GERRY FORTIN INTERVIEW, PART TWO

Greg Bennick's latest interview for the Newman Numismatic Portal is with Liberty Seated dime expert Gerry Fortin. Here's the second part, where Fortin talks about the early days of his semiconductor career and Seated dime collection, as well as his research on 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: So, were there Liberty Seated researchers or dealers throughout history that focused on Liberty Seated coinage that you admired or looked to before you became the expert on Liberty Seated dimes? Were there others who had paved the way a hundred years ago? That sort of thing.

GERRY FORTIN: Well, that's a great question. Because in 1989, I decided to join the Liberty Seated Collector's Club. Before that, in ‘88, after I made the decision to collect Liberty Seated dimes, I was looking in Coin World in the classifieds and there was a book put out by Kamal Ahwash that was published in 1977 and it was a second printing of the book. And it was specifically on Liberty Seated dimes. It was an encyclopedia. So, I ordered it. It came in and what was in that book was not only an analysis by date, but also major varieties.

Now, my background is that I'm a semiconductor engineer and my expertise is operations, testing, information management, yield enhancement. So, I've got a very inquisitive mind in terms of semiconductors. When I saw the book and the content, this was like opening a window to the minting process and understanding the manufacturing of that era.

GREG BENNICK: So the semiconductor manufacturing and the coin manufacturing...there were parallels in your mind.

GERRY FORTIN: Right. There are parallels. I mean, one's done in a clean room, one's done in a dirty sweatshop, but there's similarities because, you know, you've got to roll the alloy, you've got to make the planchets, you've got to polish them, then you've got to put them through a press, then you've got to count them. Um, you know, there was just that process while, you know, building a semiconductor wafer is similar, except it's much more complicated.

GREG BENNICK: So, you were still, in 1988, you were still in the semiconductor industry for many years as you began to study and collect coins.

GERRY FORTIN: Right. I'd been in the industry for 10 years, which is not that long. So, in 1986, I left IBM, we had our first child, and I decided that raising my son in Dutchess County, New York, which was just directly above, New York City...I just didn't think that was the best place. I had come out of Maine and a parochial school system and a Catholic high school. And I thought, "Eh, I think it's better to raise children up in Maine." So, we moved back, and I got a job at Fairchild Semiconductor in Portland, Maine.

GREG BENNICK: I like that. You've got this parallel life going on where you're gearing up with coins and still on proverbial fire working your way positively and successfully through semiconductors. So, it's pretty interesting that there were two lives basically being lived at the same time at this point.

GERRY FORTIN: Yeah, correct. I would work my semiconductor job. When I came back to Maine at IBM, I had done very, very well. Now here I am, I am in my late twenties and I'm managing some very sophisticated test equipment in an organization. And we were testing all these high-speed bipolar chips and doing the failure analysis and yield enhancement. And I'm 28 years old. So, coming back to Maine, I went to work for a, let's call it, a commercial semiconductor house, which was ages behind IBM. Very primitive. So, there I had to build all of these tools that I had at IBM before I could really do my job, which was just enhancing the productivity of the factories.

GREG BENNICK: So where, where we're at now is 1988 or so, and you've decided that Morgan dollars are boring, that Liberty Seated coins are interesting, that Liberty Seated dimes are doable...and in you go into Liberty Seated dimes. What happens from that point? Meaning you don't just start collecting by date. Something happens. I mean, where it triggers your collecting.

GERRY FORTIN: Well, number one, it was the, yeah, it was the Kamal Ahwash book. All right. That got me going. When I joined the Liberty Seated Collector's Club, I wrote a letter to the president, John McCloskey. I said, "I'm interested in Liberty Seated Dime varieties." All right. John McCloskey put me in touch with a gentleman named Brian Greer. Now, Brian Greer was, at that time, researching Liberty Seated dimes and was building a reference set for a book that was published in 1992. Within the Liberty Seated Collector's Club, he was also taking on the responsibility of doing a population survey. So there was a survey sheet of all the dates and major varieties. They sent it out to the club members, and everybody disclosed what they owned. But you know, there's a lot of work involved in making the template, sending it out, having all the responses, tabulating everything. Once you have the tabulation done, now you write articles for our publication, which was The Gobrecht Journal. So, I became the gopher. Essentially, I took on the role of doing all the administrative work. And Brian was thrilled to have somebody like me.

GERRY FORTIN: But at the same time, it was reciprocal because Brian was at that time, the authority on Liberty Seated dimes. So, I was able to get mentorship from Brian and he got an assistant. And the two of us really hit it off. I mean, we became friends. And after Brian published his book, he said, "I'm done. I put so much work into this. I'm moving on. I'm going to be a full-time coin dealer." I said, "Okay, I'll pick up from you. And I'm going to take this much, much further." And my model was the Overton book. So the Overton die variety book on Capped Bust halves. Now that's an incredible piece of research.

GERRY FORTIN: Right. So, I said, "Well, the model's there. I just have to take Liberty Seated Dimes and take it to that level."

GREG BENNICK: This falls right in line with what you said earlier, when you said, "I'm an intense individual," meaning devoted, intense, and all the above encapsulated in one word. You didn't just say, "Oh, Liberty Seated Dimes sound fun. I'll go to flea markets and buy one or two once a year for five bucks." You basically took the Olympic gold medal level research book on half dollars in the Overton book and said, "Yeah, that's the baseline. If it's that or better, I'm in good shape with these Liberty Seated dimes."

GERRY FORTIN: Yeah! And it was second nature to me because you have to remember that when I worked in the semi-industry, we had fantastic networks and databases because to manage yields in a semiconductor factory, you have to store so much data that's coming from the fabrication equipment, the test equipment, and then you have to have your trending tools, your linear regression tools, all the stuff that you need to make sense of what nobs or what defects you have to improve in the factory to get the productivity on each wafer up. So, I was just living that. To me, it was just natural. That's how I've been trained at IBM. So that same philosophy of researching the dimes and building a database, it was second nature. I knew the path to get to the Overton book for the dimes.

GREG BENNICK: Great. How did your collection grow as you started to collect? Where did you finding the pieces that you wanted? And how did it go from being, as you mentioned earlier, VF, a fine VF, into what it became eventually?

GERRY FORTIN: That's another great question. In the early years, there was a coin shop that was two blocks away from my office at Fairchild. And so, at lunchtime, I would take the car and go over and go see Bob Levy. Bob Levy managed Main Gold & Silver. And, you know, for fun, I would go pick his silver bullion buckets. As he bought silver, junk silver, as it came through, he'd just throw it in his big buckets. And every couple of days, I'd go through the buckets, and I'd pick out better date Mercury dimes and Walkers, whatever. And then one day I said, "Hey, Bob, you know, I'm collecting Liberty Seated Dimes." He goes, "Really?" He says, "I have a complete set." And yeah. He says, "...and I'd like to sell it. You want to buy it?" I said, "Well, Bob, I can't buy the whole set but show me what you got and let's figure out how I can, every week pick up a coin or something like that." And that's what happened.

I was able to go through his Dansco and pick out the coins that I wanted. He put them in little paper envelopes in a box and then he priced them. And every week I would come in with some cash and buy one. So that was one of the avenues for getting us some nice quality dimes. And then Bob told me stories because he knew Kamal Ahwash and he knew people in the business. He had been around. So, I got all the background on his coins.

GREG BENNICK: That's fantastic. When I started collecting Standing Liberty Quarters, I wouldn't have started, even though I always wanted to, were it not for a guy I met on the East Coast who had an almost complete set of Standing Liberty Quarters. I wanted to collect them in AU. He had an almost complete set of original AU Standing Liberty Quarters. He had decided that he wanted to buy a Trans Am or a Camaro or something, and he wanted to get rid of this set. So that's what started my collection was this block purchase of these quarters. So that's great to hear.

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.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
GERRY FORTIN INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n01a13.html)