KEN BRESSETT INTERVIEW, PART FOUR

GREG BENNICK: Well, along the lines of those adventures, you've mentioned B. Max Mehl and William Sheldon and some other folks. Are there other characters, other people from the history of the hobby that today are of course legendary, but who were contemporaries of yours that you remember stories about?

KEN BRESSETT: Oh yeah! Well, like John Ford.

GREG BENNICK: Sure. What could you tell us about John Ford?

KEN BRESSETT: He was absolutely a character. I say that—yeah, just absolutely. I got along fairly well with John. He was brief and not very close to anybody. I mean, most people didn't like John because he was so arrogant and so short with everybody. And not that he liked me very much, but I was able to stand up to him.

We'd go out to dinner at a convention, and John would bring his own food along with him and have a chef keep it in the kitchen because he wouldn't eat the hotel food.

GREG BENNICK: Really?

KEN BRESSETT: Wherever he was, it didn't matter. I remember one time he said, "For dessert, I want strawberries—fresh strawberry shortcake." And the chef said, "Well, they're out of season. We don't have them." He said, "Don't tell me that you don't have them. Send somebody out and find them. They're here somewhere in New York." (Laughs)

GREG BENNICK: Wow.

KEN BRESSETT: Yeah, he was that kind of a guy. He had a real beef with the United States government because he wanted to collect gold coins of all kinds, especially territorial coins. And you weren't supposed to own gold at that time.

GREG BENNICK: Right.

KEN BRESSETT: So he said, "Government be damned. I'm going to make my own. I'll show them what's what." He had this friend, Paul Franklin, who was a master engraver and another associate with John. The two of them made plans to have coins made in Italy that were really replicas or nonsense or fantasy coins, all made of gold. And some out-and-out counterfeits. They practically disrupted the whole collecting community during that time.

GREG BENNICK: Wow.

KEN BRESSETT: Yeah. So, these are characters.

GREG BENNICK: It certainly sounds like it. Absolutely.

KEN BRESSETT: Yeah. And very few people knew about all that went on, and I'm not going to try to get into all of that here.

GREG BENNICK: Sure.

KEN BRESSETT: There are things still that people don't know. And they shouldn't know. So many dealers got stuck with these coins that nobody wanted to be the one to break the whole story open.

GREG BENNICK: Got it. So, but they were counterfeits essentially that were being manufactured.

KEN BRESSETT: Yeah. And then a lot of them got into the Lilly collection. They took him as a patsy. Eli Lilly didn't know enough about coins to realize that they were selling him these fakes, which he eventually donated to the Smithsonian.

And then when some of us serious collectors wanted to go there and examine them and find out what's what, we were refused entry to the Smithsonian to do that.

GREG BENNICK: Wow.

KEN BRESSETT: Eric Newman, myself, John Pittman, and a couple of others— we tried to get into the Smithsonian to see those and were denied that.

GREG BENNICK: Interesting.

KEN BRESSETT: So anyway, those are just some of the people that I knew and interacted with and had a lot of fun with.

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 via instagram @minterrors. He can also be reached by email at minterrors@gmail.com.

To watch the complete video, see:
Ken Bressett, Interviewed by Greg Bennick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emQlt4zLTxU&t=1s)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
KEN BRESSETT INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n22a17.html)
KEN BRESSETT INTERVIEW, PART TWO (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n23a18.html)

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