DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART THREE

GREG BENNICK: So, tell me: what are some of the other numismatic educational presentations or angles that you've taken, connecting numismatics and education? Are there favorites of yours and are they documented somewhere where people might view them or read them?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I've probably given about 20 different presentations over the years to the ANA, numismatic theaters, Central States, as well as the Nebraska State Historical Society, and the Nevada State Museum. Maybe ten or so are available on the Newman portal. So, you can Google my name, pull them up, and watch my hairline recede and my weight go up over the years.

GREG BENNICK: Well, I look forward to seeing your presentations for sure. I think that they're going to be great.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I will briefly mention a couple of my career highlights starting with The Coins of Fort Atkinson. Fort Atkinson was interesting from my perspective because it was furthest West American settlement on the frontier in 1820, as far away as possible in America at the time. It left an archeologically stratified site full of coinage. Besides perhaps Williamsburg, no other site in America has had as many coins recovered from it as Fort Atkinson. Furthermore, these were U.S. soldiers being paid monthly with 50-cent pieces straight from the Philadelphia Mint and each soldier got $5 a month or 10 coins.

And out there on the prairie, they carved on them. They lost them. They chopped them up. The sutler needed his bit, his one-eighth, so the government would chop the coins right there. The laundry lady got hers. Bits of these coins were found all over the site and surrounding area in its radius, because there was basically a town center of about a mile full of other trappers and tents and travelers. There were people there besides the soldiers.

These people left behind an archeological record and when it was all said and done, there was about 120 coins found archeologically on the site (whether as full coins or as coin bits). 90% of them were Spanish, not American. There was only three copper pieces. Everything was silver. And lots and lots of bits. It was the only time amidst the U.S. government that I am able to find where they actually chopped up their own coinage to pay its soldiers. You had to first pay off the laundress, then you paid the sutler, and whatever was left, you got to keep. But they would chop up pieces to make change.

I gave a presentation on Fort Atkinson. I gave one on a Clark Gruber & Co. $10 note. I gave one on the secrets of the Denver Mint Archives. I went out to the Denver Mint archives, which are in the Federal Center in Denver. I passed all of the security, and finally got burrowed down in there. My point here is that you could not find the information that's available down there on the internet. People often think, "I'm going to do some research. I'll go on the internet, and see what it says." For instance, and here are two examples. First: pick a date, say 1934, and ask "How many pressmen were operating coin machinery? How much did they make, and what were their names?" You would not find that information on the internet, but it is in the archives.

On the same line of thought, and from a numismatic standpoint, pick the 1937-D nickel, for instance, because that's where the three-legged D comes from. Then ask, "How many obverse dies and how many reverse dies were used that year?" It's all listed right there in the archives but it's not on the internet. No one's dug that up. So, the secret of the Denver Mint Archives, I thought was the one that was supposed to spur people to actually travel somewhere and go through some actual archives.

GREG BENNICK: How did people respond to that presentation?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: That one, actually, got a little bit of interest from Coin World who did a little interview on it and they followed up with someone else snooping around there too. They realized what a treasure trove of information is available if you just do a little snooping.

GREG BENNICK: I'm currently working on a book on a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker, and if you look online for information on Ernest Becker, you're going to find precious little. There's information, there's stories, and they're the same regurgitated stories over and over and over again, and the same information over and over and over again. But it takes reading his books, and it takes really looking into his history, and it takes going to libraries and looking at archives before the real picture starts unfolding a bit.

While the prevalent information about Becker is out there, the people who actually know the real guy behind the books, well, you can name them on the fingers of one hand. This is because those of us who have done that extra research, the equivalent of going to the Denver Mint to the archives, are few and far between. So, I find your work really interesting.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Ernest Becker, you say?

GREG BENNICK: Yes, Ernest Becker. He wrote a book called The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 70s.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Remember, I had read The Denial of Death many years ago.

GREG BENNICK: Oh, wow, there you go! It's a perfect example of what we're talking about: that if you're fascinated by a numismatic subject, and this is now directed at our readers: If you're fascinated by a numismatic subject, dive in beyond what you can read on the internet, because there might be far more out there. What exists on the internet is what people have created collectively as the internet, but there are more primary sources of information from a researcher's perspective, which are completely separate from the internet. So, this is a really good call to action on your part. I appreciate it.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: The secret is that the researcher has more of an understanding of academic discipline and how you review literature. That's one of the standard five approaches to research. Review the literature, a statement of the problem, the collecting the data, the analyzing, and so on. The steps that you go through in the analytic process are ones the researcher knows well. The stronger the numismatic research component is, even though we don't have this formal educational component in numismatics overall, the more we will be moving the hobby forward.

GREG BENNICK: Fantastic. Well, back to a more traditional topic. Can you tell us about your role in the discovery, authentication, and announcement of the missing Walton 1913 Liberty Nickel?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I would be happy to. Heritage, when they sold the Walton nickel in 2013, wrote an entire auction catalog on that one coin. I don't know if this is the only time that's been done, but this was the only time I've seen it. They asked me to write up how, as the ANA curator, I got thrust in the middle of this whole thing. Basically, someone came up with the idea (I believe it was Paul Montgomery), to have the reunion of the four known 1913 Nickels, because the ANS had one, and the Smithsonian had one. We were able to arrange all four of them to be together for the Baltimore ANA show, and then out of the blue, they said, "We'll give a million dollars" if the fifth one shows up.

And by the Law of Unintended Consequences, everybody in the world called the ANA and asked me if their 1913 Nickel was the correct one. And so all day long, I was doing nothing but telling people, "No, no, no, no, no," because, one, I didn't expect anybody to have it, and two, it is diagnostic what to look for: the numeral three on the 1913 in the date is diagnostic. If you know what it's supposed to look like with little balls on the edge of it and everything else then you know what is not it. It's likely just pushed metal from the 1912 or a 1910 or whatever they're using as their host coin. It's not the real thing. So, every number three is going to look different. Whereas on the five known ones, all the three's look the same. There are other diagnostic characteristics as well.

This one reporter said, "You need to talk to this family. Because they claim they are the descendants of George Walton who owned the firth specimen. They claim they're the owner, or they know where it is." To make a long story short, back, and forth over the phone, I would work with this descendant, and ask about the 3. She sent me pictures of the 3, and I was shocked. It had the right look. I said, "Well, take a look at the corn on the back," and we worked through some details and when she told me about the corn on the back - the corn kernels on the reverse in the wreath are not high definition as they're supposed to be on genuine coins, they are weak and mushy. She replied, "Oh I can hardly see them, they're really mushy."

This was also promising. There were a couple other diagnostics we went through. Eric Newman had discovered a dot on Liberty's neck behind her head and there's an ejection mark on the edge and there's… realistically there's various diagnostics that you can use to authenticate. Usually, you don't even need to get down to these, such as there being an ejection mark on the side, because the 3 itself is a giveaway that typically isn't right.

So anyway, they came to the Baltimore show with their specimen and after the opening festivities late that first night, we all zipped back down to the convention center at midnight in a caravan of cars. Each car has its own security people, and each one was carrying a different 1913 nickel. Five cars. Five nickels. We all went back there and the experts were all there. My role was to lay out the coins and to get the gloves ready and the lighting and then the experts would come in and do whatever they did to authenticate them and the family was excused at the time. They weren't supposed to be watching it. So, it was really cool to be behind the scenes watching them decide, "Yes… yes… yes…," one at a time and to have them say "Yes this is the fifth nickel."

So, when the family was brought in, they were completely overjoyed to find out that the coin was real. Nine years later, it was sold, and that's brings us back to your original question. The really cool thing is that after all of this, after it was finally sold, after I wrote the article by Larry Lee in the Heritage catalog, the coin was bought by Jeff Garrett and Larry Lee, a Florida coin dealer with the same name as mine. As a result, all of the people who knew I had worked with the Waltons, and the Myers all thought I had bought the coin. So that was pretty fun. I got a lot of mileage out of that coin.

GREG BENNICK: That's really great. I actually interviewed Jeff Garrett and asked him about the purchase of the 1913 Liberty nickel, not connecting it to the Walton specimen when I asked it. So, readers can refer back to the Jeff Garrett interview on the Newman Numismatic Portal for his story of what it was like to make the purchase that day. I love the idea of this clandestine caravan in the middle of the night, with each vehicle carrying a different 1913 Liberty nickel. that's pretty remarkable.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yeah, it's pretty cool.

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 and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. 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

To read the full transcript on the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
Lawrence Lee Interview (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/642577)

To read the full transcript on the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
Lawrence Lee Interview (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/642577)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n46a14.html)
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART TWO (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n47a13.html)

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