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Letter to the editor

Part of her shell passion lives on at Smithsonian

By ANDREW MEACHAM, Times Staff Writer
Published January 15, 2008

Bernice Albert started collecting shells in 1948 on the shores of Okinawa, Japan, while the mainland was still in ruins.
	[Special to the Times]

Bernice Albert found her life's calling on the beach. The year was 1948, and she was working on a military base in Okinawa, Japan. Alongside spent shell casings, she found thousands of seashells.

Before long, she was scuba diving for shells around the world and cataloguing her finds. Though Ms. Albert had no formal training in the study of mollusks, or malacology, she earned the respect of university professors and the museums that displayed her work, including the Smithsonian.

Ms. Albert, who lived in Safety Harbor died Thursday. She was 97. She had Alzheimer's disease and was legally blind, but she never stopped collecting shells, her family said.

A policeman's daughter, Ms. Albert grew up in Pennsylvania. She suffered from polio as a child but learned to walk again.

"She didn't talk down to anybody," said her daughter-in-law, Annie Albert, 66.

She married an engineer whose jobs took him to the Far East, Australia, Mexico, Cuba and Japan. Ms. Albert watched the tides and donned her snorkeling or scuba gear to catch live mollusks.

She paid a price for her pursuits. In Japan, a half-hidden monkfish bit off the end of her index finger. But in the 1960s in the Philippines, she found a cone-shaped gloriamaris thought to be extinct.

At her son's Safety Harbor home, the shells lined the living room, a special shell room and display cases around the house. Outside, Ms. Albert let ants take the first crack at cleaning out newly dead shells. After the ants had eaten the animal carcass, she cleaned the shells with dental tools and hydrochloric acid.

Sometimes she took a break to feed marshmallows and shrimp to an alligator named One-Eyed Jack, who lived in a lake behind the house.

Ms. Albert gave most of her 50,000 shells to the University of California Santa Barbara. The university gave some of those shells to Tulane University, the Smithsonian and the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History.

Andrew Meacham can be reached at ameacham@sptimes.com or 813 661-2431.

Biography:

Bernice Albert

Born: Dec. 23, 1910

Died: Jan. 10, 2008

Survivors: son, Ernie (Annie); several grandchildren

Services: at Maria Manor in Safety Harbor, date to be determined. Call 726-1489 for more information.

[Last modified January 15, 2008, 00:03:53]