You can't help but wonder how Dan Cooper keeps from walking into trees and stuff, what with the way he's always scouring the ground ahead of him.

        Turns out he's looking for trilobites, a relative of crabs, spiders and assorted insects. And even though they've been extinct for 250 million years, Cooper has found enough fossils to make him one of the stars of this weekend's 38th annual Gem, Mineral, Fossil and Jewelry Show (Saturday and Sunday, Albert B. Sabin Cincinnati Convention Center). He'll have four displays there.

        “I have a two-car garage full of nothing but fossils collected since 1974,” he says. And that's not counting the ones he has given to Cincinnati's Natural History Museum and the nation's Smithsonian Institution.

        Not bad for a guy who didn't start collecting until he was 22. “I didn't know what a trilobite was before that, but I got really interested really fast.”

        We'll say. Since that day in '74, he has bought a farm in Mount Orab for its trilobites and leased a spread in Oklahoma, also for trilobite treasures.

        What most people don't know, and what Cooper would like to tell them, is that Cincinnati is famous for its trilobite lodes. They don't jump up and bite you in the ankles or anything, but they're easy to find.

        Cooper is an amateur collector — never mind that his hobby costs him $25,000 a year — and one of the most famous members of the Dry Dredgers, a local fossil club.

        The other star of the show is Sue, a 6-foot long skull of a T-Rex dinosaur, coming in from Chicago.

        Until then, Cooper will just keep collecting.

        Party season: Well sure, Elliott Ruther knows about hard work. As an aide to Cincinnati Councilman John Cranley, he sometimes goes 12 hours a day. But this time, well, he bit off a whopper.

        Seems he's engineering a waaay ambitious benefit that has about 10 different functions: “It's to draw attention to the mental health levy (Issue 5) coming up, but I want it to do a lot more — to bring people downtown, to showcase local bands, to be remembered as a really great party, to draw attention to mental health and remove the stigma of mental illness.”

        Ruther knows a bit about the stigma. Diagnosed as bipolar a few years ago, the 28-year-old Anderson Township resident still battles the ups and downs, but mostly remains on an even keel. So much so that he finds time to compose and play music often enough that he has cut a CD he's polishing up for release.

        “The more time I spent writing the music, the more I felt I wanted to go public to benefit others. I've been blessed with support other people don't get. I'm thinking maybe if we can attack the stigma, and I feel my music does, then I can be a tremendous help to people.”

        He'll play some of his music, backed by friends, at the benefit. As for the other bands, “Ryan Adcock has signed on and so has Crazy Chester and the Stapletons. I'm still talking to others. But they're all local, because I want to showcase the local talent. We have so much of it.”

        It's 7 p.m. May 1 at Jefferson Hall in Over-the-Rhine.

        E-mail jknippenberg@enquirer.com
       

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