The bid board
SoCalBigMark
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Downtown La Verne used to feel like a secret you earned.
You’d walk past the tidy storefronts and the college kids drifting between classes, and then—without warning—it would hit you. That sharp, unmistakable reek of cat piss. Acrid. Eye-watering. A smell that clung to your clothes and announced, you’ve arrived. If you could get past that, you were rewarded.
The coin shop looked like chaos given a lease. One entire long wall was buried under coins—slabbed, raw, toned, scratched, foreign, obscure, common, rare. This was the bid board. During the week you’d study it like scripture, scanning dates and mint marks, watching numbers creep upward in pencil. You learned fast who the serious players were. You didn’t know their names, but you knew their bidder numbers. When one of those numbers jumped in, you paid attention. That guy knew his sh*t.
The owner shuffled around behind the counter, unkempt and brilliant, a walking contradiction. He knew everything about coins—die varieties, strike quality, provenance—yet looked like he’d slept under the counter. His fake leg squeaked when he walked, a rhythmic complaint that somehow became part of the soundtrack. He smelled terrible. The shop smelled terrible. And none of that mattered.
If you were there when bidding closed, the real fun started. Numbers were drawn at random, and if yours came up, you won a silver coin. It didn’t matter if you were rich or broke or just learning—you had skin in the game. Then came the scramble. Coins everywhere. Hands reaching. Laughter. Groans. A free-for-all of knowledge and instinct. It was better than any classroom. You didn’t just learn coins—you learned people.
One afternoon, a guy wandered in who looked straight-up homeless. Mustard-stained shirt. More dandruff than hair. He carried a crumpled brown paper sack like it held yesterday’s lunch. He dumped it on the counter.
Inside was a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coins. Absolute monsters. Rare dates. Stunning condition. The kind of stuff you only see in auction catalogs. Everyone just froze. The owner didn’t miss a beat—no surprise, no judgment—just respect. That was the place. That was the magic.
Across the way was the smallest ramen shop on earth. Two people could fit inside, three if nobody breathed. People would line up and accidentally block the sidewalk, apologizing without moving. The chicken vegetable ramen came with a fried egg and a broth so perfect you didn’t dare touch the condiments. It needed nothing. It was complete.
Next door to that, I’d get my hair cut by an attractive woman who somehow made an ordinary haircut feel like therapy. After a week of stress, numbers, deadlines, and noise, that quiet human attention felt like a reset button.
Then, slowly, it all went away.
The ramen shop changed owners. The broth lost its soul. The coin guy died. New owners took over the shop. The smell disappeared. The chaos disappeared. The bid board became a sterile buy board. Clean. Efficient. Boring.
Yes, it smelled better.
But they ruined it.
What they didn’t understand was that the stink, the squeak, the mess—that was the culture. That shop wasn’t just a business. It was a place where knowledge passed hand to hand, where you learned by losing bids and winning scraps, where a guy with a paper sack could humble everyone in the room.
Downtown La Verne is still quaint. The college is still there.
But the secret is gone.
Comments
I reme.ber them from years back but on a smaller scale. I haven't heard of anyone doing this any more. Cool story 😉
That’s when the room really went quiet.
The guy with the rumpled brown paper sack wasn’t just some lucky eccentric—he was, you later learned, the treasurer of the Covina Coin Club. The mustard-stained shirt and dandruff weren’t a disguise exactly, just a side effect of someone who cared more about history than appearances.
After the first reveal—those jaw-dropping rarities in immaculate condition—people were already recalibrating their understanding of reality. Then he reached back into the sack again.
Out came a Capitol holder.
Not a random one.
All the keys.
High grade. Clean. Original. The kind of set most collectors only ever see as a grainy photo in an auction catalog with a price estimate that makes you swallow hard. A few guys instinctively leaned closer, like proximity alone might help them absorb what they were seeing.
And then—because apparently reality hadn’t broken enough—he went back into the sack again.
This time it was the entire Educational Series note set.
Not “nice for the grade.”
Not “solid.”
PQ. Crisp, balanced margins, color that still looked alive. Notes that had no business being folded into a brown paper sack like leftovers from lunch.
That was the moment you realized what that shop really was.
It wasn’t about the smell.
It wasn’t about the chaos.
It wasn’t even about the deals.
It was a crossroads where absolute monsters of the hobby could walk in looking invisible, drop history on the counter, and be met not with disbelief—but with understanding. No gasps, no theatrics. Just nods, quiet respect, and serious conversations about paper quality, originality, and survival.
That’s why the buy board never worked.
You can sanitize a room, but you can’t sanitize culture.
You can clean the air, but you can’t bottle moments like that.
A homeless-looking guy with a paper sack casually redefining what collector means.
A squeaking fake leg keeping time while knowledge passed from one bidder number to another.
Silver coins won by chance, lessons learned by loss.
That place didn’t just sell coins.
It created numismatists.
And once it was gone, nothing shiny or clean ever quite replaced it.