[meteorite-list] WANTED [AD] August 2003 isue Meteorite Magazine

From: bernd.pauli at paulinet.de <bernd.pauli_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: 15 Jul 2007 16:57:14 UT
Message-ID: <DIIE.000000B100001B8A_at_paulinet.de>

Dear Listoids, Anyone can help me to get a copy of the August 2003 issue of meteorite
magazine? Or at least a printed copy of the article by Martin Horejsi entitled "A Portable
Strewnfield"? Thanks. Jan, Holland


Hello Jan, Listees, Listoids,

Awefully hot here in Germany - about 105?F so my Pauline and I will be busy watering the
garden for at least two to three hours - in other words hardly any time for meteorites
but here is a copy of the article you inquired about. Happy reading and ciao from sizzling
hot Germany!

Bernd

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Martin Horejsi (2003) From the Strewnfields - A Portable
Strewnfield (Meteorite, Aug 2003, Vol. 9, No. 3, p. 25):

"No one will ever know when the idea of collecting meteorites
was born." (H.H. Nininger, 1933 - Our Stone Pelted Planet, chapter 1, line 1)

Shortly before midnight on March 26, 2003, 13-year old Robert Garza curled up
in a ball in his bed. Unsure if he was awake or trapped in a nightmare, he froze in fright.
A thunderous chain of booms pounded him from peaceful sleep into the reality of a
particularly vicious meteorite attack. The night sky peered into Robert's room through
holes in his ceiling. The cool evening air blew freely through the shards of glass outlining
the window frame in the wall. The windowsill hammered into scrap metal. His venetian
blinds hung in tatters, and Robert's mirror, now a spider's web of shattered glass, reflected
the silence of the night, and the black and white face of the perpetrator.
The celestial events of March 26 are history, but the story of the Park Forest meteorite fall
will live on just as other falls have throughout the centuries; except in this case there is more
than just words. Artifacts of a meteorite fall rarely include more than the space rocks themselves.
Those who experience firsthand the arrival of thunderstones are quick to clean up the pieces
and get on with their lives. A few notable exceptions arise when the damage is too great to
consider repairing the offended objects such as with the Peekskill Car and the Claxton Mailbox.
Of the 25 meteorites (according to the kind database searching efforts of Bernd Pauli in Germany)
that have smashed through roofs, very few of the impact holes are preserved, let alone the damaged
materials foolish enough to obstruct the meteorite's path. Luckily Park Forest was different.
While meteorites are the obvious focus of a fall, Allan Lang (the owner of the Peekskill car) and
Adam and Greg Hup? also collected the scene of the fall, in particular Garza bedroom items and
the now-leaky roof. Their dream is to recreate the Garza family's personal strewnfield complete
with more than a dozen actual impact objects including the punctured roof shingles, broken ceiling
joists, fractured sheetrock, the smashed windowsill, shredded blinds, the shattered mirror, and
of course the Garza meteorite. Ideally, the cosmic crime scene will fit nicely into a portable museum
display allowing views from rooftop to bedroom floor. Other artifacts of the Park Forest event will
supplement the display including enlargements of newspaper articles and possibly video.
Capturing the impact materials was not easy or inexpensive. To preserve the integrity of the roof
and windowsill as well as the Garza household, additional work was required of the contractors
when repairing the damage. Extra material was cut from the roof, and the entire window frame
was gently freed from the wall vastly increasing the cost of the repairs. The mirror itself was another
challenge. The shattered glass was carefully reinforced, and the entire mirror was placed in a custom-
made shipping container for transport.
Soon after Lang and the Hup? brothers started to plan the display they realized that their collection
of meteorite fall-related artifacts was most likely the largest collection of impact materials in the world.
Their meticulous collecting of Garza Park Forest impact items even yielded the corpses of two termites
that according to wing flexibility tests, an entomologist placed their time of death within reason for the
meteorite strike. He quickly followed his post-mortem deduction with a generous but unsuccessful
offer to buy them.
Greg Hup? likens the planned exhibit to the reconstruction of a fossil like a dinosaur. The portable
display of the Garza impact site is the first of what may become a series of exhibits to join the
Peekskill car in the quest to share the power and awe of a personal meteorite encounter. According
to their plans, the completed exhibit will d?but at the Tucson Mineral Show in February 2004. Then,
if accepted for display, it will be moved to the Chicago Field Museum for its first formal stop on what
could be a multi-year world tour.
What started as a bit of misfortune for the Garza household turned into a jackpot. Beyond the sale of
the meteorites themselves, all possible impact items were sold including the shattered mirror, which by
the way, sold for the greatest amount of money of any of the Garza impact items, proving that a broken
mirror is not always bad luck.

To: jan at meteorieten.com
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Received on Sun 15 Jul 2007 12:57:14 PM PDT