Fehér Béla (szerk.): Az ásványok vonzásában, Tanulmányok a 60 éves Szakáll Sándor tiszteletére (Miskolc, 2014)
Kecskeméti Tibor: A 60 éves Szakáll Sándor köszöntése
The greeting of the 60-year-old Sándor Szakáll 11 The greeting of the 60-year-old Sándor Szakáll At the end of the 1970s, after the meeting of the Hungarian Geological Society, Vilma Széky-Fux - professor of mineralogy at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen - made an announcement: she has a brilliant student, who is obsessed with minerals. He not only loves minerals, but he also understands them. He can greatly look through systematic mineralogy; moreover, he knows the topographical mineralogy better than the average. He could be an ideal mineralogist in a museum, so that is why, she recommended her student of physics and chemistry to me, as museum supervisor. I wrote down Sándor Szakáll’s name - because it was about him - and contact details, so I could recommend him to one of the rural museums in case of opportunity offer. At the same time, the Herman Ottó Museum (belonging to my professional supervision’s competence) got a bigger building in Miskolc. It would have given a chance to enrich the museum’s collection of the natural science with a mineral-petrographic one. Because of the bigger building, the museum got some technical jobs for the maintenance from the County Council. I told director József Szabadfalvi that it is time to create a mineralogist- museologist job, for which position I have a candidate with excellent references. After many unsuccessful attempts to get a status, we asked for permission to revise the technical status to a professional one from István Bujdos, the vice-president of the County Council responsible for cultural affairs. Few weeks later, we got the permission, so there was no difficulty for Sándor to become the curator of mineralogy at the Herman Ottó Museum. His daily and uncommon professional career started from there. The beginning was extraordinary. He gave his own collection to the museum, which became the basis of the mineralogical collection that contained only few stalactites from the Esztramos Hill. To get more experience, his next step was to get in touch with museums, which had mineralogical collections such as the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. Furthermore, he got to know the colleagues of other mineralogical and petrological departments of universities (among them Gábor Papp and Tamás Weiszburg are needed to be mentioned as their still strong and productive professional cooperation began there, which is not ordinary either!). Together with his former university mates, he founded the Mineral Collectors Group that changed in 1990 into what it is today, the Hungarian Friends of Minerals. With the help of the Group’s members, he started an intensive collecting all over the country. His main aim was to set up a mineral collection that contains almost every kind of minerals that can be found in Hungary, and that this collection will be placed in the Herman Ottó Museum. Fortunately, the Central Bureau of Geology had similar ambitions, so it supported the collecting. Sándor created a regional charge system; he had some representatives in every mountain range who took part in the old and new excavations and sent informations and samples to the Herman Ottó Museum. Due to this method, the collection enriched with 900-1000 samples yearly. Besides the collecting, he devoted great care to get samples from the classic mining areas of the Carpathians. He bought many - sometimes “ownerless” - collections, so that he could make up a separate systematic collection. Because of the increasing collection,
