JEFF ROCK REMEMBERS RICH HARTZOG

I was deeply saddened to read of the passing of Rich Hartzog in last week's issue of The E-Sylum. I bought several things from his World Exonumia sales and, of course, many of the books that he published and when our paths crossed at shows it was always an enjoyable time at his table going through some of the MANY boxes he carted around -- no matter what you collected he probably had some.

But Rich really stands out to me for a service he performed. About 40 years ago I learned that my great-grandfather had issued a couple of trade tokens for the general store he ran in a small town in Illinois (he was also the postmaster for the town which sounds very grand but really meant the mail train tossed the one sack of mail out with whatever other things were delivered to his store and people from the town would come in and pick up their mail along with their supplies). I had advertised for this token for years, and had offered to pay several hundred dollars for one when "Good For" tokens of this era were usually selling for $10-20. But I never got a single answer to the ads I placed, and no dealers ever had one for sale.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and Rich was selling the Ore Vacketta collection of Illinois trade tokens -- Vacketta literally wrote the book on these tokens, and he was a distributor of groceries so he actually knew the people in the state and they knew him and what he collected, so they were happy to give him some of their tokens for his collection. Unfortunately I hadn't heard about these sales until they were nearly all completed and I wrote to Rich seeing if he had sold the tokens from the tiny town of Grape Creek (so tiny that it no longer exists, having been absorbed into another nearby town). He went back through the catalogues and didn't see any sales, and went through all the remaining tokens from the Vacketta estate -- but no luck. Perhaps, we thought, Vacketta never owned them (though he and my great-grandfather were friendly enough).

Then, out of the blue, I got an excited call from Rich. The estate found a small box of tokens and sent them to him and in this group of 50-odd additional tokens were not one but two of my great-grandfather's tokens, one of each denomination he issued, and the pieces illustrated in Vacketta's book. Rich negotiated a private sale for those two with the estate at a price that was likely higher than what they would have brought at auction, but less than I would have been willing to pay for them. The tokens arrived, and one of them immediately went into my collection. The other one though had a very special fate.

My grandmother, the daughter of the William Pilkington who issued these tokens, was still alive and remembered those tokens from when she was a kid. Her dad had bought her a tiny toy cash register and she would play storekeeper in the shop itself -- ringing up purchases and the like. In the till of that register she had dozens or hundreds of these tokens, and she would sometimes be the one who gave them out to customers. While still a teenager her world was shattered when her father was killed in a freak train accident. She fled Grape Creek, taking nothing with her but a suitcase of clothes, and never saw any of those tokens again. We never found out what happened to them - though it's likely that they were redeemed and then melted down in one of the many scrap metal drives for World War II. I didn't tell her that I had -- finally! -- found the tokens, and for Christmas of that year she received a really nice hand-carved wooden box that had a few trinkets in it. At the bottom, wrapped up separately, was her father's token, which she called the best Christmas gift she ever received.

Several years later as her own health was failing she packed an "emergency bag" that had things she would need if and when she went to the hospital. In it was some money, her checkbook, some records and documents that were important -- and this token, one of the only links she had to happier times as a child. When she passed away the token went to her daughter, my mother, who will make sure that it finds its way to the next generation.

When Rich found the tokens for me the deal was that I would write an article on the owner of the store and the area, which was something that was often missing in the literature -- that personal context. But sadly this didn't happen. My grandmother was supposed to write down her memories and I would shape them into an account, but she constantly put it off -- thinking of those days would inevitably get her thinking about the loss of her father, and 70 years later that was still too emotionally raw. But, as we were cleaning out my grandmother's house after she passed away I found several notebooks that included pages of memories about the store and her time there -- perhaps enough to belatedly write this article that was promised to Rich. If so (and I will make it a priority to get through in 2018!) then it will definitely be dedicated to Rich; it's just a shame that it would be done only after the two people most interested had both passed away.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
RICHARD HARTZOG (1947-2017) (http://www.coinbooks.org/v20/esylum_v20n52a06.html)

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