This is Throwback Thursday #99.  In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general.  If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com.  Thanks!

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William Allaway was one of the founders of ESCONI.  He served as the first Chairman/President of ESCONI from 1949 – 1952.   We’ve featured him in a few Flashback Fridays and Throwback Thursdays.  My favorite has to be the Lemont trilobite field trip in 1952, which we documented in Throwback Thursday #41.  At the time of ESCONI’s founding, he worked at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, which was a large factory complex in Cicero, IL.  Not much is left today.  Demolition for a shopping center happened in 1994.

Western Electric had a magazine called WE for many years.  In the November/December 1956 edition, there’s an article about “Hawthorne’s Rockhounds”.  Bill Allaway figures prominently in the article.  He’s referred to as the “Pied Piper” of ESCONI.  The article is a fascinating view into ESCONI’s early days  It shows some of the activities – like the Thornton Dig, and of course there’s Mazon Creek fossils!  A bunch of ESCONI founding members of ESCONI worked at Western Electric.  For a time, there was even an Earth Science class offered in the event classes at the Hawthorne Works. Orval Ether, Doc Hoff, Roy Beghtol, and Harry and Nellie Witmer are mentioned in the article.

HAWTHORNE’S ROCKHOUNDS

ᎡOCKS WAS THE SUBJECT that brought four Hawthorne men, two of their neighbors and six of their sons together in Bill Allaway’s living room in Downers Grove, Ill., the night of December 12, 1949. They were still talking rocks when the host nudged them firmly into the snowy street at five o’clock in the morning.

When 30 people arrived for the second session, Bill and his W.E. colleagues-Roy Beghtol, Harry Thayer and Steve Norvell-scheduled the Congregational Church basement for the next one. But the rock hungry talkers multiplied like guinea pigs-from 60 to 120 to 200 on consecutive meeting nights-and by their fifth meeting the local high school auditorium had become the permanent home of an organization which now had a name-ESCONI, the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois.

Its members today numbering 420-their wives and their children collect, sort, trade, study, classify, cut and polish rocks. They spend their week-ends in gravel pits and primeval coal forests searching for new specimens, their week-nights poring over literature to identify their finds, their vacations roaming any area from the Black Hills to the Rockies that promises undiscovered and interesting deposits of rocks. Their basements are filled with rock collections which some times overflow into the garage while the family car sits the year around in the driveway. They proudly call themselves “rockhounds” and their children “pebble-pups.” Their enthusiasm is as epidemic as a 14th century plague.

In the seven short years since the meeting at the Allaway home, ESCONI has beanstalked to one of the largest and most active clubs in the country-certainly the most departmentalized. The members have regular functioning sections for geology, paleontology, paleobotany, mineralogy, archaeology and the lapidary arts, with a special study section on astronomy. They have four active junior groups, conduct a mineralogy class at the Hawthorne Evening School and another at the Downers Grove adult education school. They have exhibited at schools, libraries, museums and pioneer events, and their display at the annual mid western convention of earth scientists took first prize this year. A group of its members publishes the national Earth Sciences magazine (one of them is currently associate editor), and the American Geological Institute in Washington has pointed to their club as a pattern for others to follow. Greatest period of growth was under the regime of W.E.’s Carl Hoffman, the rockhounds’ third president, credited with reorganizing and stabilizing ESCONI into the dynamic club it is today.

Probably its greatest local contribution to the earth sciences, however, was what in archaeological circles is now known as the “Thornton dig.” When the Chicago Museum of Natural History heard, several years ago, that a super-highway was to pass through a forest area near Chicago where many Indian artifacts had been found, ESCONI answered a call for volunteers who would work with the museum staff to excavate before it was destroyed.

For the next ten week-ends, in hot, miserable weather and without compensation, these amateur archaeologists dug-moving 100 tons of dirt and sand as carefully as a housewife would dust a Ming vase. Using hand trowels, small picks, and often spoons, needles and paintbrushes, they peeled the earth away, six inches at a time. All objects found in each square were carefully sacked and tagged to facilitate the several years of study ahead for the museum staff. But the Hawthorne earth scientist’s first love is rocks. Many Club members’ collections boast thousands of specimens. In fact, when one W.E. man transferred from Hawthorne to Tonawanda, nine tons of rock accompanied his household effects.

Despite the satisfactions of collecting, the earth sciences appeal to something basic in man: his desire to learn more about the earth itself and the creatures that preceded him as its inhabitants (let the skeptic look into his bureau drawer for the pebble he unaccountably brought back from the beach or mountains last summer). More than that, clubs like ESCONI are making a substantial contribution to man’s knowledge, not only by the “finds” of its members, but by fostering interest among young people-some of whom, like Roy Beghtol’s son Leroy, now a geologist, may go on to make one of the earth sciences their life’s work.

A ROCKHOUND’S GLOSSARY

Geology – The science concerned with the history of the earth, and its life, especially as recorded in the rocks.

Paleontology – Science that deals with the life of past geological periods based on the study of fossils.

Fossil – Any impression or trace of an animal or plant of past geological ages, which has been preserved in the earth’s crust.

Archaeology – The scientific study of the remains of human life and activities, such as fossil relics, artifacts, monuments, etc.

Artifact -A product of human workmanship; especially simple, primitive workmanship.

Paleobotany – The paleontology of plants.

Mineralogy – Science of minerals their physical and chemical properties, classification, and the ways of distinguishing them.