I knew Hans Schulman quite well. He was the ultimate ladies’ man and often had a beautiful lady with him when we had dinner. Very nice man, well-liked, and always happy. Never had a bad word to say about anyone.

In January 1973, I departed Vietnam for an Army school before being assigned to a Defense Communications Agency laboratory in Reston, Virginia for a four year tour. We rented an apartment and started buying living room and bedroom furniture, and also a desk, file cabinet, bookcases to furnish my office/library. I still own all of it (except the IBM Selectric typewriter) and added more over many years as you can see in the attached image.

In December 1975, I was called by the Pentagon that I was on emergency orders to report to an intelligence unit in Heidelberg, Germany and had less than 72 hours to be a flight from JFK! I started to question him about how I could pack everything in time. He said no problem because it would be packed for us and we would have a fully furnished quarters. Just bring two suitcases until our stuff arrives in two weeks. I told him I had an office that needed special packing and he said it would be carefully packed. I told him I needed two bedrooms so my office would have a place. He said no problem and was there anything else? I said everything was fine except now I had to explain to my wife that we were moving and she had to immediately quit her job.

A week or so after arriving in Heidelberg, I was surprised with a letter which was forwarded from our Reston address from Hans M.F. Schulman in Alicante, Spain! He told me that he had learned about me working on Southeast Asian numismatics and that it was a badly needed area of work for the numismatic community. I was impressed! He offered me photocopies of his card file and I immediately wrote back to him that I was now in Germany and would love to see copies of his card file. I started receiving envelopes in the mail to my local German address on a regular basis. He concentrated on the old gold and silver coins and ingots of Viet Nam.

It has taken me many years to learn enough about these coins and ingots to tell most of the differences between the original pieces from several generations of replicas made in Viet Nam and France. Hans sent only a few images but the data on the weights and measurements is extremely valuable, and I acquired most of the catalogs in which the coins were shown on their plate pages. I could not thank him enough for taking the time to supply all of this information to me. Our letters continued until I received a short note from his wife that he had passed away. I was very lucky to be able to learn so much from him and to add so much information to my database.

If any reader has information and/or images of Vietnamese gold and silver coins and ingots, please send it to me at HADANIEL3@MSN.COM or P.O. Box 880067, Port Saint Lucie, FL 34988-0067.

I have fond memories of the Schulman offices in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I had become interested in British coinage as a kid and they had terrific inventory. Mr. Schulman was always courteous and helpful when there, though I dealt mostly with one of his colleagues, Vincent (I can't remember his last name). But even though I wasn't even a teenager, I was always treated with respect -- something that has stuck with me almost fifty years later. Thank you the bio -- I knew the family had been in the business for a while, but I don't think I realized it had been that long.

Talk of the Schulman family in the last few E-Sylums had me writing to Laurens Schulman about an article I wrote last year on Hans and his father Maurits for ANS Magazine (2017 issue 2). Laurens was kind enough to point out an error I had repeated regarding the founder of the original firm, J. Schulman.

Online resources refer to him as Jacob “Jacques” Schulman, and John Spring, in his 2009 book on ancient coin auction catalogs, calls the founder “the first Jacques Schulman.” In fact, according to Laurens, his name was simply Jacob. Jacques, Laurens’s father, came later. Also causing confusion is the fact that, after the J. Schulman firm ceased operation during World War II, when Maurits, who was running the firm, was killed at Sobibór by the Nazis, Jacques Schulman, who had been operating his own firm since 1937, moved into the building where the J. Schulman firm had been operating for decades.

So the original J. Schulman (Jacob’s firm) was at 448 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam, up until the war, and Jacques Schulman, a different firm, was there after. I thought I had all the different Schulmans sorted out but apparently not! I hope this helps set the record straight.