posted 04-18-2017 07:05 AM               

Jim was an avid collector of really top quality lunar surface objects from the Apollo era. He was also a poster on this forum over the years, having been a member since 2008.

Jim was more than a space collector. He was a collector's "collector," philanthropist, auction house owner and, in the end, just a pleasant gentleman.

Jim collected objects related to old country stores and later donated the entire collection, as well as the actual country store, to the City of Palm Springs, California as a museum. He was an avid coin collector in his youth. He and his partner, David Bowers, opened a coin auction house that would become one of the largest coin auction houses in the world. In 1977, they sold the Real Eight Company's salvaged coins and ingots from the 1715 Treasure Fleet. Pete Conrad and Al Worden used silver ingots given by members of the Real Eight Company to cast Robbins medallions for their flights to the moon.

posted 04-18-2017 08:05 AM               

As Larry noted, Jim joined cS in 2008 but he did not make his first post until three years later. Here is, in part, how he introduced himself:

In 1998, after collecting letters of the Presidents of the U.S. and of Neil Armstrong for many years, I purchased a tie-down strap from Apollo 12. I was "hooked"! Having an artifact that was on the Moon, another world, fascinated me. I sold all of my letters and now have a collection of 20 NASA artifacts that were flown to the surface of the Moon.

posted 04-18-2017 09:58 AM               

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posted 04-18-2017 03:33 PM               

As far as collecting/dealing goes, he was best known for coin collecting/dealing, and was one of the prime movers and shakers in the numismatic field (coins, medallions, bills, etc.) during the 1970s. He was one of the two founders of the Bowers and Ruddy numismatic auction house. He created a book called Photograde, that showed how different coins look at different grade levels (the more wear a coin has the lower the grade, and the less valuable the coin) that became an item to have in a coin collector's library. There is a thread about his death on the Collector's Universe US Coins website. Here is what I posted over there.

What an excellent day for him to die.

I assume most of you don't know this, but after he got out of coins (what finally pushed him essentially all the way out was the introduction of TPG's), he bounced around in collecting for a little bit, and then got FULL blown into collecting early space memorabilia, in particular items flown on the Apollo missions. I've had a variety of interesting talks with him about collecting both space memorabilia and coins. He was kind enough to even give me a piece of lead from Gene Cernan's Apollo 17 lunar surface flown mechanical pencil.

A year or two ago he disposed of his space collection, essentially in its entirety, to a well known Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley.

The reason April 12 was such a good day for him to die was that it was the 56th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight, Vostok 1, flown by Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961, and the 36th anniversary of the first space shuttle flight, STS-1, flown by John Young and Bob Crippen, launched on April 12, 1981. I think one thing, at least by most space memorabilia collectors that I know, is that we would prefer America to be first in space, but we are certainly willing to celebrate other countries' space exploits as well, as it all has to do with the advancement of the human species.