DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART ONE

GREG BENNICK: Hi, everybody. This is Greg Bennick with the Newman Numismatic Portal, and I am here today to conduct another interview, this time with Dr. Lawrence J. Lee, museum curator, and I will be referring to Dr. Lee today as Larry. This is a casual and fun conversation about his background and connection to the coin hobby. Larry, how are you doing today?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Hey, Greg. How are you doing? Thanks for inviting me.

GREG BENNICK: Absolutely. Well, let's start off. Just give me a little backstory about your connection to the coin hobby. Have you always been a collector? Have you always been a researcher? A little bit of both? I'd love to know.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, on my business card, I claim to be a professional numismatist, as I see there being a gradation between the coin collector, who is a hobbyist, and the numismatist, who is the scholar and who realizes that knowledge is important. The main difference is, to me, hobbyists usually don't buy many books besides The Red Book, whereas the more interested you become in numismatics or a subset thereof, the more numismatic books you have. You start becoming more and more of a numismatist rather than a hobbyist. So, I see it as a gradation, and so that's why I self-proclaim to be a professional numismatist.

GREG BENNICK: That's great. So, you've been a collector historically. How did you get your start in coins?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, I am the template for the 10 to 13-year-old boy who, just prior to puberty, some way or another becomes interested in coins. In this case, my grandmother's little box of pennies. And there was a 1916-D Lincoln cent in there that was bright and shiny, natural mint luster, I later learned. It was very high grade.

At any rate it was neat and it caught my attention. I wanted to know more and because I lived in Denver: I knew the D on it stood for the Denver mint. But it wasn't just a situation of let me quickly accumulate and fill a blue holder and start pushing these coins in one at a time and get my date run complete. It was more that I was interested in, well, since Denver has a mint here, finding out what minting was about? I became interested, not so much from the investment strategy standpoint, but, as it turned out, interested in it as an academic discipline.

GREG BENNICK: So, your start, right off the bat, was as a researcher, a student of the hobby beyond just the collecting standpoint.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yes. Then interestingly, my father was an artist, a commercial artist, but in his heart, he wanted to be a fine artist. He contracted to do some background work at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He was working in the Australian outback section of the diorama, which was about an 80-foot-long section, in front of which they would mount animals.

I can just remember seeing him sitting on a stool, painting shrubbery way in the background of this diorama. It was just really cool to be in a museum after hours and see what was going on. So that museum, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which I went to many, many times as a child, ultimately - my most recent publication is a publication of the Indian Peace Medals that are in that very museum. So, I kind of came full circle with that.

GREG BENNICK: Obviously curation, in a sense, is essentially in your blood.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, I would say to a certain extent, curation is in every collector's blood. To curate means to care for. To be a curator means to be the caretaker for. And so, all collectors, to a certain extent, have their own mini museum where they are the curator and they care for their own collection. They keep track of where they got the item, the extensive records, the provenance, where they got it and how much they paid. They're basically duplicating what museum curators do on a professional level for other people's collections. So being a curator, I do have it in my blood to the extent that I believe collectors are born, not made. Basically, the collecting gene is a part and parcel of who and who collects what.

If you look at any mailing list or membership rolls, they show that 90% of all coin collectors are male. It's not that there's not female collectors. But in general, women, if they collect, don't necessarily collect coins. I'm probably on dangerous ground here.

GREG BENNICK: I mean, realistically, the hobby is replete with men. It is predominantly men and efforts are made continually to change that. I know Women in Numismatics was the name of the group that Charmy Harker was running for a while. Efforts are always being made, but definitely men gravitate toward the hobby more, it seems.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: What I'm arguing is that it's genetic. Collecting is genetically inherent. Men tend to like coins more for maybe reasons of history, maybe reasons of wealth and accumulation. Consequently, the pattern is generally: they get into it, boys do, and they have it the coin bug until puberty. And then they discover girls and they leave it. They quit doing it. Later in life after the family nest is empty, they're 40, they're 45. They now have discretionary income. Now, those are the guys if the ANA or the ANS or whoever, I think if you're going to target someone, you don't target the 13-year-old kid who's about to lose interest. You target the 45-year-old guy who collected coins way back when and, you go after him.

GREG BENNICK: The idea of targeting 40-year-olds with discretionary income is pretty interesting. So, you've written about the, and I'm putting this in air quotes as I say it, "the myth of the young numismatist" and the title is provocative since a lot of emphasis, of course, is placed on young numismatists as the future of the hobby. There are so many young numismatists in the hobby today and its very encouraging. Is that what you're talking about with the myth of the young numismatist, meaning that we should be targeting older individuals in terms of bringing them into the hobby for the importance of the future of the hobby?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yes. I'm saying that if you, take it as a given that there's a genetic component, and the fact that 90% of coin collectors are male, it seems to suggest such. Then there is the fact that most of the males get into it at puberty and get out of it once they discover women and beer and that they don't have discretionary income. Some people come back to it, and those are the ones I think you should target. But the emphasis is on the young collector, the young numismatist. It is misplaced, in that those people who were born to be a collector, the John Kraljevich's and the Dwight Manley's of the world, they're going to collect regardless.

If they find their way to the coins, fine, but they're going to have that gene, and they're going to collect regardless. So, they became interested in coins, and both, to the betterment of the hobby, became successful YNs. But my argument is that not all of them are as noteworthy, whereas if you look at the new people, the interest of people, the people with money spending in the coin shows, it's not 13-year-old boys spending in the coin shows. It's 45-year-old men.

So, there's not a single study anywhere that validates that helping YN people, helping the young numismatists, the young kids, leads to any kind of further growth down the road.

GREG BENNICK: So, you're suggesting that it is essentially as though YN's could theoretically be encouraged as young numismatists and then not really be expected to be seen again for the most part for 30 more years?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yeah, exactly. They'll be self-driven enough. They'll be writing their own books and starting their own companies soon. So, turn them loose. Let nature take its course.

GREG BENNICK: I am sure there will be a lot of opinions on this topic! Especially with the proliferation of YN's recently in the hobby and the professional programs currently working to bring them into the hobby and support them. Now, switching gears a bit: I'm just curious…in terms of a genetic component to collecting, could you speak to that? This genetic idea? I mean, I understand in terms of tradition or standardized societal roles having an influence along the way, especially in regard to you mentioning it could be connected to the acquisition of money. This historically could speak to a sociological component between the role of men in society historically and where our interests are today. Is that what you're talking about? And are there studies that show that?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Oh, boy. That gets really tricky because I'm not a geneticist.

GREG BENNICK: Right. Me either!

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I just know that in autism, there is a total focus on single subjects - and there seems to be a lot of YNs who get into coin collecting because it's a natural outlet for those who have slight autistic tendencies. There's a genetic component. How much it is, I'll leave to other people to say exactly. But at the very least, we should be aware there might be such a thing and we might adjust accordingly, because we teach adults totally differently than we teach young people. And the people we have teaching the Boy Scout badges, and the coins in the classroom are geared towards elementary, non-mature thinking. They don't have the background and experience, not necessarily that it's necessary, but that it helps a lot to imprint it more deeply into the brain, if their interest and background association is there. So that's why there's adult education classes in which you don't do the ABCs because you already expect a certain level of knowledge to have been reached. So that's where we need to put our focus. Teaching at that level and aiming the investment, grading, collecting aspect of the hobby to that age level and degree of maturity.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

NOTE: The interview was conducted in parts via phone, so no video exists, and editing together audio would have been choppy sounding at best. This transcript is an accurate representation of the whole interview experience. Thank you for reading! -GB

   

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