Michael Traurig: An Opal Dealer’s Battle with COVID-19
At the AGTA show, Michael Traurig (Jayson Traurig Bros. of Australia—Phoenix, Arizona, and Sydney, Australia) told us about his hospitalization for COVID-19 in Phoenix beginning in June 2020. “I went into shutdown,” he said. “Heart, lungs, kidneys. I was on dialysis. I was on a respirator. I became diabetic.”
Doctors put him on a life-support machine that acts as the heart and lungs outside the body. He said that up until that time, few people in the world with COVID-19 had survived the procedure. He was taken off and put back on the machine several times and visited by top doctors in the Phoenix area. “The ICU nurses called me magic because they put you on the machine to die basically,” he said. After 30 days, he was sent to a rehab facility in order to free the hospital bed. “I coded one more time in rehab and they jumpstarted me,” he said. “A few days later, everything started working again.” Today he is no longer diabetic.
At a second Phoenix hospital, where Traurig underwent surgery to remove the dialysis tubes, the staff had heard his story. “The head OR nurse looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re the one.’ I was the hope shot for the nursing staff because nobody else had lived through it.”
Traurig went home in September, more than two months after he was admitted. He had lost 70 pounds. “I couldn’t stand up,” he said. “I was jelly. I had to learn to walk. So I got a dog. And she walked me every day, twice a day.”
“It’s worth sharing my story if I can get even one person to put on a mask,” he said.
Before contracting COVID-19, Traurig had a successful show in February 2020. But a month later, 85% of the sales hadn’t been paid for, and he got the stock back. “Because everybody’s business shut down,” he said. He had used most of his funds to buy stock for Tucson because his business had changed in recent years due to changes in the industry and in the company. “I ended up mostly broke,” he said.
After his hospital stay, people began calling him and finding out what had happened. “They started throwing me a few bones,” he said. “And I started getting some business. They’ve been kind.” When he made his first purchase in months, a large batch of loose opals from a supplier in Australia, they let him pay it off over time. “There’s never credit given normally when you buy opals,” he said. They sent him more shortly before this year’s show. He had several displays of opal at the booth (figure 1) but said he had not yet been able to buy enough stock to make a living. “But it’s okay,” he said. “You realize who the friends are.”
Traurig’s father, John, and uncle, Tom, began working in the opal business in 1969. Jayson Traurig Bros. was the only non–North American member when AGTA was founded in 1981, the same year Michael bought into the business (Jayson = J’s son). In 1988, one of their boulder opals—which was later sold—was featured on the cover of G&G’s Summer issue (figure 2).
Traurig and his father are both red-green colorblind. He said they had both learned to compensate and that lighting makes a difference. During GIA’s Gem Identification course in the ’70s, John was given permission to ask what color a stone was because he couldn’t identify alexandrite’s color change. “I remember him coming home and laughing,” Traurig said. “During the exam he never asked the question. He said, ‘If I had to ask, I knew it was alexandrite.’”
Traurig spoke about how the opal business and his business have changed in the last 20 years. More dealers have joined the industry, and older miners have stopped mining. He noted that there are far fewer mining concerns today. In the ’80s and ’90s, they used to have three people to work the booth. “There were people who were trying to always be next to us because of the overflow. We were the draw. We stopped being the draw. It’s okay.”
Traurig also visited Tucson last April. “It was my tour of ‘I’m alive, I’m here, and I can walk,’” he said. “People were really welcoming and wonderful.”
