"Rocks in His Head"
by Carol Otis Hurst

Student Edition
Unit 4, pp. 64–74

A biography is the story of a real person's life, written by another person. Why might the author have decided to write a biography of this person?

Mr. Hurst, my father, was a collector. He didn't collect stamps or buttons. He collected rocks—all kinds of rocks. His interest in rocks began when he was a boy. By the time he was an adult, he had rocks of many colors and sizes. He knew the name of every rock and where each came from.
He used to tell people he had rocks in his head. Of course, this made them laugh. When people say that you have rocks in your head, they usually mean that you are not very smart. Mr. Hurst meant that he liked rocks a lot and knew a lot about them.
Rocks were just Mr. Hurst's hobby. For work he ran a gas station. He filled up gas tanks and repaired cars, using spare parts he kept in the station. He kept his rock collection at the station too. Every now and then, a customer would ask Mr. Hurst about the collection.
Business was good until the Great Depression. That was a time when many people lost their jobs. They did not have money to buy gas or fix cars. Mr. Hurst had to close his gas station.
He carefully packed his rocks and moved them to his home, where he put them in his attic. He went up there to look at them every day. Like others, Mr. Hurst had trouble finding work. There were very few jobs and very many people looking for work.
Sometimes he would spend the whole day at the science museum. He really liked the rock room. He met Mrs. Johnson, the head of the museum, there. When they talked, she found out that Mr. Hurst knew more about rocks than anyone else around. She asked the museum's board to hire him.
The board said that Mr. Hurst could not be hired as a rock scientist, or mineralogist, because he had not gone to college. And so Mrs. Johnson hired him as a night janitor. His chores included sweeping, cleaning, and dusting the rocks.
Then one day, Mrs. Johnson came into the museum and saw Mr. Hurst relabeling a rock. He told her it had been labeled incorrectly. Mrs. Johnson went to the board once again. This time she got them to agree to hire Mr. Hurst as the head of rock science.
She said that he was the best person for the job because he had rocks in his head.

From Rocks in His Head by Carol Otis Hurst. Text copyright © 2001 by Carol Otis Hurst. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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