Welcome to the Tarnished Truth, your newsletter. There are at times coin markets that are considered buyers markets and those that are sellers markets. It is quite obvious that right now we are in the middle of a buyers market, the difference however in the present market and those that I have experienced before is that in the present market the better coins are not disappearing in to safes and lockboxes, and only low grades or problem coins being offered. If you force yourself to be disciplined and stay to your overall plan you can improve your collection at a much lower percentage of what it would have taken in a normal market. Great collections are built by just staying the course. Enjoy the ride.

It doesn't seem all that likely that my life would be of a whole lot of interest to anyone. I'm not a celebrity, nor do I have what most people would consider an interesting job. So I was sort of surprised when asked to provide a bio for the club newsletter. But, after thinking on it for a while, I realised that most people are intensely curious about other people. I hope you won't be too bored by my life's story.

I was born in (of all places), Hazard, KY, the son of a country preacher. We moved to a small town (about 250 pop.) in Nebraska when I was in first grade, and to Mt. Morris, IL when I was in fourth grade. In the 8th grade, we moved to Rockford, IL (my father's home town), and I have been in this area (except for while I was away at school) ever since. I went to school at DeVry Institute of technology in Chicago, graduating in October of 1981, with a BSEET. You may recall that times were tough then. I wanted to either come back to the Rockford area, or go to work for Bell labs. Neither option was a real good one at the time. The unemployment rate in Rockford was in excess of 25%, and Bell labs had a hiring freeze on. I used to call the hiring manager there pretty regularly, he probably got tired of telling me that the hiring freeze was still on.

But luck was with me. A company in Rockford hired me to design microprocessor based control systems and I moved to Rockford. In a somewhat humourous vein, Bell Labs lifted the hiring freeze a week or two after I moved back to Rockford and called me to try and set up an interview. Stranger yet, the job I was hired for never actually materialized as it never got funded and I ended up starting my career in automation. I worked for this company for about 9 years, learning a lot about industrial automation, particularly as it applied to the high purity water field (read water for washing semiconductors or for high pressure boilers). It was a great place to work, but all good things must come to an end. We ended up being owned by Alcoa who basically ran the place into the ground. Massive layoffs (including me) followed and I found myself looking for work.

I found work with a small system integrator nearby. Just 2 miles from home. I actually called their salesman just to sniff around to see if he knew of any openings around town, and he invited me to come in and chat. I found out once I was there that the engineering manager was an engineer I had worked with previously, and I ended up being hired a few weeks later. I am still there, now in my 12th year. I also found time to get married in the 8 weeks or so I was off, and started the new job once I returned from our honeymoon. Life seemed pretty good, but alas the marriage ended 8 years later.

On the other hand, coins never abandon you. I have collected coins off and on since I was a kid. Now I spend most of my collecting efforts on tokens, foreign coins, silver dollars, and whatever trips my trigger at the time. I am fascinated by the variety of tokens available - drink tokens, telephone tokens, parking tokens, good fors, etc. I also enjoy foreign coins because I find them to be more interesting then US coins. Not to say I don't like US coins, but compared to the variety available from the rest of the world....

I am a member of the ANA and a local coin club - the Rockford Area Coin Club (RACC). We are an ANA member club. I can usually be found on the third Thursday of each month at the North Suburban Library in Loves Park, IL, where we hold our monthly meetings. I am a big believer in local clubs. The ANA does good things, but its the local clubs that tend to serve the needs of the average collector. We sponsor two coins shows each year that draw in 50-60 dealer tables at each show. Its a nice size show, and I really enjoy seeing the same dealers periodically. I can usually be found at the shows looking through junk boxes. In fact, last show I bought a whole junk box assortment of various tokens. I still have not had the time to sort through them, but there was quite an interesting assortment, including lots of Moose, VFW, American legion, and Wisconsin bar drink tokens.