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MidLifeCrisis

Numismatic History – John Jay Pittman

A lot has been written about John Pittman and his collection. You can easily find information online and in books. My intent with this post is to try to capture some of the little known facts about the man, the experiences that influenced his perspective, and his collecting philosophy.

John Pittman was born in Chase City, Virginia, not far from the North Carolina state line, in February, 1913. He grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and died in 1996 at his home in New York, one day before his 83rd birthday.

Pittman served with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, European Theater of Operations, during World War II. This survey was established by the Secretary of War on 3 November 1944, pursuant to a Directive from President Roosevelt, to document an impartial and expert study of the effects of the 1943-1945 Anglo-American bombing of Nazi Germany. The Survey operated from headquarters in London and established forward headquarters and regional headquarters in Germany immediately following the advance of the Allied armies.

A chemical engineer and executive for many years with the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, Pittman took an early retirement at age 58 that enabled him to further pursue his ambitions as a leader and representative in local and regional numismatic organizations. He served on the Board of Governors of the ANA from 1959-1963, 1965-1979, 1981-1985, and 1987 to 1989. In 1971 Pittman was elected president of the ANA while at the same time serving as president of the Canadian Numismatic Association and the Mexican Numismatic Association. He was president of the Organization of International Numismatics from 1973 to 1975. He also served as president of the Middle Atlantic Numismatic Association and the Empire State Numismatic Association.

Pittman received the ANA Medal of Merit in 1962 and the Farran Zerbe Award in 1980. He also received the Numismatic News Numismatic Ambassador Award in 1985, and was inducted into the ANA Hall of Fame in 1992. His efforts on behalf of the ANA are probably best demonstrated by his service as Chairman of the Gifts and Bequests Committee from 1985 to 1987. In that capacity he obtained more gifts and bequests than anyone else in the history of the ANA.

Pittman was very guarded about many specific coins he owned and, in interviews, was usually only willing to talk about those he had exhibited at conventions.

I recently posted the following story in another thread:


<< <i>The Statue of Liberty Play

His intense love of coins, which won J.J. Pittman many admirers, proved daunting to at least one fellow collector, Phil Kaufman, the buyer of the boxed 1844 Proof Set, recalled seeing Pittman at several numismatic
gatherings. “I never spoke to him,” Kaufman said. “His knowledge was so superior to mine, I felt intimidated about approaching him.”

Kaufman was not alone. David Akers recalls an auction 41 years ago when one of the legends surrounding Pittman was born. “It was April 27, 1956 in Indianapolis,” he recounts as if it were yesterday, “during Abe Kosoff's
auction of the Thomas G. Melish Collection. John Pittman came there determined to own all five Proof Indian Head gold dollars on sale—at reasonable prices. How he did so is pure Pittman and explains how he was given the
nickname, ‘Statue of Liberty.’

“As Kosoff called Lot 1742, a Proof 1854 Indian Head gold dollar, Pittman stood, walked to the front of the room, turned his back on the auctioneer and faced the crowd. Then he raised his arm and held it aloft through all the
bidding. He glared intently at each bidder as the auction continued. He stared them down and made them blink. He did this for all five coins and won them at reasonable prices.” >>


However, according to Q. David Bowers, “…somehow, it has crept into print that John bid in a “Statue of Liberty pose,” resolutely standing with his hand fixed in the air, as to frighten all competition, in practice this may have been the case once or twice, but was not his normal method. Instead, John liked to lay red herrings across the trail. If he desired Coin A, any presale discussions were bound to center around Coin B or Coin C. If Coin A were brought up to John, he would brush it off, indicating it seemingly was of no interest. Of course, this was simply a clever way to protect his own strategy. As a longtime auctioneer I saw him do this many times, and also engage in other activities so as not to attract attention—such as giving secret signals to the auctioneer or placing the bids with someone else. If anything, John was smart, smart.”



In 1954, Pittman and his wife, Gehring, mortgaged their home to finance a trip to Egypt to participate in the King Farouk Palace Collection auction. The following is extracted from an interview of Pittman conducted by Mark Van Winkle (editor of Legacy magazine at the time) concerning the Farouk Sale:


<< <i>LEGACY: You went to the Farouk sale in 1954?

PITTMAN: Oh, yes. My wife and I went. I got a group of collectors together to go so we could bid against the dealers to be sure we got something.

LEGACY: How were the prices?

PITTMAN: Well, the prices were not cheap. I would say there were a lot of sour grapes about that sale. Dealers who didn't go said the catalog wasn't done well, but that's probably just because they weren't there. You had to
know the lots, because everything was in large lots. Nevertheless, if you figured out what the per- unit cost was you made out very well.

LEGACY: Did you just buy U S. out of there?

PITTMAN: Oh, no. I went there to buy rare foreign, because they had lots of rare foreign. A lot of the foreign material you see in my display here in Cincinnati came from the Farouk Sale. We also had a 1933 $20 gold piece
removed from the auction. I did that.

LEGACY: You had it removed?

PITTMAN: Oh, yes, because they are illegal and it was to be turned over to the US.

LEGACY: But it wasn't illegal in Egypt.

PITTMAN: No. But we have reciprocity agreements with most governments, and it was illegally removed from the Mint. It never was officially issued. The $10.00 gold piece was.

LEGACY: I understand that a lot of US dealers at the time wanted to go to the Farouk Sale but did not attend because they were fearful for their lives because of a possible overthrow of the government.

PITTMAN: I think that Is true.

LEGACY: Did you think you were personally endangered by going there?

PITTMAN: I thought I might be, so I took out a lot of insurance. Nevertheless, I was willing to take the chance, because having known about the overthrow of the French monarchy under Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the
sale in London later on of their material I knew this sort of sale doesn't happen but once every hundred or 200 years. You have to take a chance, because if you don't take a chance, you don't benefit. And by getting enough
collectors together who had deep pockets, we were able to persuade the dealers that we better get some of it. All of us were customers of those dealers. We told them it's a two-way street and to remember that this sale is
only once but we're going to be a customer, hopefully, of those dealers over a long period of time. The prime dealers there from the U.S. were Kosoff, Kaplan and Hans Schulman. There were some minor dealers there also.
Since I was a long time customer of Kosoff, and to a lesser extent Kaplan and Schulman, and we were good friends as well, we were able to come up with a solution to many problems. We made sure they got some of the
things they were looking for, and they made sure I got some of the things I was looking for. To me, that's the best way to operate.

LEGACY: How did you pay for the auction lots? Did you pay in Egyptian pounds?

PITTMAN: We paid for everything with international traveler's checks or with a letter of credit, which was transferred officially at the same rate as the British pound, which was $4.03 at that time. We had to pay every day,
including the government tax, we couldn't run a tab at all.

LEGACY: I have heard two different stories about the cleaning of Farouk's coins. The first story is that he had a cleaning room, and he cleaned all of them himself. The second is that he did not clean them but the Egyptian
government and the people who handled the coins for the Egyptian government cleaned all the coins.

PITTMAN: Neither of them are true. He had a conservator, a museum curator, who used what they called plate powder, British plate powder. He cleaned some coins, especially some of the copper and some of the patterns.
But very little, if any, of the silver or gold was ever cleaned. So that's not true, and Farouk had nothing to do with the cleaning. Also a number of the coins had nitrocellulose lacquer on them. It comes off very easily with a little
acetone but not everyone knew that and many who saw an otherwise beautiful coin like the 1827 quarter thought it was all bad. I knew what it was, so after I bought it I just took a little acetone and took the nitrocellulose
lacquer right off it. By the way, a lot of the modern-day proofs being made in England are lacquered right at the mint when they are made.

LEGACY: Farouk was still alive at the time of the sale, wasn't he?

PITTMAN: Oh, yes. He lived for many years after it. He abdicated about a year before the sale and went to Italy, allegedly with a number of paramours. Allegedly the British started feeding him wine, women and song when he
was a young cadet in England. He actually bought the 1839 English proof set that was in the sale from Spink himself while he was in school in England. He really was a collector and he had a number of good friends in the coin
business. Hans Schulman was one. Hans was one guy who would let Farouk run a tab, so Hans sometimes didn't get paid for a long time. When the sale came, Hans had about a hundred thousand outstanding. But after the
first day, the government made an agreement that they would pay him and honor their obligation. >>


Between 1997 and 1999, the Pittman Collection was sold at a series of three public auctions for prices totaling more than $30 million – making it one of the most valuable coin collections ever sold at auction. Pittman’s initial outlay probably came to just a few hundred thousand dollars. Interestingly, Pittman never owned an 1804 silver dollar or a 1913 Liberty Head nickel. Those great rarities were far less costly 60 years ago than they are today – but nonetheless their prices were high in relation to other rare coins, so Pittman chose to spend his limited resources on coins that, in his opinion, were still “sleepers.”



1740 Mo MF Mexico Pillar Dollar MS62 (PCGS) Ex-David Aker's August, 1999 sale of the John Pittman collection, lot #2903.





Sources:
1. American Numismatic Biographies, by Pete Smith, 2010 (http://www.coinbooks.org/resources/anb_2010.pdf)

2. “An Interview with John J. Pittman”, by Mark Van Winkle

3. Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Bombing_Survey_(Europe) )

4. United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report, (European War)
(http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm)

5. “Remembering John Pittman”, by Q. David Bowers

6. http://www.learcapital.com/rarecoins/1066/detail.html

7. “Great Coins, Great Collectors”, Universal Coin and Bullion’s Investor Profit Advisory
(http://www.universalcoin.com/articles/great-coins-great-collectors.html)