World's Fair that Follows the Money - San Francisco Chronicle

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 27, 2005



Bay Area residents can see legal tender taken to a whole new level this week, as coin and currency collectors from around the globe gather at San Francisco's Moscone Center for the World's Fair of Money. 

The event, which opens today and runs through Sunday, is the annual convention of the American Numismatic Association, which bills itself as the world's largest organization for collectors of coins, paper money and other valuable memorabilia.

And the best part is that admission to the two floors of exhibits that feature, among other things, three U.S. Treasury Notes worth $1.1 billion, is absolutely free.

"Where else can you see a billion dollars and not spend a penny," quipped conference spokesman Donn Pearlman. 

The real action for currency aficionados will occur on the first-floor trading room where serious numismatists will swap or sell the rare coins, bills, medals and documents that are their stock in trade. 

But the jaw-dropping action, for those whose money habits incline more toward spending than collecting, will be on the second floor.  There, a 20- nation display will be headlined by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which produces those green scraps of paper that never seem to linger long enough in the wallet. 

In sheer dollar value, nothing will top the display featuring three coupon certificates -- two worth $500 million each, and the third a mere $100 million. 

The ornately printed notes carried interest coupons at the bottom.  Investors were supposed to clip these coupons every six months and bring them to the bank to redeem the interest.   A single coupon clipped off the seven-year, $500 million note issued in 1969 at 6.25 percent interest was redeemable for $15.625 million. 

Another highlight will be two dozen $100,000 bills bearing the likeness of President Woodrow Wilson.  The big bills were never in general circulation.  Instead they were issued for the exclusive use of large financial institutions. 

"Before electronic-funds transfer this was how banks moved large sums around,'' Pearlman said. 

Many of the exhibits are rich with history.  Southern California coin trader Steven Contursi lent the show one of the stars of his collection, a silver dollar struck in 1794 that bears the distinction of being the very first such coin minted by the fledgling United States of America. 

Contursi, 53, who started collecting coins when he was a paper boy in the Bronx, explained the backstory. 

In the early days of the American republic, Spanish reales were in wide currency in the former British colonies.  These silver dollars were called pieces of eight and were literally broken to give change, which is how "two- bits" became slang for a quarter.

The new American nation wanted its own dollar to compete with this Spanish coin, and on Oct. 15, 1794, its moneymakers minted about 2,000 silver dollars, about 1,750 of which were deemed good enough to go into circulation. 

"Like the Declaration of Independence is to our freedom, this dollar is the birth of our international economy,'' Contursi said. 

But there was just one rub.  The makers of the 1794 edition used a press designed for a smaller coin, and so it was decided to wait until the next year, when a bigger press with more oomph was obtained, to start pumping out U.S. silver dollars in earnest.   Yet to collectors, the historic significance of this 1794 issue and the fact that it appears to be the first of the run, makes Contursi's bum buck so valuable that it is insured for $10 million.

Near the money counters, coin collector-turned-document-hound Brian Hendelson was setting up a display of a July 17, 1776, copy of the Declaration of Independence that played its own role in the early days of the nation. 

As Hendelson explained, about 50 copies of the original Declaration were printed in Philadelphia and sent home with the delegates who had voted to secede from Great Britain.  These master copies contained instructions that they should be printed and distributed to every parish and congregation, and be read after services.

"This is how they got the word out,'' Hendelson said.  But many ministers, fearful that British troops would catch them with this radical document, destroyed their copies.  The one on display in San Francisco, printed in Salem, Mass., had been squirreled away and handed down until it came into his collection.  And the rest, as they say, is history. 
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World's Fair of Money
-- Moscone Center West

10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. today-Saturday 
10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday 

Free 

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com