The Collectors Collector

Many, if not all, of us who have been collecting long enough recall the famous names which add a tremendous premium at auction or through private sale. As I'm embarking into a direction not yet taken, acquiring pre-1900 proof coinage, I thought of this subject reflecting on the collector I admire most. John Jay Pittman.

Born in rural North Carolina (1913) to a railworker father and school teacher mother, he was far from wealthy like the vast majority of those well known names which he became associated with. Even throughout his lifetime, employed as a chemical engineer for Kodak, his was a simple family oriented upper middle-class lifestyle. It wasn't so much what he collected, but how and why. Rather than chase popular rarities like so many others, his was the pursuit of the overlooked proof coinage. While many were paying hundreds if not thousands at the time for mint state examples he was adding proofs often no much over their face value comparatively. In short, he saw the true rarity. Countless dates with mintages below 10,000. He saw long term value, in his lifetime. Quite a few of his specimens, bought for under twenty dollars, were valued in the tens of thousands at the time of his death in 1996.

So who's your favorite and why?