GERRY FORTIN INTERVIEW, PART ONE

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The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 1, , Article 13

Greg Bennick's latest interview for the Newman Numismatic Portal is with Liberty Seated dime expert Gerry Fortin. Here's the first part, where Fortin talks about how he got into coin collecting, and specifically, Liberty Seated dimes. Be sure to check out Gerry's upcoming auction of his world class Seated dime collection at www.seateddimevarieties.com. -Garrett

GREG BENNICK: Hi, everybody. This is Greg Bennick once again with the Newman Numismatic Portal, and I am here tonight with Gerry Fortin, noted coin dealer and expert on Liberty Seated Dime varieties. I'm really excited to have this conversation because there are many things I don't know as much about as other topics. Liberty Seated Dime varieties is one of them.

I am currently the owner of one Liberty Seated Dime error coin in my collection, and the coins that Gerry has in his collection far surpass in unlimited description what I have in my one coin. So, I'm very excited to dive in today, hear about Gerry, hear about his collection, his experiences as a dealer and researcher, and we're going to dive right in. Gerry, thanks for being here tonight.

GERRY FORTIN: Well, Greg, thank you for staging this interview. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

GREG BENNICK: Awesome. I'm very glad. So, tell me, how did you get your start in coin collecting?

GERRY FORTIN: Well, like most people of our age, you know, as a youngster, I was, I mean, I'm from Maine, so we have a lot of snow. So, in the winter, I would shovel driveways for neighbors, especially the old women who had lost their husbands. In summer, I mowed lawns. And, you know, you did the newspaper route, so you raised a little bit of money. And I got into early Lincolns, the Indians, and I was collecting right at the point where the silver disappeared from our coinage. So, 1964.

So, I was able to still pull out of circulation silver Roosevelt dimes, and a few Washington quarters. My mother worked at a five and ten cent store in downtown Lewiston, Maine. So, she would go through the the cash and the change in her register and pull out the silver pieces and bring them home. So that's how I got my start.

But of course, by the time I became a teenager and entered high school, coin collecting kind of disappeared because there was....girls, right? The hormones kicked in.

GERRY FORTIN: There was sports. There was girls. There was so much more to do in high school than collecting coins. So, I put that away. Actually, my mother put whatever I collected in the attic of our home. And it wasn't until 1987 that I reengaged.

GERRY FORTIN: It was a fairly, a very lucky event in my life. My wife has four siblings. And at a Christmas get together in 1987, Diane's (my wife's) mom, bought each of the siblings a roll of Morgan dollars. You know, it's probably like off the Home Shopping Network or whatever, but she did that. So, Diane opens her gift and there is a roll of Morgan's, and they're mostly circulated or sliders. But she looks at it and she's the furthest thing from a coin collector. And she knew I liked coins. So, she hands me the roll, and said, "This is for you." I opened up the roll, started looking at it, and it was kind of like a switch flicked in my head. All the memories of collecting as a kid came back.

GREG BENNICK: So, this is 23, 24, 25 years after you'd been actively collecting. 20 years after you'd been actively collecting.

GREG BENNICK: And that sense memory was there and all of a sudden it just came back.

GREG BENNICK: That's amazing. So, what did you do in between, say, 1964/1965 and 1987 when you weren't collecting coins?

GERRY FORTIN: I was intensely focused on my semiconductor career. I graduated from the University of Maine with an electronics degree in 1978 and I went to work for IBM. So, this was in Dutchess County. This was at the infancy of the mainframe age. IBM had just released the 370 generation, 360, 370 generation of mainframe computers. And they were working on the next generation, and they were hiring. And luckily, I had some really sterling grades at UMaine, and I got hired. So, I spent six years in East Fishkill, New York, working on the development of processor chips for these mainframes.

GREG BENNICK: I love that many people follow a similar path, not semiconductors necessarily, but people follow a similar path in terms of they get really interested in coins and then it's either, you know, girls/dating, what have you, cars, anything like that in high school. And then they come back to it later somehow, some way through some fortuitous set of circumstances later in life. So, I'm really glad this roll of Morgan dollars came your way.

So, here's the missing question at this point. So, you get into Morgan dollars and then what happens in terms of being a coin collector, coin dealer. And I guess I'm asking in a sense a leading question because I'm curious about where this leads us in terms of eventually Seated dimes coming into play. What happened after that roll of Morgan dollars?

GERRY FORTIN: Okay. Well, that's a great question. So, the Morgan dollars lasted all of six months. It became pretty obvious, after going to a few coin shows, some coin shops, and I was subscribing to Coin World...there was always the large ads for, you know, BU Morgans that were all sliders. Remember those days?

GERRY FORTIN: Within six months, there was no challenge. I mean, you could go find Morgans. It was just a matter of how much money you had to build a set. There was nothing really rare about Morgans. So, I got bored. I'm a very intense individual. When I jump into a hobby or into a subject matter, I like to dive deep and explore and Morgans just didn't provide that stimulation. So, by the summer of 1988, I said, "That's it. I'm done with Morgans. I want to collect something really memorable." Liberty Seated coinage became the target. The question was what denomination? I really enjoyed civil war history. I'd read a number of books. I was just really a fan of the North and the South struggles during the Civil War. So, I wanted to collect coins that spanned that era.

One evening I grabbed the Red Book, sat in my chair, and I was going to make a decision. And after I made that decision, I was going to go for it. So looked at the values in the Red Book, the series, how long they were, key dates, the stoppers. So, half dimes were too small, and it was too short of a series. It was just not exciting. The Liberty Seated quarters were way too tough. Just a lot of low mintages, dates, a very expensive set to put together. And I had to consider finances too, at the time.

GREG BENNICK: Like some of the CC dates in there are extraordinarily rare and valuable.

GERRY FORTIN: Yeah. The CC dates. And, but there's just, the whole series is very tough. It's an expensive set to put together. And the half dollars were doable except for the 78-S. The 78-S is the stopper. That'll cost you $50-70,000 for one coin. So that left the dimes. And I said, "Okay, the dimes seem to be reasonable. The 74-CC is really tough. There's a few other dates, but you know, fine...VF." I thought, "I had the resources. I could pull this off."

GREG BENNICK: That's great. What was it in particular that attracted you to the denomination or rather the type? For many people, they look at Morgan dollars. They think that it's a big coin, Liberty's big on the front, and that's alluring and attractive. You picked a small coin amidst the Liberty Seated series. What was it about the Liberty Seated coinage itself that was attractive to you? Or was it just economical that you could access these coins for the budget that you had?

GERRY FORTIN: No, actually it was history. The history associated with that period in the United States was fascinating and I tend to be a history buff. My father was in the Korean War. He came back and he would build a lot of those plastic models of battleships and airplanes and tanks. And I got into that and before long, I was studying World War Two history.

So, I was studying Civil War history and World War Two history. So, the coins kind of spoke to me in terms of being historical artifacts. I wanted something that was struck during those turbulent times. And this was also going to be a bit of a financial investment because Liberty Seated coinage, I mean, quality in Liberty Seated coinage is not inexpensive. So that's pretty much the thinking at the time.

GREG BENNICK: Yeah, that makes sense. And it harkens to what you mentioned before about North and the South and the Civil War and those times and whatnot and what was happening in the United States that you were driven by, by history.

GERRY FORTIN: I was driven by history. So, I just wanted artifacts, to collect artifacts, from that period of time. That makes sense to me. When you make an initial decision, and you've got some parameters to guide you, then it develops afterwards.

GREG BENNICK: That makes sense, certainly. And I think that as you pick a type of coin to collect, you eventually find that even if it seems like you're narrowing your focus, then the world opens up from there as you dive in and become an expert like you did.

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.