THE BRONX COIN CLUB

There have been two recent posts mentioning the Bronx Coin Club (including the memoirs of Harvey Stack), which imply that that club is defunct, although The E-Sylum earlier published a good photograph taken by George Cuhaj showing Gordon Frost at the Bronx Coin Club. I am happy to be able to say that it is very much alive, as are a number of other New York area clubs that were alleged to be defunct (the New Jersey Numismatic Society, the Westchester County Coin Club, the Long Island Coin Club).

The Bronx Coin Club was established in1933 by the greatly admired Otto Sghia. It used to meet at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx, but since 1960 it has met at various locations in Manhattan; for many years it met at Rosoff's Restaurant in the garment district, where members always commented on the saltiness of the matzoh ball soup.

In recent years it has adopted the practice of holding at least one meeting a year in the Bronx. Its recent presidents are Edward Janis, Robert Schonwalter, Jay Galst, Gordon Frost and the current president, Normand Pepin; I myself, a member for nearly two decades, have the honor of serving on the Board of Governors.

Its membership heavily overlaps with that of the New York Numismatic Club, but not entirely; and there are a number of members of both clubs who prefer the informal and very lively meetings at the Bronx club to the stricter agenda of its larger sibling. (The meetings are admittedly not as lively as some clubs; at one meeting of the now defunct Israel Numismatic Society of New York Ed Janis got into a punch up with another member.)

The attendance is less than the New York Club (usually about eight, rather than twenty-six), but the exhibits are of equally high quality, and there is no better place for numismatic gossip. The club has two topics a month: a special topic, often rather quirky (the best topics were those proposed for several years in the 1990s by Bill Kable), plus a letter of the alphabet; some letters, notably X, can be a bit tricky, although I once brought Notgeld from Xions in Posen (birthplace of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz).

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web