About Cal Neva Mineral Company
Cal
Neva Mineral Company is a joint venture between myself,
Russell G. Rizzo and my alter-ego, Dr. Kellogg. No, I'm not schizophrenic;
just have a well developed sense of humor.
About Russ
I
was born and lived in San Diego, CA for 40 years. When I was a kid
I had a rock collection. And it was just that, rocks. These
things that have to do with nature fascinated me when I was a kid and
now that I'm an adult (some who know me might disagree with me on the
adult part) they do so even more.
I
don't know what became of that first collection. As a teen I got
interested in other things; Music, Girls and Motorcycles. In 1988
I was re-introduced to rocks by Kyle Van Blarcom (what happened to you?)
whom I had attended High School with and had recently ran into and had
become friends with again. He explained to me what minerals were
and suggested I read John Sinkankas's Prospecting for gemstones and minerals,
as well as Mineralogy. I was hooked (thank you Kyle, thank you John).
I soon began attending the local mineral shows, purchasing 5 and
10 dollar specimens.
My
first big acquisition was in 1989 when I traded a “basket case”
Yamaha 650 motorcycle to my friend Brett J. Beach
(June 7, 1961 - November 21, 2005, (R.I.P. Bro) for some 40 or so
mineral specimens he had acquired. Like most of you my taste in minerals
began to develop (thank you, Ed & Naomi Weber) and I found myself
wanting better specimens for my collection. Being a Joe blue collar
working man I did not have the means to acquire really good specimens.
Then one day I had an idea to buy a large amount of specimens (thus
getting a better price) and trade them for specimens for my collection
or sell them at a small profit and use the proceeds to enhance my collection.
So I sold some of my Home Depot stock and away I went (thank you Wali
for helping me out on our first deal). As time passed, with a lot
of trial and error, I learned what a good specimen was and equally important
what a good deal was. Two very important things if you are going
to engage in an enterprise such as this.
In
1995 While doing some trading with Rob Lavinsky he mentioned that he was
going to start selling minerals on the internet. I must explain
to you here that in 1995 I barely knew what a computer was and although
I was aware of the existence of the internet, I thought it was just some
computer nerd thing. As time passed I became more successful in
my mineral ventures and became computer literate along the way. Seeing
what was happening with minerals on the internet, in late
1999 I too decided to have a go at it. Well, life gets in the way
of your dreams sometimes. Which brings us to December 2002.
I resigned from my job and moved from San Diego to Sparks, Nevada. I had
been coming to the Reno-Sparks area for vacation since 1998 when my good
friend and digging buddy Mark Pawlikowski moved up here. The first
time I came up I knew I would move here someday. Those of you who
have been to Reno or Lake Tahoe will know what I mean. The move
gave me the time to bring life to the idea of a website of my own.
With a little help from my brother Mike
and armed with a copy of Dreamweaver for DUMMIES, I began in late April
2003 to bring Cal Neva Mineral Company to life. I hope you like
what I've done.
About Dr. Kellogg
I
don't know where the heck he came from, he just appeared one day.
Actually I do, but that's another story.
Click
on Photo for more Pictures of Dr. Kellogg
A rare photo of Dr. Kellogg hard at work
for his cruel master, Russ. At least
Russ lets him listen to the occasional Deep Purple CD while he's working.
About our name
Because
of our close proximity to the California-Nevada border a lot of things
up here are named Cal Neva this or Cal Neva that. Also, having started
out in California and having moved to Nevada it seemed like a good name
for this venture.