A New Columbian Collection for Sale

I am very excited to announce that I have just made a quick flight to Chicago (from Seattle) and then a two-hour drive in a rental car to very rural Lawrence, Michigan, to pick up the Reuben Rodriguez WCE collection. I will be selling it over the next several months.

Reuben Sr. passed away recently and I have been communicating with his son, Reuben Jr. since the beginning of the year. It’s amazing how Columbian connections, clients and friends are interwoven. Reuben Jr. found me based on a recommendation from Dan Hale, the son of a major collector and now a significant WCE collector in his own right.

In 1989—and it’s hard to realize how long ago that was!—I was in Lakeland, Florida, to attend a major collectibles show and the auction of the William Hale collection of Columbian medals. That is Dan’s dad and I did an inordinate amount of buying at that show and the auction. Thirty-four years ago I was not doing a lot of flying around the country attending shows (I attended American Numismatic Association national events when they were in the Western U.S. but going to Florida was out of the ordinary for me; Florida is about the farthest away (3,000+ miles) from Seattle as one can get in the 48 contiguous states.)

I was far more involved with publishing than collectibles at the time and I rationalized that Florida wasn’t that much out of the way….for a trip to New York. I spent many years flying Seattle-New York-Seattle three times a year to visit book publishers. Adding Florida to New York to that trip was not too daunting via air. And driving one-way from Reuben’s house to mine (2,200 miles) was a tough drive this June, but as much as I’m always up for a good road trip, you won’t catch me driving Seattle to Florida to New York to Seattle, which would be more than 7,000 miles!

So via that circuitous route, from the William Hale collection to Dan Hale to Reuben Sr. and eventually to Reuben Jr, one of my sons and I covered that 2,200 miles in just three days, accompanied by the Rodriguez collection.

I am at the earliest stages of inventorying and photographing the collection and if anyone would like to contact me, I’d be happy to share more information about just what’s in the collection. Since a half dozen tickets don’t take up much space, Reuben mailed them to me a couple months before I undertook the fly/drive trip.

And the small number of tickets were quite a rare bunch. Outside this group, the most expensive WCE ticket I’m aware of was in my collection that Heritage sold in 2008, $3,100 (before commission) for the unique Camera Obscura ticket. The new all-time most expensive WCE ticket came from Reuben Rodriguez.

The small number of tickets Reuben Jr. sent me and their sales price (net, as there were no buyer’s fees) made up quite an excellent group. These included:

• The new all-time most expensive WCE ticket, a pass to the Kilauea Volcano on the Midway—$3,475
• Ferris Wheel Ticket that sold very inexpensively—$1,300
• Ben Franklin #00000 Specimen ticket—$785
• Intramural Railroad ticket—$385
• Moving Sidewalk ticket—$375

A few other non-WCE/non-Rodriguez tickets in the sale included two 1876 Centennial train tickets ($120 each), a pass to the 1901 Pan Am Buffalo World’s Fair ($375), a 1926 Sesquicentennial rodeo ticket ($225) and a pass to Portland’s 1905 Lewis & Clark Expo ($135). One additional WCE lot that was not from the Rodriguez collection was a very underpriced group of 4 consecutively numbered Day of Sale 1/S tickets that sold for only $100.

The collection also contained a few admission tickets, just the typical, nothing like the very scarce specimen ticket.

And adding to this somewhat ironic twist involving Bolotin, Hale Jr. and Sr. and Rodriguez Jr. and Sr., when I glanced through a stack of papers in Reuben’s collection I found a 2008 Heritage invoice to Reuben Sr. It seems he participated in a big way in the auction of my personal ticket collection. The collection brought a total of about $40,000 and $7,700 came from Reuben Sr.

A frustrating element in all this was that we could NOT find the majority of the tickets listed on that invoice. Reuben Jr. said his father never sold any of his Columbiana, so somewhere in the house or tucked away in the paper items I will be going through, there could well be about 20 lots from the 2008 auction (a total of more than 100 tickets) that so far are AWOL.

Besides tickets, highlights of the Rodriguez collection include:

• About 40± glassware items including many “ordinary” ruby flashed pieces and several quite scarce larger and unusual items.
• 35 medals, the only group I’ve inventoried thus far. While there aren’t any rare medals, there are several that should fetch $250-$500 each.
• A large stack of books and periodicals/portfolios/photographs
• A dozen glass slides
• An enormous collection of silver and plated spoons, including a few very scarce ones featuring the Ferris Wheel and Mrs. Potter Palmer.
• The odd lots include a whiskey bottle, cast iron bank and walking stick with a metal bust of Columbus.

It’s a quite nice collection including some outstanding individual pieces.

I am tentatively planning TWO world’s fair sales, possibly one in the fall and another in the winter. Besides Reuben’s 35 medals, I will be adding more than 50 to the group (including many raw and slabbed rarities). Included are several gem prooflike high relief aluminum liberty medals plus a 90-mm bronze prooflike example of the Mayer design.

I will likely have one of those two sales devoted entirely to Columbiana with the second one including medals and tickets from other world’s fairs, plus very high grade BU and proof US coins.

I will also beginning listing an excellent cross section of material on Ebay and in my own non-Ebay store beginning about the first of July. These will include rarities in several categories: proof and BU US coins, error and ancient coins, Civil War tokens and Sanitary Fair medals and tokens, and selections from two other outstanding world’s fair collections—from 1901 Buffalo and 1904 St. Louis. It may take more than Ebay listings and two major sales to work through the massive inventories I have inhouse. The single common denominator throughout is rarity and exceptional high grades in virtually all of what we will be selling.

Coming soon—an article about unknown varieties of official government struck WCE medals, HK154 and 155.

I am always anxious for your questions and comments. One thing I’ve learned in 44 years of studying the WCE is that I never stop learning and discovering new information.