At the Long Beach coin show last week, I had a long conversation with Mike Kliman, Abe Kosoff's former son-in-law and once married to Abe's daughter Sonny Kosoff Kliman (both since divorced and remarried).

Mike, now 78, and Sonny both attended the 1954 Farouk Cairo sale with Abe. To my and Mike's knowledge, there are only three living Americans who attended that sale - Mike, Sonny and Maurice Storck of Tucson Arizona and Massachusetts. Maurice, approx 90 yrs old, still has some of the auction lots he purchased in the Farouk sale!

Tony Tumonis of Tucson sat in on our conversation. Tony knows Maurice well and says he was given Maurice's annotated Farouk auction catalogue and numerous paper and photograph souvenirs of the Farouk sale saved by Maurice. Mike says he has Abe's annotated Farouk catalogue with buyer's names, lot comments and indications of who "partnered up" on what lots.

There's supposed to be an elderly Canadian numismatist still alive who attended the Farouk sale - no one could immediately recall his name. Perhaps a Canadian E-Sylum reader can tell us his name?

The only person I can think of is James Charlton, who started all the Charlton Catalogues on Canadian numismatics. He was a big (and rich) coin dealer who would have gone there, along with John J. Pittman, to see what Canadian coins he could buy. We know that Pittman bought some, but I don’t know of any that Charlton bought.

I believe that Chuck Moore may have some knowledge of which coins, if any, Charlton owned that came from the Farouk sale. I know I didn’t attend. I figured that if I didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the airport terminal, I sure wouldn’t have the money to fly there and actually buy something.