Q. David Bowers
The Continental-Illinois Bank
You know about the Continental-Illinois Bank and how Eddie Milas later handled their vast hoard of silver dollars. What you don't know is that years ago when silver certificates were around I was buying silver certificates from Continental Bank. One day Continental called me up and asked me what I was paying and I said $1.50. The guy said that he would like to sell me half a million certificates. "Could you handle something like that?" he asked.
I said, "yeah I can handle it-you got yourself a deal, but one thing I want you to do, I want you to send tile 50,000 at a time 10 days in a row, sight draft every day so you got your money." He said, "You got it."
He hung up the phone, and every day 50,000 would come in. I'd run up to New York, sell 'em to my connection there, and have the money to pay for the next day's shipment. Well, this went on for 10 days in a row. This was in March or April of '68. The silver certificate sales ended on June 30th, 1968. After that, the government would not redeem them in silver, and they were worth only face value.
Investors Buy Bags
I also remember that Charlie Ross was a major dealer in silver dollars in the 19608. He was from Long Island, New York. He made a lot of money. He was a very smart person, and everything he did, he did right. He had many bags of silver dollars. He put investors into bags of silver dollars and made them sign contracts that when they sold he would get 20% of the profits. I remember that we shared a bank vault once, and he had something like 150 bags of Uncirculated dollars there.
One of the biggest investors was a guy named Russell Weith, owner of Novel Products. At one time, he must have had 100,000 silver dollars. A lotof these came from me, and were sold through Charlie Ross.
I had one client who bought 400 bags-that's 400,000 coins-of Uncirculated dollars from-me, including a lot of good dates. Irecall selling him bags of 1878-S, 1890-O, 1891-O, and others. Totally, he had 600 bags of dollars. I will tell you his name someday. In the meantime, it is confidential, for his father is a well-known public figure. He still has some of the dollars, and I have been buying them from him. At the recent ANA Convention I sold some 1890-O dollars I had recently bought back.
I took a particularly nice 1890-O dollar, that, of course, had never been in any dealer's hands before, as it came directly from an original mint bag. It had very nice toning. I sent it to [aleading certification service] and, guess what? It came back marked "cleaned" -which, of course, it wasn't! So, I sent it back, and guess what? It came back, now in a slab, and marked "prooflike."
A Postcard Campaign
At one time during the early months of the 1962-1964 Treasury releases, probably early in 1963, Harry J. Forman and Bernard Gimelson decided to cooperate and each send identical postcards to the Coin World mailing list, Harry to 50,000 on half the list, and Bernie to the other 50,000. Otherwise, Forman and Gimelson were competitors, but they did not want to butt heads on this. Forman submitted the printing order to Coin World which read as follows: (February 27 and 28, 1992, as part of the earlier quoted interview with Harry J. Forman.)
50,000 [cards to say the following]
Silver Dollar Special
1898-O, 1899-O, 1900-O, 1901-O, 1902-O, 1904-O-all strictly Brilliant Uncirculated!
One of each of the above date, $19.50 postpaid! Immediate delivery at these down-to-earth prices. Special delivery air mail, $1 extra.
Roll of each of the above dates, $265.00 postpaid. Harry J. Forman
P.O. Box 5756, Philadelphia, 20, Pa.
Ruth Bauer Remembers
In an interview Ruth Bauer, Harry J. Forman's partner, added her recollections of the silver dollar releases and the busy market. (Printing order from Coin World files supplied to the author by Beth Deisher.)
The 1950s
I used to work with David Bullowa in his Philadelphia coin business, and at that time we started dealing in quantities of silver dollars. I worked for him from 1947 until he passed away in 1953, and then I continued on with Catherine Bullowa (Catherine E. Bullowa (David's widow) operated her own business under the name of Coinbunter and is very active today. Her husband, Earl Moore, is a well-known dealer in autographs and manuscript properties.) until '57.
During that time in the last few years that I worked at the Bullowa shop on 18th Street it seems to me that I saw more silver dollars coming across the counter than I had ever seen in the first few years that I worked there. This indicated to me that there must have been small releases of silver dollars here and there. The general public wasn't interested at the time, and silver dollars were not particularly popular with collectors either.
When I started working with Harry, he was very involved in silver dollars. The coins were very available then, and I remember selling six different dates of Uncirculated Carson City dollars for $13.50.
It was different in the early days. Although Harry and I handled many bags of Uncirculated silver dollars, very few people were interested in buying bags from us. It was very collector-oriented back then, and there was very little investment action. Today, it is vastly different, and we are always being barraged for requests for bags. But in the 1950s people mostly bought single coins they wanted for their collection. Occasionally, we might find someone who wanted to buy a roll of 20 pieces.
Peace Dollars First
The whole situation of how silver dollars came out of the Treasury Department was very interesting to watch. I know that Harry told this to you, but I remember that the people who knew about silver dollars in the banks and at the Mint and Treasury made it clear that the government wanted to payout its Peace dollars before mint-sealed bags of Uncirculated Morgan dollars would be generally available. In other words, the Treasury Department had an internal policy that they were going to get rid of all the Peace dollars first, before they started giving out the better coins.
We were getting an awful lot of Peace dollars at that time.
Whenever anyone asked us about Morgans, we would say, "They're coming, they're coming," because that was the information we got from the insiders. These were very exciting times. Once the Morgan dollars came out, and word spread, there was a line stretching around the block at the Treasury Department. Down the street you could see a Brink's trailer parked. In my entire life I had never seen a Brink's trailer; I had seen plenty of their regular trucks, of course. We learned about the guy who hired it. He was out of Chicago, and he bought 1.5 million silver dollars, which is 1,500 bags. At that time the Treasury was not putting any limitation on the amount of bags you could take.
I want to say a few words about The Bridwell Report, that Harry mentioned to you. As orders poured in, I kept telling Harry, "You're not telling me the truth. You have an ad going somewhere, haven't you?"