CARL SUBAK AND THE HEBERDEN COIN ROOM

Last year the Ashmolean Museum’s Heberden Coin Room received a legacy gift of $5 million from Carl Subak, an American coin dealer whose collaboration with the coin room spanned many decades. Carl died at the age of 103 in Chicago, his adopted home after fleeing Nazi persecution in Austria as a teenager.

Professor Frédérique Duyrat and Professor Chris Howgego from the museum tell us about the man whose love of coins continued into his tenth decade and share the lasting impact his donation will make on the world of numismatics.

Carl was a precocious coin collector and by his teens was already attending some of the great pre-war auctions in Vienna. His passion did occasionally outstrip his means, however: he became so excited during one visit to a London dealer that he chose many more coins than he could afford to buy. Happily, he was allowed to take them all away and pay later — a kindness he never forgot.

In 1938, when Carl was 19, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. He fled the country and, after waiting many months in Latvia, had the good fortune to receive a visa to the United States. His US backers were a family from Boston who he had met by chance while at a holiday camp in England.

Carl worked in Boston as a plumber's assistant, chauffeur and bookstore clerk, before being recruited into a special programme at Camp Ritchie that trained native German speakers to return to Europe and take part in various missions. As one of the ‘Ritchie Boys', Carl worked as an interpreter for a US army colonel and was stationed for many months in the American zone in Berlin. While overseas, he finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in Geography.

At the close of the war, Carl joined his sister who had moved to Seattle from Boston after escaping from Vienna via Italy. He began an import-export business with his brother-in-law, which eventually became a stamp wholesale enterprise and coin dealership. In 1949 he relocated to Chicago, where he and his wife Eileen built one of the region's most successful coin and stamp shops.

Carl travelled the world for his work and it was a chance meeting at a train station in England in the 1960s that sparked a decades-long relationship with the Ashmolean Museum.

The man Carl had bumped into was Michael Metcalf, then Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room. Professor Chris Howgego, who later held the same role, also came to know Carl well, describing him as incredibly intelligent and savvy, yet modest. ‘He didn't have a big ego; he wouldn't impose his own ideas but was instead interested in how things would actually work,' Chris says.

Carl was a generous supporter of the coin room during his lifetime, helping with the acquisition of several major hoards, including the Watlington Hoard and the Chalgrove Hoard — the latter of which turned out to be extraordinary for its inclusion of a coin revealing the ‘lost emperor' Domitianus.

To read the complete article, see:
The coin collector's legacy (https://medium.com/oxford-university/the-coin-collectors-legacy-b41a50584481)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
CARL H. SUBAK (1919-2022) (https://www.coinbooks.org/v25/esylum_v25n08a05.html)

 

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