DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART FIVE

GREG BENNICK: You'd mentioned in your answer, of course, being a private curator. I was wondering if you'd talk about - and this is almost more from a philosophical standpoint - tell me about the ethical considerations which arise when combining the roles of collector, dealer, and curator. Could you explain the differences between those three roles?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, I alluded to it earlier in that I thought genetics causes collectors and all collectors have within them a desire to organize and to care for these objects. So that's what the professional curator does. A collector is someone on the road to becoming a museum curator; he just privately curates his own collection.

A museum curator cares for somebody else's collection. Technically the same ethics that apply to the museum curator, you would want to apply to your own collection. You would want to have a collecting philosophy, for instance. You can't collect every coin out there. You just can't. You have to be focused and you have to decide what do I really want? What am I studying? What is the end goal?

Every single museum in America could potentially have coins in it and also people who give them coins all the time, but they ultimately might not need them. Perhaps they're not specifically a coin museum. It's not their function or in their mission statement. Their function is the history of Washington County or the history of Fort Wayne or whatever.

In that case, it would be more important to have the local trade tokens from your geographic region in there and you should have a much stronger collection of the trade tokens from your city than showcasing random steel pennies simply because somebody thought they were important and gave them to you.

GREG BENNICK: Speaking to different folks for this interview series people have alluded to the conflict which can develop between being a curator, and if you can still be a collector? Or if you're a collector, can you desire to be a dealer if your goal is to sell things, not keep them, like a collector does.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: It is an interesting thing. And the ethics are a little mushy. I don't consider myself a coin dealer, but I sell coins and I buy coins. In the case of curation though, whosever collection I'm caring for, and this is the difference: I'm ethically bound to that collection. My point is that the individual collector should have the same approaches. Thoughts on deaccession, or how do you get rid of your extras? Organization and a system for that. I always want to organize every single coin.

GREG BENNICK: Well, I had one more question for you. I was wondering if you could tell us about the Henderson Supper Club or if this is a situation where if you tell me, since it's seemingly top secret, that you'd then have to kill me.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: What you're referring to is the Bill Henderson Supper Club. and Bill Henderson was the mayor of Colorado Springs who was instrumental in getting the ANA to move there. This club meets once a month at a nice restaurant where they have a private room. First there's the libations and then there's the dinner. And then there's show and tell, which alternates each month with a different moderator.

The subjects for show and tell are nothing very specific. It'll be something generic like "wings over America" or something. And as is often true at clubs there's a hundred different interpretations. Everyone gets five minutes to present their pieces. It's semi-secret, by invitation only, with the only rule being, no rules.

Basically, the Henderson Club draws its membership from Front Range, which is the area including Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs. They keep the membership at 18 members. If someone drops off or drops dead, they nominate a new member and that person goes through a nominating process. All of the current members are aware of the E-Sylum and the Newman Numismatic Portal. Ed Rochette was a longtime member. He was the longtime director of the ANA, and a prolific author. George Fisher taught the class on Chinese coins for many years at the ANA summer seminar. Bill Spangler, who literally wrote the book on Turkoman coins. Dick Horst and Larry Johnson had Gresham's Law, so they had great tokens and medals.

These people might all be familiar and they all were members of the Henderson Supper Club. I'm honored to be one of their members. It has been one of the highlights of my career.

There's one other thing I want to add if I could would be my plans for future research.

GREG BENNICK: Yes. Please do. Tell us.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I have four projects going on. One is to finish the Colorado book as there's so much on Colorado gold coins I haven't yet published and that is new to the field. This would be in conjunction with the Frederick Mayer collection. I'd like to still do that.

My current interest is Indian peace medals and I am working in conjunction with the Denver Museum. We think we have the earliest Indian peace medal issued in the northern hemisphere. It is dated 1655. That is way, way, way, way, way early.

Then we also have a third project I'm doing. There's an "al merito" Indian peace medal that is ascribed to an archaeological dig in Nebraska. This single site in Nebraska was the source of seven different Indian peace medals, which to my knowledge is the highest number of Indian peace medals from any single site. But one medal that's traditionally ascribed to this site, a Spanish "for merit" or "al merito" medal, didn't come from that site at all, despite all the literature. It's more likely, like the Walton nickel, sitting in a home in a small town in Nebraska waiting to be discovered. That's a good story.

My last project is that I am writing my third book, this on Numismatic Theology. What is numismatic theology, pray tell? You'll have to read the book to find out, but it is basically an extension of the idea of "Biblical coins."

GREG BENNICK: This interview has been great. We covered so many ideas and aspects of collecting and curation which don't often make it to the forefront. I'm really happy with it. If readers are interested in this interview, please check out my others. What makes this interview series really fascinating to me is that each of the people I've talked to comes to numismatics with a different perspective, a different philosophy, a different idea, and certainly a different background. There's really something here for everyone to discover.

As more of these interviews go up, be sure to check the Newman Numismatic Portal and the page they have specified for the interview series. You're going to find a breadth of information and different perspectives on numismatics and truly fascinating stories of the people involved in it all. I really appreciate your time today, Larry. This has been fun.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Thank you, Greg. I really appreciate you doing this series. It's another benefit of Eric's long-term thinking and I am sure he too would appreciate what you're doing.

INTERVIEWERS NOTE: I highly recommend, for anyone interested in the concept of numismatic archeology or how coins can inform us about the past, Dr. Lee's most excellent and award-winning book, The Coins of Fort Atkinson: A Study in Numismatic Archeology. The 2nd edition, published in 2015, is very interesting and will certainly offer a new perspective as you explore its ideas and analysis of history. You can read more about the book through the E-Sylum review here: https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n10a04.html.

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 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)
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART THREE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n48a17.html)
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART FOUR (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n49a16.html)

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