[Caitlin]

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PAUL CROSS

I left the lakes of Tennessee to fly to Sacramento. to interview Paul Cross. From the air, California looked like a desert stretching in all directions, with the only patches of green occurring where man has placed water. Everything else was a dusty brown.
Marysville is an hour's drive north of Sacramento. Cross leases 30 acres of land and water in the middle of a surface goldmining operation, so I needed to obtain clearance from a guard before going on the property. He opened the gate and gave me instructions to get to the company pearl farm. I could see neither building nor water and was totally lost after 10 minutes. After a return trip to the guardbox, I managed to find Cross. He was dressed in a white company T-shirt and jeans and standing in front of a low warehouse building with bags of mussel shells piled to one side. It was a relief to step out of the sun into the shade of his building.
Paul Cross, age 43, didn't seem to notice the 101-degree heat. He was too busy supervising his bead operation. Small, but muscular, there was something boyish about the man. Perhaps it was the energy and enthusiasm with which he moved among the workers and machines. It was a relief to reach the coolness and quiet of his air-conditioned office. Where the Tennesseeans were guarded with their information and selective as to where I could visit, with Cross there were no secrets. "Where do you want to go?" he asked. "What do you want to see? Where do you want to begin?" I found his attitude most refreshing. He'd even show me his books, but I wanted to begin with his background.
Cross' career started in Hawaii where he owned a chain of five jewelry shops. When the energy crisis hit in 1972, he sensed an opportunity and switched from drilling holes in necklaces to drilling holes in the ground for natural gas. After training with Haliburton, his new career took him to Louisiana and Texas where he supervised gangs of rough-necks. It was 1983, near Victoria, Texas, along the Guadaloupe River where he observed his men diving for mussels during their workbreaks. He asked if they were going to eat them. No, there were going to sell them to a broker who would ship them to Japan for beads for pearl culture.
The word "pearl" immediately caught the attention of the former jeweler, and he decided to study the situation further. His quest for information took him to experts on malacology at the Smithsonian Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. He explains: "I sniffed around and my interest snowballed. The more I understood about this giant secret business and how the Japanese were controlling it, the more it looked like the 'deal of the century' to me. I took every dime, hocked everything I owned and plunged in."
In 1985, Cross quit oil and setup a tank culture study with California mussels behind his house in Woodland Hills, California. The success of this project encouraged him to try his hand at pearl farming. Only after reading a National Geographic article that year did he learn that a man named John Latendresse was attempting to do the same thing. He also began experimenting with nuclei production because of its similarity to the polishing of other gemstones. He felt that control of the nuclei would provide him with added flexibility and less reliance on the traditional Japanese source of supply.