Back to Columbus

I was fortunate to get back to Columbus one more time, and while there, I visited the CONA club again. Interestingly, I haven’t been to Columbus before this year, and now twice in two months. These trips just pop up in my life. Once I was in Tennessee twice within two weeks, never before or after. Anyway, Gerry Tebben was nice to offer me a ride to the club’s meeting again. Thank you, Gerry!

Gerry is a pleasure to ride with, it looks like he knows about everything. In a way it is his job, but it is still fascinating. Last time we talked about his collection of numismatic essays which were published in a book, called the “Coin Lore”, and since I wasn’t able to get it, he found me a copy. I tried to take a picture of it, but I don’t think it turned out ok. How do I know if a picture turned out ok? Mostly I don’t, in this case I can run it through character recognition and if I get decent results it is a good guess the photo is fine. However, I couldn’t capture any characters from this picture, so I just decided not to post it. Sure, I could ask somebody to help me, usually my wife. I get so much help in general I can’t do without I just didn’t feel like bothering anybody with this. I have other posts without pictures.

Anyway, back to Columbus. Before the meeting we met at a Chinese restaurant, this time only a few people. Good food, good company. I really enjoy this club.

Last time I thought it would be nice to get a club membership, I was back and forth about it, and finally I decided not to. Lessons learned. I feel I’m hoarding club memberships, to be honest I don’t even know how many I have. At some point I wrote about this, there are a few clubs where I take advantage of the membership, others are just there for one reason or another. I didn’t think it was a good idea to add yet another membership I wouldn’t use. But now I think about it differently. First, I got an invitation to go back to Columbus in the next few months, and if the club meets again, I’d like to attend. So, I think it is just the right thing to support a club that invites me to speak, helps me to get to their meeting, and offers me a good time I can’t find in all clubs. So, my official apologies here, I will get a membership next time, to show my appreciation.

After the general business, Gerry played a video and made a presentation.

The video was a recording of Bob Campbell talking about getting a good deal at coin shows. It was very informative, well, yet another thing that won’t be done too well without vision, though it was interesting to hear how it really works.

Gerry’s presentation was about the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. It was interesting to hear about it from a different angle, I really enjoyed understanding how inflation played a role during the introduction of the Walking Liberty Half.

During the break after the presentation, a nice gentleman, John came up to me to show part of his ancient Greek collection. It was amazing. I know very little about ancient coins, aside from touching a few at museums. It was great that John was able to show me some very nice ones, which were extremely tactile. A few days later we exchanged some emails, and he sent me recommendations on the best places to learn more about greek coins. Interestingly, at least, interesting to me, he suggested to learn from auction catalogs. I always thought regular coin catalogs and related books are the way to go if you want to learn about ancient coins.

Finally, at the auction, I got a few bags of foreign coins, hoping to add to my swap list, but after I went through them, I think I’ll keep most of it. I also bought an Ohio token, as I was reading a bit about local tokens but I never owned one, so it was the right time to satisfy my curiosity and add one to my collection.

Hopefully I’ll be able to attend another meeting next year.