ABOUT THIS ISSUE: MAY 18, 2025

Tuesday evening I was looking forward to attending the Fairfax Coin Club meeting to hear John Kraljevich speak. It was not to be. It was raining that night and traffic on the Washington Beltway was horrendous - after two and a half hours I was still crawling and would miss most of the meeting, so I just bailed when I had the chance to get off and head home for the evening. Sorry I missed it.

While I'm heading up to Pittsburgh at the end of the month for the PAN show, I was unable to arrange another visit for this week's Early American Coppers (EAC) show. How was it? If you attended, let us know.

Thursday afternoon was spent more pleasantly - at Orioles Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore with a group of coworkers watching a game against the Minnesota Twins. With both teams near the bottom of their divisions, the question of the day was, "Which team will outstink the other?" In the early innings two outfielders ran into one another like Little Leaguers. But there was no rain, good company, and a pleasant afternoon was had by all. Nothing remotely numismatic to report other than that the entire ballpark was cashless, even the parking lots. I could only laugh after buying a big box of popcorn to snack on and finding when I opened it at my seat that it was barely half full. Apparently "some settling of contents may have occurred."

On Saturday I was having trouble with Editor's comments like these - the grey box wasn't displaying. I asked Bruce to investigate. But after a while, I realized I'd raised a false alarm. After my cataract surgery my vision is much brighter. On my external monitor the color was appearing white to me. Moving the window to my laptop I could see the color again. I retuned the settings on my monitor and I'm good now. Sorry, Bruce! Another Senior Moment of sorts. I'm not getting any younger, and will turn 67 the day after the August ANA.

Meanwhile, Garrett Ziss has graduated from the University of Pittsburgh (my hometown Alma Mater) - congratulations! See his updated bio below - he's continuing on for a Master's. More congratulations, and good luck! -Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is pursuing a Master's Degree in Quantitative Economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
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.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org site, making the club and our E-Sylum archive available to collectors and researchers worldwide.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.