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To: long-gone who wrote (50272)	3/11/2000 11:07:00 AM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116790

All That Glitters : From one Gold Rush to another BY MIKE CASSIDY Silicon Valley Dispatches Posted at 6:46 p.m. PST Friday, March 10, 2000 YOU'VE HEARD how Silicon Valley is the modern California Gold Rush. Digital '49ers pouring in from around the world hoping to strike it rich. For some, the analogy is growing tired. Not for Cecilia F bos-Becker. She understands the comparisons better than most. The San Jose woman is sitting on a gold mine. OK, it's not hers. But she loves it like it is. ``It's drop dead gorgeous,' she says of the Sixteen to One Mine in Sierra County. ``Forty-six hundred feet up on a ridge. You can see practically forever. The sky is so blue.' It's the oldest working gold mine in California. Yes, gold mine, as in tunnel 3,000 feet into the earth and haul up dirt, rock and, with luck, some gold. Workers at the Sixteen to One have been doing it for roughly 114 years. After 13 years in Silicon Valley, F bos-Becker is ready to join them, sort of. She and her husband, Tony Becker, moved here in 1987. He joined one start-up and then another. F bos-Becker, 50, did some tutoring, some word processing, some public relations and eventually started pairing investors here with entrepreneurs in the then-Soviet Union. That business fizzled when the Soviet Union fizzled. The couple has done all right, building a 27 percent stake in the Engineering Consortium, a Santa Clara company that specializes in computer chips for hearing aids. But they've watched the valley change for the worse. The expressway near their townhouse has gotten wider and at the same time more crowded. The air seems dirtier, the world noisier. ``Within a few years, if not sooner,' F bos-Becker says, ``we will be out of this valley.' But where to go? The question was on their minds when they met Michael M. Miller at a gem show last year. Miller is president of Sixteen to One, in Alleghany near the Nevada border. F bos-Becker had always loved rocks. Now she had a dream--a dream of living and working near a mine with a Gold Rush pedigree. ``The romance and the history of it,' she explains. ``You had young, mostly single males, coming here to follow a dream and get rich.' Same as Silicon Valley today, she says, without the traffic. F bos-Becker told Miller she could find backers to build a jewelry production plant near the mine. The real profit in gold is in jewelry. If the mine had its own plant, that would increase control and cut out the middle people. Miller was intrigued, if not ready to agree to the exact structure of the business deal. ``I think she's honest,' says Miller, who oversees the publicly held company. ``I think she has a certain amount of passion.' The idea is not much past the dream stage. But F bos-Becker has a business plan for a $1.5 million plant to produce jewelry from Sixteen to One gold. She says she's talked informally with valley investors. Miller, who has seen many head for his hills with dreams of riches, has no formal agreement with F bos-Becker. But, he says, she'll be rewarded if she succeeds with investors. F bos-Becker says success could lead to a partnership between her production company and Miller's mining company. It would certainly lead to a new life--a life up on that ridge chasing the original golden opportunity. Contact Mike Cassidy at sjmercury.com or call (408) 920-5536. For previous columns by Mike Cassidy for SV and the Mercury News go to www.sjmercury.com/svtech/columns/dispatches/.