ELWIN CRAMER LESLIE PHOTOS FOUND

 

Regarding Adrian Gonzalez Salinas's request for a photo of Elwin Cramer Leslie, attached are scans from the 1928 Lakewood (Ohio) High School Cinema yearbook. I also located a detailed article from the Sunday, March 8, 1959, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Persistently Yours: Skilled Hands Still Wield Pen Despite Trend, which included a photo of Elwin Leslie. The article is about Leslie's penmanship partnership with Michael G. Cunningham. Cunningham and Leslie were described as engrossers and illuminators.

After Elwin Leslie's father, Scott E. Leslie, was killed in a car crash in 1941, details of his life were reported in the national newspapers. The August 22, 1941, New York Times wrote that Scott E. Leslie was a handwriting expert who helped terminate a number of criminal careers and that he was an expert in all kinds of writing, in ink chemistry, the age of writing paper, and in the types of writing employed at different periods of many countries. The elder Leslie's expertise was used in the Lindbergh kidnapping case and an important voting fraud investigation. He was able to show that a number of X's on multiple ballots were written by the same hand.

As to Elwin Cramer Leslie, I also found an interesting article in the March 10, 1968, Grand Rapids Press, When GR Man Made His Own Coins by Tom LaBelle, about the Civil War Tokens of Philip N. Goodrich. Leslie had a Goodrich token in his collection, along with other tokens (L.H. Randall and Courtlander & Pressgood's Russian Clothing Store) from the Grand Rapids area. The article states that Leslie owns a fourth coin-like object which he is trying to identify, and which appears as if it might also have originated in Grand Rapids. The token is copper and has the head of an animal stamped on one side. The date is 1876.

The article goes on to detail that Leslie said he got the coin thinking it was a trapper's tally seal skin identification tag. ‘After careful investigation, I could not reconcile the letters G.R.D.T. (stamped about the animal's head) with any known trapping concern and the portrait on the piece actually looked more like a dog than a seal.

Leslie speculates that the letters were possibly for Grand Rapids Dog Tag or Tax, though it does seem rather unlikely that there were any such things as dog tags as far back as 1876.

 

Adrian writes:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ELWIN CRAMER LESLIE PHOTO SOUGHT (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n18a11.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web