Interviewer, Stephanie Fritz: My name is Stephanie Fritz and today I am interviewing Doctor Kevin Minch. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Kevin Minch: Sure, my name is Kevin Minch. I’m the director of the Truman Institute. I also run the Joseph Baldwin Academy in the summer and various professional developments and enrichment programs for the University. I am also a professor of communication.

SF: The first questions is: To you, what is a cabinet of curiosities?

KM: Well I suppose it is something that would catch someone’s interest. Maybe not something they would expect that would draw their attention in and keep them focused on it for awhile.

SF: Okay, so when you were sent this email by Doctor Orel, obviously you decided you wanted to participate. So what were some of the items that you decided to loan to this project?

KM: Well, most of the material that I loaned, actually all the material I loaned, is from a larger rock, mineral and fossil collection. Which when I was a kid up through college years, I was a very active collector in that area. Then of course once college and graduate school started, my time for collection dropped off so they’ve largely just been on display at my house. And people I know, Doctor Orel included, who have an interest in minerals and archeology and things like that have commented on them before and I knew I had several pieces of museum quality so I thought, you know, let’s see if I can help out here.

SF: So you chose these specific items for that purpose? Because you knew that Doctor Orel would like these and that these items were museum quality?

KM: Well, there were a couple of items that I knew were of museum quality just because of some comments people have made over the years. And those were in the fossil area. I threw in a few relatively basic minerals because there was a comment made that some variety in terms of color and texture would be good to just kind of round out the space. So the minerals are really not that unique.

SF: They’re very pretty though.

KM: Some different types of quartz crystals, and I think the more amusing mineral sample is a pyritized dinosaur dung. Actually, you can pick those up fairly commonly. They’re not that rare but they’re a good source of amusement if nothing else.

SF: Yea, the day we were putting it all together, Katie Dye was one of the people who came to you and she was just incredibly amused by this and people were asking her what she had and she told them and their jaws would just drop.

KM: Yea, I usually stick it in someone’s hand and tell them to close their fist and then I tell them what it is.

SF: So kind. You actually already answered some of my questions. They were why are these objects in your possession and apparently it’s something you’ve been doing for awhile.

KM: Yea, and particularly with the fossils, I think the interest there was partly my own but partly driven by family members who helped me understand it and get into it. There are two items in the collection that stand out in that respect. There is the fish and there is also a fern. And in the case of the fern, that was given to me by my grandfather who picked it up from a friend of his who picked it up who was just walking along a beach and kicked this stone and it split open. And that’s one when I talk about museum quality, you’ll see a lot of ferns in museums that are partially intact and what’s remarkable about this one is that it is almost fully intact and quite large. So, that’s probably the item that I’m the most impressed by and have always thought was the coolest. And I had a couple of fish and crinoid stems and such that I donated for the collection as well. And a lot of that was stuff that my father and my grandfather and others bonded over while I was collecting. So that’s part of what drove the interest.

SF: That’s very cool, nice that you have such a family support system in that has been given to you.

KM: Well, and I grew up in Michigan and that’s significant because of the lakes it is not uncommon for you to go out and find fossils very abundantly. I remember being on Lake Huron once and finding, literally a boulder that would sit in the sand and when we dusted away the sand it was just filled with fossils. Thousands of fossils in this huge black boulder. And there was no way we could have moved it; it would have taken a semi-truck to get it out of there. But as a kid growing up in that environment and seeing fossils and Petoskey stones that are fossil based all over the place. You kind of develop a more enhanced interest for it.

SF: The environment definitely would have helped with that. So now that you are in academia obviously, but in a different manner, have you gone back to collecting and making your collection larger?

KM: No, I haven’t. I have not really been the kind of person, there are certain types of people who have a collectors personality. To me, issues like space and time impact that. I do display prominently what I have and I’m proud of it but in terms of expanding the collection. You know, there’s a practical part of me that is like ‘You know, hauling around rocks is a bit of a pain.’ And for a long time, the bulk of my rock collection stayed in my parent’s house after I moved here and finally one summer when they came up to visit they brought a ‘truck load’ (hyperbole) of boxes filled with rocks which are now sitting in my basement, un-displayed, waiting for someday to be properly cleaned up and mounted but I just haven’t had the time to do it.

SF: That actually brings me to my last question. Earlier you said that some of it is displayed in your home. How exactly have you gone about displaying this? Do you have a specific case?

KM: Mostly on shelves. I do have a barrister bookcase that some of it is in. I have a lot of cracked geodes and those are very easy to display. You can put them up on little racks. The fish and the ferns are pretty easy to display as well, just kind of balance them up on shelves. So they’re not locked up or anything like that but some of them require special light. There are some items that I did not donate because they are too fragile to donate. Those are kept in small plastic cases that are on shelves just because they are delicate.

SF: Thank you very much for your time. It was very delightful.

KM: Thank you.