MORE ABOUT ROBERT H. LLOYD

Thank you for publishing the interesting biography of Robert H. Lloyd, who lived to be 103 and holds the record for the longest ANA membership of 83 years. Based on what I gathered from this and the linked article about Robert L. Hendershot, it seems that the three people who were members of the ANA the longest are:

83 years - Robert H. Lloyd (1906–2009)
82 years - Eric P. Newman (1911–2017)
74 years - Robert L. Hendershot (1898–2005)

This prompted a number of questions: is there anyone between Newman's 82 years and Hendershot's 74 years? Also, which currently-living person has been an ANA member the longest? Thinking it might be Q. David Bowers, I searched the online archives of The Numismatist and found his application for membership announced in the February 1956 issue. This is nearly 66 years ago. If Mr. Bowers is the currently-living person with the longest ANA membership, would this place him fourth on the list of all-time longest members?

Mr. Lloyd was born in 1906, but according to the E-Sylum article his father died in 1881. I wondered whether this error had been copied from Mr. Lloyd's obituary published in the March 2010 issue of The Numismatist, but I found no reference to his parents there. Since his obituary says that he served as an ANA governor and also on the Convention Advisory Board, this led me to another question: had Mr. Lloyd ever exhibited his collection of bank notes at an ANA convention?

Searching the archives further I found my answer. The Numismatist of October 1934 reports that Robert H. Lloyd of North Tonawanda, New York, exhibited the following items at the ANA convention that year: large-size notes of Western New York banks; large-size notes with low numbers; rare transportation tokens.

 

 

Published in this same issue is a fold-out photograph showing convention attendees on the roof of the Carter Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio, the location of the 1934 convention. The next page lists the names of the people in the photograph, and Mr. Lloyd's name is the seventh in the fourth row. As I looked for Mr. Lloyd in the photograph I found it hard to ascertain who actually belongs to the fourth row and thus who counts as the seventh person. But basing my visual identification of him on the images published in the E-Sylum article, I think I have him identified correctly in the photograph and have included a copy of it with his face circled in red.

 

As a native Clevelander and current resident of the area, my curiosity was again piqued: where was the Carter Hotel located and does it still exist? I found out that the building once known as the Carter Hotel, which opened in 1917 on Prospect Avenue near East 9th Street, is still there. Originally named Hotel Winton after the Cleveland-based Winton automobile manufacturer, it is now an apartment building named Carter Manor. I found it interesting that the ANA held the entire convention inside of the hotel rather than at the more spacious Cleveland Public Auditorium, which at the time of its opening in 1922 was the largest convention hall in the United States. But this is a testament to the modest scale of ANA conventions back then.

 

Since the convention photograph with Mr. Lloyd had been taken on the hotel's roof, in the background can be seen the tops of other buildings. Curious to know if I could identify the group's exact location on the roof, I used Google Earth to zoom into the building and rotated my view to find it. This method enabled me to locate the brick wall with a double-hung window that formed the backdrop for the group shot. The wall looks curved in the photograph due to distortion caused by the wide-angle camera lens. The building seen behind it in the photograph with a turret-like structure on top is Halle building, which is now occupied by apartments. At the time of the photograph it was called the Pope Building and housed the Halle Bros. department store.

Pete adds:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ROBERT HEPWORTH LLOYD (1906-2009) (https://www.coinbooks.org/v24/esylum_v24n49a13.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web