Dennie Austin and his dog, Tammy, have returned to the Big Bend from Colorado. “I’ve had her since she was 5 weeks old. She was going to be a throw away, but I said ‘No, not this one.’ She goes everywhere I go: the bank, the post office...”

by Marlys Hersey

“Stones don’t put out bad luck – they put out good luck!” So says Dennie Austin when I ask him about the notion that opals bring bad luck.

After spending part of an afternoon with this 84-year-old jeweler and lifelong rockhound, I’m pretty convinced. The guy’s definitely got something going on.

Dennie Austin has just returned to the Big Bend from Colorado, to live and work indefinitely as an artist in residence at Eve’s Garden Bed & Breakfast and Ecology Resource Center.

Whether showing me his trays of gems and jewelry, telling me about his recovery from an accident, or explaining the plans for his new apartment, Austin is very alive, very present, and very calm.        

And usually smiling.

For many years, Austin was a general contractor (whose company constructed the building which now houses the IGA Food Basket in Alpine). Towards the end of that career, Austin took up jewelry-making.

“I’ve collected rocks for all my life,” Austin says about how he became a jeweler extraordinaire. In the 1970’s, while living in southern California, Austin joined a rock and gem club; after a few weeks, he had a tray of gems and wondered what to do with them. “I went to a guy, Nick Besker, who taught silversmithing for $10 an hour. I spent two hours talking to him, salivating over his equipment. He finally said to me, ‘I don’t need to teach you anything. I’ll tell you what tools to get....’ ”

Since then, Austin has made a vast array of jewelry, from bracelets to bolo ties, earrings to toe rings.  Maybe Austin’s jewelry wasn’t always this way, maybe it’s evolved over thirty years of practice, but the pieces of jewelry he shows me are strikingly unusual, characterized by large stones – turquoise, jade, purple agate, tigers eye, labradorite, to name a few – in minimal yet elegant, solid settings. Pieces of art, for sure. “The mounting’s incidental to the stone.... You have irregular shapes to use as much of the stone as you can,” Dennie explains.

In 1992,  Austin attended a “touch-up” course in Santa Barbara, California. “Why are you here?” he was asked, since he was already well-known in some jewelers circles for “the Dennie Austin clasp,” an original design of his in which the stone itself works as the fixture which closes a bracelet around a wearer’s wrist. Austin’s completion of this 5-day course certified him as a “Master Jeweler,” an accreditation from the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) which allows him to display “GIA-certified” status often sought by customers of fine jewelry.

More than just a finish jeweler, Austin makes his own fixtures and collects many of the gems himself, using his lapidary equipment to grind and polish the stones, making them jewelry-ready.

When asked how often he goes rock collecting, Austin is effusive: “Oh, every chance I get! There are places to go here that I know about – and I can breathe here.”

Raised in western North Carolina, near Asheville, Austin has lived in several parts of Texas (El Paso, McKinney, and Alpine), southern California, and most recently in Conifer, Colorado – at 9400’ elevation.

Three years ago, Austin left his jewelry shop on Holland Avenue in Alpine to move to Colorado to be near one of his two daughters. After a serious car accident two months into his time there, and a year-and-a-half recovery process (during which he set up shop, made jewelry, and did jewelry repairs 15 minutes at a time until he regained strength and stamina), Austin still never fully acclimatized.  “I went to a pulmonary specialist there... when he told me I needed to move, I already knew it.”

While many people find the idea of moving daunting enough that they rarely, if ever, do it, this 84-year-old was relatively un-phased by the prospect. A bout with colon cancer eight years ago left Austin grateful to be alive, and ever more aware of all he wants to do.  He tells me the story of his experience with cancer – surgery, chemotherapy, and a wretched weekend of intense illness which concluded with him dragging himself to the hospital, being re-hydrated, and being proclaimed cancer-free – just two months into what was expected to be a 6-month treatment regimen.

“My oncologist couldn’t figure it out. Finally, he asked me ‘Do you work around a lot of crystals?’

‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘All the time. Since 1950.’

‘Well, Mr. Austin,’ he told me, ‘I’m not so sure these people who are into crystals [for their healing properties] don’t have something.’

Of course, a lot of it,” Austin says, leaning closer to me, smiling more widely than ever, and tapping the top of his head, “is up here. I wasn’t ready to go. I still had so much to do!”

Eight years later, Austin still has so much to do – maybe even more, now. He has jewelry to make (“I have to rebuild my stock”), an entire shop to set up, and display cabinets to design and construct.