in Illinois from
1985 to 1988. I was a member of ESCONI until the 90s, active mostly in the micromount study group and exhibiting at the Chicagoland Show. (I lived near Rockford, too far to make it to more than one meeting a month.) Other ESCONI micromounters I recall from that time include John and Dorothy Ade; Andrew and Jo Hay; Don and Dorothy Auler; Dan and Esther Behnke; Joe and Marge Santangelo; Jim Daley; and John Jaszczak.
I was not in contact with Allan much after he moved on to other pursuits, so it was interesting to note in his obituary (sent to us by a friend in Iowa City) that he died in Maine, barely 45 miles away, having moved to Auburn not long after my wife and I had moved to the Portland area.
Ed Clopton
Westbrook, Maine