Elvis “Buzz” Gray seemed to have a way of being in the right place at the right time. His son, Mike Gray, says it more personally… “My dad was lucky. He had good luck with everything. And I think I was lucky just to be with him.”
That may be the best way to begin telling Buzz Gray’s story — not because luck explains his career, but because it followed him into every place he worked…
The oil fields of California.
The agate bars of Montana.
The foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
The Benitoite mine in San Benito County.
Pala International and the tourmaline mines in Fallbrook, in its earliest years.
Tucson, Bangkok…
Australia, Germany…
mine sites across the U.S.,
and museums around the world.
But luck alone does not cut a stone.
Buzz Gray, who died on April 18th at the age of 92, became known in the gem trade as a miner, mineral dealer, and master gem cutter of rare, challenging, and unusually large gemstones. His work reached major museum collections, and became rare gemstone jewels. Buzz is a major part of California Benitoite history, and was a mentor for a generation of cutters.
Yet according to Mike, the beginning was far more modest.
A Life in Central California
Buzz grew up in Taft, California, near Bakersfield, in oil-field country. His father worked in the oil fields, and Buzz did too. At the age of 19, during the massive 1952 California earthquake centered in Kern County, Buzz was working at a gas cracking plant.
“He said he couldn’t even run,” Mike recalled. “Every time he got up to run, he was thrown back down to the ground.” This put his job in the oil business on shaky ground, literally. So he joined the army.
After military service, Buzz spent time in Montana, where Mike was born, and became interested in Yellowstone River agates. That interest led him towards minerals, mines, and eventually geology. Back in California, he leaned in on this new interest and earned a Master of Arts in Geology from Fresno State College.
Unfortunately, there were not many geology jobs waiting for him after graduation. The work he did find was with Laval Underground Surveys, inspecting water wells throughout California’s Central Valley. Mike noted that while the work may not have sounded glamorous, the technology was advanced for its time: stereo cameras lowered deep into wells to photograph damaged casing so repair crews could make repairs.
Exciting work? Maybe not.
But the job led Buzz to the person who would help shape the rest of his life: Bill Forrest.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Collection
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
Benitoite
On weekends, Buzz, Bill Forrest, and young Mike traveled through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada collecting minerals and searching for gold. During one of those trips, they stopped at Turlock Lapidary and Mineral Supply, where Bruce and Joe Runner showed them specimens of Benitoite.
Buzz and Bill had never seen anything like it.
Bruce gave them rough directions to the Benitoite mine, and the following weekend they went looking for it.
“It took two days for us to find it,” Mike recalled. “But we found the place.”
When they finally arrived, they discovered an old redwood cabin still standing at what appeared to be an abandoned mine site. Though the area looked untouched, the mine already carried a remarkable history. Peter Bancroft and Ed Swoboda had reportedly visited and high-graded the locality decades earlier, while John Sinkankas and Josie Scripps later reopened portions of the workings during the 1950s.
Believing the property had been abandoned, Buzz and Bill filed claim papers.
A few weekends later, an older man appeared and asked, “What the hell are you youngsters doing?”
That man was Clarence Cole.
Cole held the lease to the property. Rather than ending the story there, however, he became part of it. Buzz and Bill visited him regularly at his home in Mariposa, purchased Benitoite “plates” from him, and gradually became trusted friends.
When Cole later passed away, the owner of the mine, Dallas Reed, contacted Buzz and Bill directly. Cole had spoken highly of them, and so Reed asked whether they would be interested in continuing the lease.
They accepted.
At first, the arrangement was straightforward: Buzz and Bill would work the mine and send Reed a percentage of whatever they sold. After the first year, according to Mike, Reed was surprised by the size of the royalty payment.
“I didn’t realize it was that valuable,” Mike remembered her saying.
The lease was extended.
Image courtesy of Mike Gray
Learning to Cut
Buzz and Bill continued working the old pit and surrounding areas while still holding their regular jobs at Laval. They recovered Benitoite and Neptunite specimens from the old workings, but increasingly they also found broken crystals and gem rough.
The specimens could be sold to mineral dealers.
The rough raised a different question.
What were they going to do with it?
At first they tried sending the material overseas for cutting — first to France, where much of the earliest Benitoite had historically been faceted, and later to Idar-Oberstein and Sri Lanka.
Buzz was disappointed with the results.
“The cutting was all very commercial,” Mike recalled. “And Dad said, ‘Well, I can do better than that.’”
So Buzz bought a faceting machine and began teaching himself to cut.
That decision quietly changed the course of his life.
Self Taught
Buzz was not formally trained in the way most people would imagine. Mike believes he may have had a lesson or two, but no traditional instruction. The machine he bought was a Sapphire faceting unit — that was the brand name — and it became the beginning of Buzz Gray’s cutting career. [Years later, Mike donated that machine to Justin Prim’s Museum of Faceting Technology in Lyon, France.]
Buzz began cutting the larger Benitoites himself. Mike learned alongside him, cutting garnets and other materials.
“At that time,” Mike recalled, “one-carat round Benitoites were selling for one hundred dollars a carat.”
Meanwhile, the deeper Buzz and Bill worked the mine, the more they realized how much valuable material earlier miners had left behind.
Early miners had focused mainly on the obvious crystals protruding from white natrolite matrix. Once the best exposed material had been removed, the remaining plates were discarded down the hillside.
But those discarded tailings still contained Benitoite.
“There were still good crystals that just didn’t stick up as much,” Mike explained. “And they had thrown all of that over the side.”
As Buzz, Bill, and Mike began reworking the old dumps and surrounding alluvial material, they recovered thousands of carats of cuttable rough along with countless broken crystals and smaller fragments.
“We kept everything,” Mike said. “Everything went into tins.”
Pala International
Around 1970, another important connection pulled Buzz south.
Ed Swoboda was building Pala International in Fallbrook, California. Swoboda controlled the famous Stewart and Tourmaline Queen mines and was assembling what would become one of the most influential colored stone businesses in America.
A young Bill Larson had already joined the company to handle minerals, while Buzz became deeply involved on the gemstone side — cutting stones, evaluating rough, and training cutters.
Mike remembered arriving in Fallbrook before Pala had truly become Pala.
“My dad and I drove down to Fallbrook,” he said. “This was before the shop and everything else.”
At the family’s Fallbrook home, faceting machines ran regularly. Mike learned to cut alongside his father, eventually gravitating towards softer and more rare gem materials while Buzz concentrated on harder stones.
“If a cuprite came in,” Mike laughed, “that was mine.”
Together, father and son developed a cutting partnership that would continue for decades. Buzz became known not only for Benitoite, but for expertly cutting unusual and difficult gem materials that many cutters avoided.
“He could cut anything,” Mike said.
Still Mining Up North
Even after Buzz moved south to Fallbrook and began working with Pala, the Benitoite mine still dictated the calendar.
Every spring, Buzz and Mike would drive the six or seven hours north from Fallbrook to San Benito County, where they would meet Bill Forrest at the mine and spend two or three months working the property. They could only mine during the wet season, when enough water still flowed through the area to run the recovery equipment and process material from the old workings and tailings.
Once the creek dried up, mining stopped.
“We were up there and nowhere else,” Mike recalled. “Snow, wind, insect invasions — that’s where we were.”
In the early years they stayed in the old redwood cabin near the mine. Later, Bill began bringing trailers up each season, eventually replacing them almost yearly.
The pattern became a way of life: springtime at the Benitoite mine, followed by months back in Fallbrook where Buzz cut stones, bought rough, worked shows, and expanded his growing network throughout the gem trade.
From roughly 1968 until the sale of the mine in 2000, the Benitoite mine shaped nearly every year of Buzz Gray’s life.
Left to right: Ed Swoboda, Peter Bancroft, Buzz Gray, Dr. Eduard Gübelin.
Image courtesy of Mike Gray
A World of Gems
Pala also opened doors to a rapidly expanding gemstone world. Through Ed Swoboda, Bill Larson, and the miners and dealers who passed through Fallbrook, Buzz gained access to rough, collectors, and international gem sources at a time when very few American dealers were traveling directly to mining regions.
Mike especially remembered the influence of Bill Larson, who was already traveling internationally in search of mineral specimens and gemstones.
“You have to admire what Bill Larson did,” Mike said. “He was one of the first really going over to Africa looking for specimens, but he kept running into gemstones too.”
Some of the earliest lots of Tsavorite garnet passed through Pala during those years. Buzz helped evaluate, distribute, and cut the rough while also training cutters within the operation.
Among those influenced by Buzz was future gem expert John Ramsey, who later became associated with Pala’s cutting operations.
By the mid-1970s, Buzz no longer worked FOR Pala, but worked WITH Pala. He was no longer simply a miner who had learned to facet Benitoite. He had become part of the emerging international colored stone trade.
Pala, Shows, and the Wider Gem World
The Pala years gave Buzz and Mike access to much more than rough.
They were suddenly inside a moving classroom of the American colored stone trade — loading vans, driving across the country, working booths, visiting mines, meeting collectors, and stopping at museums whenever the route allowed.
Buzz had been part of early Pala International. He stayed local, cut stones for Pala, and went to many of the same trade shows as Pala. He remained close to Swoboda and others in that circle for the rest of his life.
Mike was still in high school, but he was already living the business.
“My dad would drive the van to every show in the nation that Pala did,” Mike recalled. “And guess who got to go to every show and work behind the booth? Me.”
Those trips were rarely straight lines from one show to the next. If Pala was headed to North Carolina for the 1975 National Federation Show, Buzz and Mike might stop at Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas, dig in North Carolina, or take another side trip while carrying minerals for Pala.
The same pattern followed them north and west.
Every year, they returned to Montana, where they dug sapphires by hand in the days before modern jigging operations became common. Mike remembers shoveling gravel into small screens and shaking them like gold pans, letting the heavier sapphires and garnets settle into the center.
From left to right: Pat Gray, Doris Chou, and Buzz Gray
at the Benitoite Mine
Image courtesy of Mike Gray
At night, they played cards outdoors under the long northern light.
“I still remember sitting out at 10 o’clock at night playing cards because it was still light,” Mike said.
They also explored the Sierra Nevada, finding smoky quartz crystals and other material, often joined by friends, collectors, or visiting miners from other countries. Bryant Harris, who would later play a role in building large faceting machines, was among those who sometimes came along.
“We wouldn’t do this just by ourselves,” Mike said. “Some people from other countries would come with us, and we’d take them out and say, ‘Let’s go try this place. We’ve never been there before.’”
There were trips to Utah’s red beryl locality, too — early enough, Mike recalled, that they were there “before the Harrises knew what a red beryl was.” Buzz and Bill Forrest even considered becoming involved, but the distance made it impractical for Forrest, whose businesses kept him closer to home.
For Buzz, though, the appeal was simple.
“He was always interested in any kind of mining,” Mike said. “Because it was fun. When you’re finding stuff, it’s fun.”
That same curiosity carried into museums.
On show trips, Buzz and Mike would make time to visit major collections. In New York, Mike met George Harlow and others at the American Museum of Natural History. In Washington, they visited the Smithsonian and met Paul Desautels.
“We’d show up and it was like, welcome,” Mike said. “In most cases, they knew us from the shows.”
Those museum visits were not casual sightseeing. They were part of the education — seeing what great stones looked like, meeting the people who cared for them, and understanding how minerals and gems moved from mines and dealers into public collections.
“My dad and I hit museums not only in this country, but all over the world,” Mike said. “Australia, Germany, London — every place.”
By the time Mike left for college in 1975, he had grown up in an unusual classroom: Pala’s vans, mining claims, trade shows, cutting rooms, museum vaults, and the Benitoite mine itself.
And through all of it, he saw the same pattern in his father.
“He was there at the right time all the time,” Mike said. “Luckily, I was able to coattail on him.”
Then, in the fall of 1975, Mike left for college.
And Buzz’s next chapter began.
Bernadine Johnston
It was at Pala where Buzz met Bernadine Johnston, who was working in the shop at the time.
It was the mid-1970s, Mike had left for college, and Buzz moved in with Bernadine. It was the ’70s.
Together, Buzz and Bernadine began traveling internationally, building relationships with miners, cutters, dealers, and collectors at a time when relatively few American gem people were regularly traveling directly to mining regions.
The Benitoite mine helped open many of those doors.
According to Mike, miners from around the world wanted to visit the famous California locality. Buzz and Bernadine would invite them to the mine — and, in return, were invited to visit mining operations in other countries.
That network steadily expanded their access to rare rough.
Some of the early Mozambique tourmaline entering the market in the late 1970s and early 1980s passed directly through Buzz and Bernadine’s hands. … “because nobody else was buying it,” recalls Mike.
By then, Buzz and Bernadine were buying rough, cutting stones, selling to dealers and collectors, and gradually building a remarkable inventory of rare gem materials from around the world.
Over time, that collection evolved into jewelry and gem-art objects centered around unusual stones rather than traditional jewelry design.
Bernadine became deeply involved in the creative direction of the pieces, designing around stones Buzz had cut. Later production work involved Hong Kong and Bangkok jewelry manufacturer John Ip.
The pieces were anything but conventional.
Benitoite, Hiddenite, North Carolina emeralds, rare garnets, and unusual collector gems became centerpieces in butterfly brooches, necklaces, and gem objects designed as much for collectors as for wearability. Some of the early butterfly pieces had fixed wings. Later examples incorporated articulated wings – they moved.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Collection
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
Mike estimates that Buzz and Bernadine eventually created at least 80 jewelry and object pieces together — though the full count may take a few years in going through papers saved over numerous decades.
Beyond Benitoite
By the late 1970s, Buzz Gray’s world had expanded well beyond the Benitoite mine.
He and Bernadine Johnston were together by then, based in Fallbrook, still traveling constantly, still doing shows, and still buying rough wherever opportunities appeared. At that point, they were not yet producing the elaborate jewelry pieces they would later become known for. The focus was still on mining, cutting, trading, and building relationships throughout the gem and mineral world.
And mining remained central to everything.
In 1979, as Mike was preparing for graduate school, Buzz became involved in another important California property: the Colorado Quartz Mine in Midpines, near Mariposa. Buzz and several partners from the mineral trade purchased the famous mine, known for producing spectacular crystallized gold specimens.
“It’s probably the premier mine for crystallized gold in the world,” Mike said.
The Colorado Quartz Mine became another extension of the same pattern that had shaped Buzz’s life since the Benitoite discovery years earlier — mines leading to people, people leading to rough, and rough leading to entirely new opportunities.
At the same time, the gem market itself was changing dramatically.
The Hunt brothers’ attempt to corner the silver market in 1979–1980 triggered a broader investment boom throughout gems, minerals, and precious metals. Prices surged. Demand exploded.
“All of a sudden, I was selling every single stone that I cut,” Mike recalled. “My dad was selling every single stone that he cut.”
The boom helped cement gem cutting as a full-time profession for both father and son.
Shows multiplied. Tucson became increasingly important. Buzz and Mike traveled constantly, buying rough, cutting stones, supplying dealers, and helping assemble collections for private clients and museums alike.
That business model — buying rough, understanding unusual gem materials, and knowing how to cut them properly — became one of Buzz Gray’s defining strengths.
Owning the Mine
For years, Buzz Gray and Bill Forrest had operated the Benitoite mine under lease from owner Dallas Reed.
But by the mid-1980s, circumstances changed.
According to Mike, Reed had lost her only daughter and had no clear successor for the property. Buzz and Bill were already deeply tied to the mine after years of work there, and Reed eventually offered to sell it to them.
“And of course they said yes,” Mike recalled.
The purchase appears to have taken place around 1987.
By then, Buzz and Bill had already spent nearly two decades pulling Benitoite from old workings, tailings, and alluvial deposits surrounding the original mine. Again and again, the locality seemed ready to give out — and then produced another surprise.
“Every time it looked like the mine was done,” Mike said, “all of a sudden the mine would give something else up.”
Still, mining conditions were changing. Environmental regulations increased. Costs rose. And eventually the economics no longer made sense.
In 2000, Buzz and Bill sold the mine to Brian Lees.
Lees continued mining for several years before eventually closing and burying the workings in 2004.
But Buzz and Bill had kept something important.
The rough.
The Rough Never Really Ran Out
When the Benitoite mine was sold, the mining stopped — but the cutting did not.
“We kept the rough,” Mike said. “We had kilos.”
Buzz Gray and Bill Forrest divided both the cuttable material and many of the finest specimens between them. Years later, after Bill Forrest passed away, Mike would appraise Forrest’s remaining Benitoite holdings — material remarkably similar to what remained in the Gray inventory.
And the cutting continued.
“I am still supplying Benitoite,” Mike said. “Probably for another five years.”
By that point, the Gray family’s cutting world had become increasingly international.
During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Thailand emerged as a major cutting center, and Mike himself spent time in Bangkok helping improve cutting quality and standards.
“At first they didn’t like losing the extra weight,” he said. “But they saw that’s what people wanted.”
Buzz, meanwhile, continued training cutters in the United States and abroad.
One cutter stood above nearly all the others in Mike’s memory: Alan Pobanz.
“You look at one of his stones and you know it’s his stone,” Mike said. “Nobody else could do that.”
Pobanz had been trained within Buzz’s cutting circle and became known for extraordinary precision and faceting quality, especially on difficult materials. Mike considered him among the finest cutters he had ever seen.
Buzz’s influence as a cutter was now extending outward through multiple generations of gem craftsmen.
of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Eric Elander
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Collection
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
The Era of Giant Stones
As the years progressed, Buzz Gray became increasingly associated with another specialty: cutting enormous gemstones.
Part of that evolution came naturally from buying rough.
“In any bag of rough,” Mike explained, “there are a few stones that pay for the whole bag.”
Rather than immediately selling every important crystal, Buzz and Bernadine often retained exceptional pieces for future projects, collections, or jewelry designs.
Some eventually became museum pieces.
Others became legends.
Among the best known was the “Brazilian Princess,” an enormous faceted topaz weighing roughly 21,000 carats, now associated with the collections of the American Museum of Natural History. Other giant stones found homes at the Smithsonian Institution and museums around the world.
Image strip courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, New York
The Brazilian Princess: 21,190 carats
Image courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, New York
By then, standard faceting equipment was no longer sufficient.
The breakthrough came through another important figure in American gemology: John Sinkankas.
Sinkankas had previously designed oversized faceting equipment for cutting giant faceted crystal objects, including the famous faceted eggs now in the Smithsonian collection. Using Sinkankas’s machine as a starting point, Buzz Gray and mineral collector Bryant Harris redesigned and enlarged the concept into a new generation of massive faceting machines.
“We ended up making about a dozen machines,” Mike said.
The machines allowed Buzz, Mike, and others to facet stones weighing tens of thousands of carats.
One giant smoky quartz cut by Mike eventually reached nearly 20,000 carats and entered the Smithsonian collection. Then came a giant yellow topaz — a stone so large it had to be weighed at the local post office because ordinary gem scales were useless.
And even that stone developed its own story.
At one point, while being transported in a metal container, the topaz was damaged after puncturing the box itself during shipment. The massive stone had to be re-dopped and re-cut multiple times.
“It grew,” Mike joked after another re-cut slightly changed the final weight.
Eventually, Mike escalated the family competition even further by cutting a 50,000-carat stone for a Thai client.
“The big stones were a big part of my dad’s life,” Mike said. “We enjoyed the challenge of doing something nobody else had done before.”
The projects became both technical achievements and family collaborations — Buzz cutting, Mike cutting, Alan Pobanz assisting, Bryant Harris building machines, and museums eventually acquiring many of the finished works.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Collection
Image by Greg Polley, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
Buzz and Bernadine Jewels
As the cutting projects expanded, so did the jewelry side of the business.
Beginning in the 1980s, Buzz and Bernadine gradually started creating important jewelry and objet d’art pieces built around rare gemstones from their own mining and collecting network.
Mike estimates the pair eventually created at least 80 major pieces.
Bernadine designed many of them.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Collection
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
The jewels often centered on rare and unusual stones — Benitoite, Hiddenite, North Carolina emeralds, rare garnets, and unusual collector materials that reflected decades of relationships with miners around the world.
“Not only did you have a rare stone as the centerpiece,” Mike explained, “but then you’d have a bunch of rare stones accenting it as well.”
Some of the butterfly jewels became especially well known, combining unusual gem species with elaborate movement and design.
And once again, mining connections shaped everything.
North Carolina emerald miner Terry Ledford traded material with Buzz. Other miners did the same. Rough moved between friends, dealers, and cutters who all knew one another through decades of travel, mining, and shows.
“It was all connected,” Mike said.
Eventually, production shifted increasingly overseas through Hong Kong and Bangkok, especially with jeweler John Ip, who helped coordinate manufacturing while Buzz continued cutting major center stones.
The result was not simply jewelry.
It was a lifetime of mining relationships translated into wearable form.
As Luck Would Have It
Again and again during Mike’s recollections, one theme kept returning.
Luck.
Not gambling luck exactly — though Mike laughed about that too — but the strange ability Buzz seemed to have for arriving at the right place, at the right time, beside the right people.
“He was there at the right time all the time,” Mike said earlier in the conversation.
The examples never seemed to stop.
Buzz and Bernadine left San Francisco for Bangkok in 1989 barely an hour before the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area.
Mining ventures somehow led to world-famous museum stones.
One California Benitoite mine somehow opened doors to gem rough from Africa, Brazil, Thailand, North Carolina, Australia, and beyond.
And through it all, Buzz kept finding stones, finding people, and finding opportunities.
“My dad was one of those lucky people,” Mike said quietly. “And I think I’ve been lucky just to be with him.”
