Alan,

I'm sorry to hear about Frieda's passing.  As you probably know, she
was a friend and long-term customer during the early years of my
business.  I only met her once at the St. Louis COA convention, but I
corresponded with her up until the mid-1990's.  Your obit revealed a
great deal that I did not know about her.  She seems to have lead an
active and rewarding conchological life, collecting and collaborating
with the creme-de-la-creme of conchology and malacology.  Yet with
all of this she was always so understated.  Frieda is probably
looking down with pride now that you've picked up the baton and
carried it to win the DuPont Trophy for your superb FW Bivalve exhibit!

Rich


At 02:11 PM 1/20/2010, you wrote:

>With extraordinary personal sadness, I report the passing of a shell
>collecting giant, Mrs. Frieda Schilling, a lifelong resident of St.
>Louis City and County Missouri.  Born March 3, 1924, she passed away
>on January 19, 2010 after several years of declining health.  She
>was preceded in death by her husband Omar in 2006.  Omar worked in
>the 1960's on the original tread plates of the behemoth Crawler
>Transporters for the NASA Apollo and later Space Shuttle programs
>which are still in use today.  Frieda and her sister Hessie (Hedwig)
>were among seven children of a family of German immigrants.  Frieda
>indicated with sister Hessie while their husbands were on fishing
>trips along the Ohio River near Paducah, Kentucky in the early
>1960's, and other rivers and streams they would pick up freshwater
>mussels and gastropods.  When the rivers were high, they would look
>for land shells.  Their collecting data were always excellent,
>describing habitat, how the shells were found, and specifically the
>location.  In those pre-GPS times, she would always annotate range
>and township locations from local maps and how to access the
>collecting site.  She often preserved live material as well as the shells.
>
>Hessie and Frieda had a scientific inclination to identify and
>classify shells when freshwater mollusks when those shells were not
>popular to collect.  They corresponded with Alan Solem (Field
>Museum, Chicago), Bill Clench (Harvard) and David Stansbery of Ohio
>State for shell identifications.  The sisters would assign their own
>common name to the shells collected until they could be identified
>scientifically, such as "Big Browns" for Actinonaias ligamentina and
>"Raspberry and Purples", for the brilliant color of the interior
>nacre for Leptodea leptodon.  Though a poor swimmer, Frieda and
>Hessie would not hesitate to cross rivers in a small rubber raft to
>collect shells. They attended many American Malacological Union (now
>Society) meetings where Bill Clench would warmly greet them as "My
>freshwater collecting friends from Missouri."  They also collected
>with David H. Stansbery, R. Tucker Abbott and Constance (Connie)
>Boone among others.  Hessie's collection was donated to the American
>Museum of Natural History in New York and Frieda's collection of
>over 200 genera was donated to the Field Museum, although she also
>provided material to the Ohio State Museum, and some wet material is
>in the Florida Museum of Natural History.
>
>Frieda inspired and was a mentor to many of us in the St. Louis
>Shell Club as she would consistently win the DuPont Awards at our
>shell shows (this was pre COA Awards) with small but well documented
>freshwater or land shell displays.  I believe she and her sister
>were among the last to collect Epioblasma florentina curtisi
>(Frierson & Utterbach, 1914) along the Black River, Missouri and the
>Spring River in northern Arkansas.  Of the Black River location she
>related the shell was never common and in swift current in an area
>that was later dredged while putting in an overhead power line
>destroying the habitat.
>
>She was honored by the Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society's 2nd
>National Symposium in Pittsburgh in 2001 with the William J. Clench
>Award "for her exemplary contributions to the science of freshwater
>malacology, emphasizing field collections, sharing information with
>others in the field and her making her collection widely available
>by depositing them in museums."
>
>We seldom see quiet individual workers who have made such a
>contribution to freshwater malacology such as her, and she will be missed.
>
>Alan Gettleman
>
>Merritt Island, Florida

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