A lifetime of rock collecting benefits miSci

PHOTOGRAPHER: Patrick Dodson

Bertha Kotlow, 92 years old, of Slingerlands, joins four generations of family members and miSci Vice President of Collections and Exhibitions Chris Hunter to unveil her lifelong rock and mineral collection, which joins the Museum of Innovation and Sci...

When Bertha Kotlow set off for the airport at the end of a trip to New Mexico, the porter toting her luggage made a comment she’ll never forget.

“The guy from the hotel said, ‘Gee, this feels like it’s full of rocks.’ And little did he know, it was full of rocks,” she recounted with a laugh.

The 92-year-old Slingerlands resident, who likes to be called Bert, has been collecting rocks for most of her life. She recently donated her collection to miSci in Schenectady, where a selection of her treasures is now on exhibit.

Kotlow was a young girl living in Albany when she started collecting interesting rocks. She can’t remember exactly where she found the first one to spark her interest, but she remembers everything about it.

“It had a little hole in it and there was a little crystal in it and I picked it up and I saw the hole and I thought, ‘Oh gosh, there’s a crystal in there,’ ” she recalled, the excitement of that day still fresh in her voice.

Since then, Kotlow has gathered rocks on vacations, in rock shops and at trade shows. During a recent interview, she spoke with enthusiasm about sandstone acquired from near Yellowstone National Park and turquoise from Santa Fe.

Kotlow spent her adult life as a homemaker and at times worked as a bookkeeper. At one point, her children suggested she go back to school to study geology, but she decided she could learn what she needed to know on her own.

“I bought every book on rocks and minerals. There wasn’t much I didn’t know about them,” she said.

In 1994, she branched out to collect sand from all over the world. Her inventory includes some her granddaughter collected from a volcano in Costa Rica and some that friends brought to her from Newfoundland.

Kotlow proudly displayed her collection in her home, but when she downsized, it was tough to find space for 2,500 rocks and minerals, and 600 vials of sand. Her son suggested donating the collection to miSci. Kotlow agreed, but said it wasn’t an easy thing to do, because each piece of her collection has a memory associated with it.

“Some are such that I hated giving everything away without being able to tell them,” she said.

She did keep a couple of her favorites, including a hard-to-find piece of variscite and some carvings made from minerals.

Kotlow visited miSci Friday to view the pieces from her collection that are now on display.

“They treated me like a movie star,” she said.

Of note in her collection are some local specimens, including calcite crystals from Glenville and Bethlehem, a calcite and quartz combination from Latham and calcite created by a geyser in Saratoga Spa State Park.

“It’s the very local aspect that is intriguing because usually the geology of this area is really kind of dominated by all the Devonian Era fossils in the Helderbergs,” said Chris Hunter, vice president of collections and exhibitions at miSci.

Hunter said Kotlow’s donation has helped to fill some gaps in the museum’s collection, and has added specimens from all over the world, including azurite from Morocco, malachite from Zaire, amazonite from Brazil and stilbite from India.