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by Lloyd Lim, 31 Dec 1995
The ANA Anniversary Convention was from August 16-20 at the Anaheim Convention Center (just across the street from Disneyland). As always, there were several events that took place just before the ANA convention. We originally planned to arrive on Saturday, August 12th to catch a few of these events. However, our plans changed as soon as the auction catalogs started arriving.
The Bowers and Merena auction catalog arrived first. My want list is very specific and I didn't find anything I was interested in. OK, cross out that auction on Monday. The Superior catalog arrived next. I found one lot I might want, but I couldn't examine it because lot viewing would end before we got there. Oh well, forget about that auction on Sunday. The massive Heritage catalog arrived last. I found two lots worth looking at, but they wouldn't be auctioned until Thursday. Disneyland didn't interest us either because I'd been there twice and Evalynne three times in the past three years. Our final plans: arrive on Monday.
I'm starting to notice a disturbing correlation between numismatic events and trouble with my car. In 1994, we encountered a large rock on the way to ANA Summer Conference. The rock won and caused a couple thousand dollars of damage. This year it was a flat tire. I spent most of the morning and afternoon getting the tire fixed before we embarked on a 400-mile drive to Los Angeles. We arrived late that night and checked in.
PNG Day is the day before the convention officially opens. This day is reserved for Professional Numismatists Guild dealers and their invited guests. In other words, the rich folk. Being mere mortals, we were not blessed with invitations.
We used this day to get our convention badges and view those two auction lots. Since I was not impressed with either lot, we didn't need to attend any of the Heritage auction sessions during the convention. We spent the rest of the day shopping at IKEA in Burbank (one of Evalynne's favorite home furnishing stores), eating dinner at the Reel Inn in Malibu (one of Evalynne's favorite restaurants), and strolling along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica (one of Evalynne's favorite shopping areas). Guess whose day this was?
I also realized on this day that I had underestimated the ANA's bargaining abilities. The ANA's cheapest convention lodging was at the Magic Lamp and Magic Carpet motels for $35. I thought I could do better, but I procrastinated. The best that I found was the Motel 6 for $39. Not too bad, or so I thought. While you could easily walk from the Magic Lamp/Carpet to the convention center, we drove from the Motel 6 and had to pay $6 each day for parking. Next time we'll just stick with the ANA's choices.
The first day! Our first stop was the Classical Numismatic Group table where they were giving out free ancients to the first 500 people who weren't on their mailing list. I'm already on their list, but Evalynne is not. She received a Roman bronze of Theodosious I (379-395 AD). I expected a crowd around the CNG table, but to my surprise we only saw one other person taking advantage of the giveaway.
The entire bourse floor didn't seem very crowded, compared to local coin shows in our area. The nice, roomy aisles were probably part of the reason, and the fact that it was a weekday probably accounted for the rest. Although I wanted to see the exhibits and pop in on a few of the meetings and presentations, I also had a good-sized shopping list. We decided to shop first, during the quieter weekdays, and postpone the other activities.
My first purchase was a MS-65 1932 Washington quarter with toning near the rims. Evalynne wasn't fond of the blackish toning near the rims, but I didn't mind. It was struck nicely and was remarkably free of contact marks. A couple hours and a few more aisles later, I was turning some pages to look at 1892 Barber halves. Suddenly a flashy coin jumped out at me. Yes, it was just what I wanted--an nice AU-58. The coin was blazing and had some light, attractive toning near the rims. I couldn't find any weakness in the strike. If it wasn't for the slight rub on the cheek, it would easily be MS-64. I put it aside, finished looking through the books, asked for a better price (which yielded $25 off), and bought the coin. This turned out to be my best purchase at the show.
My last purchase of the day was a BU 1921 Peace dollar, that I would grade as MS-63. The obverse was covered with heavy toning in brownish, orangish, and bluish shades, but you can see luster through the toning. The reverse was brilliant in the center. The strike was good. Evalynne, my backup set of eyes, did not like the toning. I should have let her make the decision. Later, I found a dig on the chin that I had missed. I also realized that it didn't match well with the other coins in my type set. It's now sitting in my set, but I'll probably replace it eventually.
At the end of the day we had only made it halfway through the bourse. We retreated back to our room, where Evalynne took a nap. We were too tired to go out so we settled for pizza delivered to our room.
On Thursday morning, we met the bus for the tour of the Federal Reserve bank and the Wells Fargo History Museum. To my surprise, the tour was not sold out. On the bus ride to downtown Los Angeles, I chatted with the collector next to me and remarked that it was nice to sit in a bus instead of having to drive through L.A. traffic. He said that it was an especially nice change for him because he was a San Diego bus driver!
The Federal Reserve limits tours to 30 people so the ANA group was split in half. Our half visited the Fed in the morning and the Wells Fargo Museum in the afternoon, while the other half did the opposite. When we arrived at the Fed, we had to wait a few minutes for our tour guides. During this time, I managed to get into trouble. I pulled out Evalynne's point-and-shoot camera to take a picture of the huge lobby with its curved walls and large sculptures. I was backing up trying to fit everything in the frame when the guard noticed me. He stopped me and reported to someone on the intercom. When they determined that I had not taken pictures of the tellers' windows or the surveillance cameras (in fact, I didn't even have enough time to snap a picture of the lobby), they warned me and let me go.
We watched a short film and the group was divided again. Our half toured the check-processing area first. In this area, the Fed receives checks from the banks where they were deposited and routes them to the banks where the check writers have their accounts. Banks bring in itemized bundles of checks via armored car. The personnel do a bit of manual preprocessing for each batch of 250 checks. The batches are fed into a high-speed, pneumatic sorting machine, which magnetizes the magnetic-ink characters along the bottom of each check, reads them, and then places them into bins according to the bank (e.g.--one bin for Bank of America, one for Wells Fargo, etc.). The machine only has thirtysomething bins so it takes several passes to sort all of the checks. If the high-speed machine cannot read a check, it is placed in a reject bin. The rejects are fed into an identically-configured, low-speed sorting machine, which can read most of the rejects. If a check is still unreadable, it stops in front of a human operator who deciphers it. The machine then attaches a new magnetic strip along the bottom of the check. (You may have noticed this strip on some of your canceled checks.) When all the checks are sorted, each bank's checks are packaged for pickup by armored car. It was rather quiet during the tour because most checks are delivered at the end of the day and are processed at night.
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Sorting checks; by Federal Reserve
After the checks, we proceeded to what we wanted to see most--the cash! The cash-services area is hunkered down in the basement. There is only one entrance/exit connecting to the rest of the building. To enter this area, employees need to walk through a "mantrap", which is a chamber with doors on both ends. Both ends cannot be open at the same time. When someone enters the mantrap through the first set of doors with a card key, the guards must clear them before they can leave the mantrap through the second set of doors. Although the tour guide would not confirm our suspicions, the guards obviously have several options (locking doors, releasing gas) at their disposal. Our tour group also had to walk through a metal detector and a guard accompanied the group on this portion of the tour.
Banks get needed coin and currency from the Fed and give excess coin and currency back to the Fed. The Fed also receives new coins and currency from the U.S. Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to introduce into circulation. Banks transport the coins and currency to and from the Fed by armored car. The armored cars enter the Fed basement through their own "truck trap". We walked by several isolation rooms where armored cars were loading/unloading their cargos. The Fed carefully controls access to these rooms so that Fed personnel never come into direct contact with the armored car personnel.
The counting rooms are where the fun is. Employees must always work in pairs and must always stay in sight of each other. Both workers are also required to verify each count. I noticed that at least three of the walls of every counting room had continuous waist-to-ceiling-high windows. Bags of coins are carried on simple pallets, but paper money is moved/stored in wheeled transparent enclosures measuring approximately 3x3x5 feet. The tour guide said that one of these containers holding $20 bills is worth about $8.5 million. A pair of workers wheeled one right by us in the hallway! And we saw a vault with dozens of containers in it!
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Unloading paper money; by Federal Reserve
In the counting rooms for coins, workers simply heave bags of coins onto a scale. If the weight of a bag is within a specified tolerance, the bag is accepted. Someone in our group asked an interesting question: how do they handle mixtures of brass and zinc cents? The tour guide did not know, but he was sure that neither the banks nor the Fed sorted coins based on their composition. If this is true, the tolerances for bags of circulated cents must be extremely large!
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Weighing coins; by Federal Reserve
In the counting rooms for paper money, workers feed wads of bills into a high-speed counting machine. The machine somehow scans the money for wear and counterfeits. Old bills are shot through a pipe running into the ceiling where they are immediately shredded. (The Los Angeles Fed shreds $42 million every day.) When we viewed one of these rooms, a worker showed us a counterfeit $100 bill that he had discovered. He pressed the counterfeit, and a genuine bill for comparison, up against the window. Although the color of the ink and paper were accurate, the microprinting around the portrait was noticeably broken up.
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Counting paper money; by Federal Reserve
The tour group stopped for lunch at the Wells Fargo Center. Evalynne and I inquired about a table at the California Pizza Kitchen but the wait was too long. In fact, the restaurant gives pagers to people and pages them when their table is ready. Only in L.A.! We went to the speedier McDonald's and noticed another L.A. curiosity. Travelers have probably noticed that McDonald's adapts itself to its surroundings. For example, I've seen McDonald's in Hawaii serving saimen (a noodle dish) and we all know that McDonald's in France serve Le Big Macs. This southern California McDonald's offered espressos, cappuccinos, and caffe lattes.
After lunch, we visited the Wells Fargo History Museum, in the same complex. The museum is not very big, but it does a good job depicting the development of the Western U.S. The lobby has a magnificent Wells Fargo stagecoach. I was impressed with the leather suspension system, which transformed bumps and jolts into a forward-and-backward rocking motion. The museum has a dummy stagecoach that you can sit in and rock to experience this effect.
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Evalynne and me rocking the stagecoach
The museum does not have many coins, but it has plenty of other memorabilia from the 1800s. For some reason that escapes me, Evalynne was fascinated by the antique guns. And if you're wondering whether you can still find gold in 49er country . . . the museum has a two-pound gold nugget that was found by a boy only a few years ago.
When the tour group returned to the convention center, we went back to the show again. I managed to spend more money on an AU-55 1892 Barber dime that had iridescent, relatively even toning. Unfortunately, I didn't notice a scratch just above Liberty's head. We all miss things once in a while and Evalynne didn't catch it either, but I should know better. If Scott Travers was around, he'd make me reread the first chapter of his book over and over again!
Although we weren't looking at the exhibits yet, we stopped by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's booth for a break. There we watched a demonstration of intaglio printing on the "spider" press. I was surprised to see that the plate holds just a tiny amount of ink. We also talked a bit with one of the engravers. Again, I was surprised when she said she only engraved numbers. I would get tired of engraving numbers every day, but I guess most people would get tired of sitting in front of a computer every day.
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BEP spider press demonstration
We also learned about the BEP's drawings. Twice a day, the BEP held a drawing for one of the intaglio prints from the spider press. The catch was that you had to be at the booth to claim the print if your name was called. If you weren't there, the BEP would keep drawing names until they found someone who was present. The second catch was that the "prize" wasn't free--you only won the right to buy an intaglio print for $50. However, the limited-edition prints are valued at about $100 and winners often resell their intaglio prints immediately to one of the collectors that come and offer money.
By the end of the day, we had covered about two-thirds of the bourse floor. We went to CityWalk (near Universal Studios) and had dinner at Wolfgang Puck's cafe.
We met Evalynne's brother, Ben, for lunch in Chinatown (in downtown L.A.). Unfortunately, traffic was heavy on the way back and we missed the meeting for Internet users.
We picked up where we left off on the bourse floor. The attendance seemed to have increased slightly. I bought an AU-50 1829 half dime with triple stripes (Valentine-2). When we stopped walking the bourse floor a little before 6 p.m., we only had a couple aisles left to go.
At 6 p.m., we attended the championship round of the World Series of Numismatics. This is a Jeopardy-like game with numismatic categories. The final round pitted the six two-person teams that had made it through the preliminary rounds. When the teams were introduced, I recognized the name of someone on the net--Wayne Homren!
The questions started flying and the contestants were unfazed. At times, it was even amusing. When Anthony Swiatek's team got control, he methodically worked his way through the U.S. commemoratives category and answered five out of the six questions. (He was wary of one badly-worded question and wisely chose not to try answering it. On the other hand, several other teams weren't so careful and lost points attempting to answer this question.) Rick Snow also jumped on questions about Flying Eagle and Indian Head cents. (For those who aren't familiar with these names, Swiatek and Snow literally wrote the books on each of these subjects.)
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World Series of Numismatics championship
Wayne's team did quite well. At the end of the first set of questions, three teams had pulled ahead: David Alexander & Anthony Swiatek, John Burns & John Kraljevich Jr., and John Kleeberg & Wayne Homren. The point values doubled and the difficulty increased with the second set of questions. The game then became a close race between Burns & Kraljevich and the eventual winners Alexander & Swiatek.
Here are some sample questions (easy, medium, and hard):
Much to our delight, we noticed a friend, Chuck White, sitting a few seats away from us. Chuck is a member of the Delta Coin Club in our hometown of Stockton, CA. (Actually, Chuck regularly attends about a dozen coin club meetings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley.) We knew Chuck would be at the convention but we hadn't seen him until now. Chuck is also a regular exhibitor. He won two second-place awards for his "Indians on Obsolete Bank Notes" and "Odd & Curious Money of Siam" exhibits. James Taylor, the ANA's Education Director, also stopped by to chat with us a bit. (We met him at last year's ANA Summer Conference.)
We stayed in the same room for the 7 p.m. premiere showing of the new ANA video, "Money: History in Your Hands", starring James Earl Jones. The video is meant to explain the allure of numismatics to non-collectors. It discusses almost every area of numismatics, moves quickly, and (most important of all) doesn't get boring. I only had two very minor nitpicks: the titling was not broadcast quality, and James Earl Jones had to awkwardly turn his head left and right during the ending monologue.
After the showing, David Lisot discussed what it was like to work with the world's most recognizable voice. The biggest surprise was that Jones stutters! Jones improves with each succeeding take and Lisot thinks this is why Jones' pronunciation is so precise. Another surprise was that Jones actually has a small coin collection.
Anyway, the ANA suggests that collectors can promote numismatics by buying a copy (or copies) and passing them along to friends, family, schools, and libraries.
Evalynne's brother had expressed some interest in the convention the previous day, so Evalynne invited him to join us. Like many former coin collectors, Ben used to collect coins as a kid but stopped as he got older. I thought it would be especially interesting to see if the ANA convention would get him interested again.
Since this was probably the busiest day, and I was almost done covering the bourse floor, and Ben was along, we started with the exhibits. The most "interactive" and most fun exhibit was the exhibit of Yap stones. Three or four Yap stones weighing about 20-30 pounds each were out in the open so you could touch, feel, and pick them up. (It'd be hard to sneak out with one of these.) The most talked about exhibit at the show was the one with a 1943 copper cent and a 1944 steel cent. Wow!
Other interesting exhibits included a fascinating, but slightly morbid, exhibit about assassination attempts on U.S. Presidents, and an impressive display of dozens of Siamese gaming tokens. Evalynne liked the exhibits. In fact, she read the captions more thoroughly than I did. Unfortunately, Ben was a bit bored by the exhibits.
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U.S. Treasurer Mary Ellen Withrow signing autographs
Next, we went over to the BEP booth to wait for the drawing. Here Ben was seduced by the BEP's "Billion Dollar Exhibit". Nothing will hold a person's interest like obscene amounts of money. When they announced the winner of the drawing, I recognized the name of another person on the net--Simcha Kuritzky!
Immediately after the BEP drawing, the incorrigible J.S.G. Boggs held his own drawing at his booth next door. The winner of this drawing won the right to buy a limited-edition printing of a Boggs note for $100. After both the BEP and Boggs drawings, Ben commented on the absurdity of making someone pay for a "prize", even if the winner does end up profiting from the transaction. I couldn't agree more. If you're going to give something away, then give it away!
Also at the BEP drawing, we had noticed Terry Woodward and Kevin Maloy, two other members of our hometown coin club. Kevin has one of the best, if not the best, collections of U.S. Military Payment Certificates around. Chuck, the ever-present exhibitor, encouraged him to exhibit a couple years ago and Kevin started winning awards at local coin shows. In Anaheim, Kevin won the Thomas H. Law Award (for first-time exhibitors) and the Sidney W. Smith Memorial Award (for Class 2, U.S. Paper Money) for his exhibit "United States Military Payment Certificates". These days Chuck is always joking about creating a monster.
We had lunch and then I decided to try the "Collector Trading Room" listed in the program. We soon discovered that the trading room was the same as the "Collector Open House" room. The only people there were people relaxing and having refreshments (coffee, tea, soda, and cookies). The high ceilings and dim lights were also not conducive to examining coins, if there had been anyone there interested in trading.
We relaxed for a bit and then hit the floor again. My plan was to take a fast, systematic tour of bourse floor so that Ben could see everything and so that I could catch any tables I missed on the first pass. This strategy didn't work very well. Despite our best efforts, Ben was bored for the most part. The casino chips were the only thing that caught his eye. He noticed a Barbary Coast chip with his initials (BC) and purchased it. Soon after, Evalynne found an unusual chip with an E on one side and a C on the other. I looked but couldn't find any chips with my name or initials. Casino chips are colorful, interesting, and fun. I think this segment of numismatics has tremendous potential.
At one point, I sat down at a table to look through a dealer's books. Ben was bored and slumped down in the chair next to me. Of course, occupying space, especially a chair, in front of a dealer's table when you aren't interested in anything is a no-no. I whispered to Evalynne, but she had already devised a solution. She grabbed her brother and took him to the snackbar to get some ice cream. Brilliant!
Ben wasn't the only one to commit a numismatic faux paus. Earlier in the week I had leaned in between two dealers to get a look at a case. They were sitting in front of the case, talking to the dealer behind it. The dealer on the right gave me a funny look. The dealer behind the table chuckled and said something like "Don't worry. He's not going to rob you." I looked and realized that the uncomfortable dealer had been counting out a large sum of money in his lap. I backed out of there very quickly.
Towards the end of our trip around the floor, I found one of the few lower-end dealers. I bought two BU rolls of 1962 Lincoln cents priced at 65 cents each. This was basically at cost, considering that they came in hard plastic tubes. When I looked through them at home for a nice specimen for my type set, I found an unstruck planchet! (Type I, if you're curious.) This purchase turned out quite well.
Well, Ben was bored but he had come up with the idea of going on a road trip to Las Vegas. It's been a while since I've gone a college-style, all-night road trip and Evalynne has never been on one, so what the heck?! We stuck around for another BEP drawing and then took off. I drove out to Vegas. After an all-you-can-eat-buffet (standard Vegas fare) for dinner, we wound up at the MGM Grand, where (much to our surprise) the Tyson-McNeeley fight had just occurred. I guess "fight" isn't really the right word.
What does this have to do with numismatics? Trust me, there's a connection. While Ben spent the night playing blackjack, I pursued my favorite activity. I obtained $40 of nickels and proceeded to search through them for older dates. As usual, after I looked through a handful of nickels, Evalynne merrily proceeded to pass them through a nickel slot machine. Then we would exchange the nickels for bills at the cashier's window, exchange the bills for more nickels at a change booth, and repeat the process. I went through $120 of nickels (2400 coins) and filled three holes in my Whitman folder. (Yes, I still keep a Whitman folder collection with coins obtained from circulation and trading.) I also saved a war nickel and several older nickels for trading. One of these days I'll find that elusive 1950-D.
Casinos are not known for bright lighting so I could only look at so many nickels. I joined Ben for a few hands of blackjack and won about $160 in the last few minutes by recklessly letting my winnings ride. Evalynne and Ben took turns driving back to Anaheim. We arrived around 9 a.m. and crashed for a few hours. OK, so it wasn't Animal House, but it was a productive trip for me.
The last day of the convention was a ghost town. Probably a third of the dealers had packed up and left. While dealers may have their reasons for leaving early, this behavior will not convince anyone to collect coins. Numismatics' highest awards await anyone who can solve this problem without antagonizing dealers or collectors.
Fortunately, we were done with the convention. We only stopped in to ask Chuck about coin clubs near Oakland, CA and to chat with James Taylor (he was busy as usual and we couldn't find him). Walking by the booths for third-party grading services, I noticed that both PCGS and NGC were saying that they would now accept direct submissions from ANA members. It wasn't until after the show that I found out what that was all about.
On the way out, one of the staffers at the ANA booth offered us some World Mints Passport leftovers. We accepted a Mexican 20-peso coin and a Gibraltar penny. She also offered us free copies of The Compleat Collector and Coins and Collectors, both by Q. David Bowers, but we had already received free copies earlier when we filled out something. The convention wasn't like winning the lottery, but we did pick up several freebies over the week. The Federal Reserve Bank gave us packets of shredded U.S. paper money. On the bourse floor, we received colorful casino-like chips from Whitman Coin Products, a postcard titled Framed from J.S.G. Boggs, a 1991 commemorative medal from Israel Government Coins and Medals, a medal commemorating the 3000th anniversary of the City of Jerusalem from the American Israel Numismatic Association, and some ANAheim elongated cents from The Elongated Collectors. Of course, there was also that free Roman bronze from CNG that I mentioned earlier.
One of the biggest surprises to me was that the California sales tax controversy was not an issue, at least from my perspective. I made six purchases at the show and sales tax did not affect any of them. Each of the dealers had their own ways of handling the issue. One dealer wrote "for resale" on his invoice, even though he knew I wasn't a dealer. Another dealer wrote "tax included". One sneaky dealer added on the 7.5% tax, but he had crossed out his normal prices on all of his 2x2s and reduced them by about 7-8% for the convention. Two other dealers just wrote out invoices without any taxes or explanation. And, of course, the $1.30 transaction wasn't recorded anywhere. I don't know if the State of California hunted down all of the dealers later, but they were all ready to do business in Anaheim. So from my perspective, it didn't make any difference.
We heard a few complaints about the tax situation, but we also heard complaints about everything under the sun. One well-known dealer complained that Coin World's switch to a smaller format robbed him of ad space. The same dealer also tried unsuccessfully to lodge a vague grading complaint with the ANA about another dealer. Several dealers complained that the young ANA pages were lying about the prices of items from the snackbar. One dealer complained, in rather colorful language, about all of the ANA fliers continually being piled on top of her display cases. Yet another dealer complained about the lack of carpeting on the bourse floor. But hey, this wouldn't be an ANA event without lots of complaining.
My only complaint is that it's impossible to walk the floor, look at all the exhibits, listen to all the talks, and attend all of the meetings in the time available. At Anaheim, I happened to concentrate on the bourse and wasn't disappointed. The convention has lots of material that isn't available at smaller shows. I know that many collectors plan their vacations around ANA conventions. It's a convenient opportunity to visit different parts of the country and mix in some numismatics at the same time. We enjoyed Anaheim and we'll certainly be considering trips to future ANA conventions.
Lloyd Lim
<ltleelim@mail.limunltd.com>
References: A Day at the Fed, Public Information Dept., Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, NY, USA, 1991, p. 6, 7, 9, 10.
By the way, here are the answers to the sample questions:
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