Give this desk one last going over

I have just gotten my new desk assignment. This "Class of ’63" column will soon be written from desk No. 61 in our new office.

We are about to leave the only building I have known during my 40 years at Numismatic News. We are about to leave Iola, Wis., the place where Chet Krause founded this publication in 1952.

Come April 9, our new location will be about a half hour drive down the highway in the neighboring community of Stevens Point, Wis.

Naturally, the move will be difficult for me. Nobody likes to give up familiar surroundings. The harder part is culling the files, the books, the photos that we will take along. The rest will end up in a dumpster, or sold to secondhand vendors.

Before this moving process started, I had some files that dated back many years. They were the first to go. Someday, I suppose, I will be confronted with a question that the files could have answered.

Already, some of the books I have earmarked for disposition because I haven’t used them in several years suddenly came alive again as emailed questions arrived. The universe likes to play tricks, doesn’t it?

This desk-clearing, file-drawer emptying process is being repeated by every employee at every desk in this building. Try to imagine the volume of new trash being generated. Then double it.

One person showed up at my desk with a handful of foreign coins found in a long-lost drawer. The loose 1898 British penny was AU. New graders might even call it MS-63. Others were similarly well preserved even though they were loose. None was rare. None related to any business we had done in the last 40 years. The best guess was they were left behind when Chet Krause cleared out in 2002.

This building was almost new when I arrived in 1978. The general move-in had only occurred less than three years before at the end of 1975. Where we are going in Stevens Point is similarly endowed with a new smell.

Now the newness is long worn off here, and the present building is quite lived in. I can walk through it and remember when now long-gone employees were in their element and in their prime. Time marches on. There is no one here now who experienced the 1975 moving process.

Perhaps when the Iola Car Show takes over this location they will find an errant elongated cent or club medal in the very back of one of my desk drawers. You never know. I hope to be thorough as I depart and leave nothing behind but memories. I will also publish new contact information when I have it to make new memories.

More Collecting Resources

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