Central States Numismatic Society

By the time you receive this, our 69th Anniversary Convention will be just a few weeks away. While I normally have a few things to say about the convention, I'd like to do something a little different this time and share with you my thoughts about our Fall Board Meeting, held last October in Winchester, Indiana. Meeting in Winchester was a bit of a departure from our past practice of generally having our interim Board meeting at a coin show or some other numismatic function. The Board had a number of significant issues to deal with and President Brandimore felt that meeting outside the context of a show would give us all a better opportunity to focus on those important and pressing matters with minimal distractions.

Leon Hendrickson and his son, David, served as our hosts and gave the Board a tour of their SilverTowne smelting and minting facility, where our CSNS convention medals are made. I'm certain, however, that such informal aspects of our gathering were secondary in most of our minds to the weightier issues we were all prepared to discuss at various levels of anticipated conflict and discord. Leon was away for a portion of the weekend, attending a military reunion of the ship he had served on during World War II. His birthday fell on our meeting weekend and when he returned home, the Board and various SilverTowne employees and Leon's family members gathered at a surprisingly good Winchester restaurant to share the occasion with Leon. After dinner, as he circulated a bit, I asked Leon about his reunion and he told me that he had served on the USS Caldwell during World War II and that there were about 50 members of his crew who still gathered each year.

When I asked Leon if he could recall where he was when he learned of the attack of Pearl Harbor, he explained that he was still in high school. He then said something very simple that I don't think I'll ever forget: "When I got out, we all went down and enlisted. That's what you did then, you just enlisted." He didn't say anything else and somehow I sensed that I shouldn't ask. When I went back to my room that night though, I thought I'd see what I could find out about this ship I'd never heard of. When I typed "USS Caldwell" on Google, I soon found myself reading an article about the ship this man I'd always thought of simply as a numismatic colleague had served on, with some place names I suspect too, many people today don't think about very much any more, "Attu," "Kiska," "Tarawa," "Wake Island," "the Gilbert Islands," "the Marshall Islands."

As I traveled home to Wisconsin the next day I thought a bit about how much we all owe men like Leon Hendrickson and others like him and I realized the things that had originally brought me to Winchester, that just a few days before had seemed so overwhelmingly important, were really quite trivial.

"When I got out, we all went down and enlisted. That's what you did then, you just enlisted."

I learned a lot that weekend.

Our visit to Winchester, Ind., was made especially pleasurable as we celebrated the birthdays of our hosts, Ruhama and Leon Hendrickson, and then had plenty of time for quiet visiting.

Kevin Foley