Bob Earnest: Relationships Key to Success of GIA Alumni Association
December 31, 2014
Born and raised in Springfield, Missouri, Earnest grew up in the family jewelry business. He learned about GIA through a supplier who urged him to take the correspondence course and in 1956 went to Los Angeles to earn his Graduate Gemologist (GG) diploma.
After he graduated, he went to work for San Francisco jeweler Robert Lindemann. Several years later, a 1962 classified ad for an instructor position at GIA in Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone caught his eye. The possibility of going to back to the Institute as an instructor intrigued him, so he interviewed. He passed the hiring exams and soon received a letter from then-GIA President Richard T. Liddicoat offering him a job.
“I told my boss I was going to GIA,” recalled Earnest later, “and what did he do, but make me vice president!”
Earnest turned Liddicoat down, but called him back in early 1963 when he realized his new post wasn’t a good fit. “Come on down,” Liddicoat told him.
Earnest was put in charge of GIA’s colored stones and gem identification correspondence courses and helped teach the one-week diamond appraisal, gem identification and diamond setting classes. In 1966, Liddicoat asked him to supervise the Institute’s on-site resident studies, which had been steadily growing since the early 1960s.
As program supervisor, Earnest was a jack-of-all-trades for students and in the classroom. He welcomed students, providing their books and study materials and finding housing, especially for the growing number of international students. He also set up classrooms, arranged for instructors and guest lecturers and oversaw exams.
Earnest supervised the program for the next two decades, guiding it as class sizes increased and the curriculum became more in-depth with “more materials to study, more stones to test, more work projects, more lectures and more reading assignments were added,” he said.
Betsy Winans, a GG and video producer for GIA, fondly recalls Earnest. She was a 21-year-old student at UCLA when she started working for him in 1975.
“My first impression of him was a kindly, fatherly figure, but he was smart and a very good gemologist,” Winans said. “He was always kind, respectful, understanding, polite and fair. He was honest, honorable and worked hard, so as a boss, he expected that from us. He had a strong sense of right and wrong.”
By the start of the 1980s, GIA had produced tens of thousands of gemologists in America and abroad. Yet it had never established an alumni association, something that would offer graduates a lifelong connection with other alumni and the Institute. Earnest, with Liddicoat’s support, was the original advocate of a formal alumni network.
“The concept of an alumni association had been blossoming for years,” Earnest recalled. “In fact, for about 10 or 15 years, students had been asking for some kind of organization where they could keep in touch with each other after they graduated.”
The Gemological Institute of America Alumni Association (GIA AA) was established in the fall of 1982, with Earnest as the executive director. Its goals were to create an extensive communications network among Association members involved in gemology, keep alumni informed of new gemological developments and promote goodwill among members.
“We look forward to bringing together graduates of GIA and other gemological institutions in an organization that will serve the worldwide professional gemological community,” Liddicoat said at the time.
Fifteen hundred alumni joined in the first six months; there were more than 3,000 members, with a growing number of alumni chapters in the United States, by the end of 1983. At the end of the decade, there were 50 chapters worldwide, and some 4,000 members.
The Alumni Association also became an important foundation for ongoing gemological education. Local chapters provided opportunities to exchange ideas and information through lectures, videotapes and workshops. They created forums for local and statewide communication among jewelers and gem enthusiasts, and meetings on topics ranging from photomicrography to store security.
Earnest continued to expand the association’s membership and lead alumni tour groups (to gem localities, including South America, Caracas and Brazil – five continents in all) until his retirement in 1988.
About the Author
Amanda J. Luke is a senior communications manager at GIA. She is the editor of the GIA Insider and Alum Connect and was the editor of The Loupe magazine.