A more enthusiastic person than Robert Feiler you are not likely to find nor one more generous when it comes to sharing his passion, which is money, and which he often gives away.
“Here, take this,” he said, “I’d like you to have it.”
He deposited in my hand a small bag that looked like some kind of exotic salad concoction that you might be served at one of the city’s nouvelle froufrou restaurants. But it was actually a bag of shredded currency in the amount of “approximately $364.”
It is what is called “Fed shreds,” a plastic bag that came from the Money Museum (www.chicagofed.org), one of the city’s least known but fascinating museums, tucked in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago at 230 S. LaSalle St.
You must, as at airports, pass through a metal detector in order to gain entrance. But admission costs not one cent, and the place is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (A bit more on this later)
So, Feiler gave me the bag of shredded money and then began a lively two-hour conversation during which he gave me not only more money (a 1964 British penny, three 1943 Lincoln Steel Cents), but also an understanding of the joys he and others derive from collecting and a new appreciation for money of all kinds and shapes.
It may make the world go ’round, but money is so often taken for granted; when was, outside of a tavern game of liar’s poker, the last time you gave a bill a second glance? And here we are in a new world of cryptocurrency, bitcoin mania and coffee shops that won’t accept cash for a latte — staring into a time when we might not use coins and paper currency at all?
Before that coming apocalypse, let’s go back where it all started for Feiler, a small apartment on the North Side where his father worked as the building janitor and his mother one day gave him a small purse that a neighbor had given to her.
“I was 6, maybe 7, and I just was so taken with the coins in that purse, they were so old and cool,” said Feiler. “I nagged my mother to take me to the third floor of Marshall Field’s (which then had a coin and stamp department), and I found a picture of one of the coins in a book and I was hooked.”
Like many kids of that 1960s era, he began a coin collection (for others it might have been stamps or baseball cards). He was aided a bit by his job working the cash register — “I was always looking through the change,” he says — at the neighborhood pharmacy while attending grammar school at Nettelhorst and high school at Lake View. He enrolled at Southern Illinois University with the intention of becoming a pharmacist but instead wound up with a bachelor of science in management and met the woman who would be his wife, Karen, who would eventually pursue a career in social work.
“That’s when the collecting stopped, when I sold my collection to help with a down payment on our first house,” he said. “The collection only sold for about $2,000, but it helped a lot.”
In the mid-1980s, his passion was rekindled and he began going to coin shows, joined a couple of coin clubs and began collecting again.
“There are not as many coin clubs as there once were, not as many dealers, and there are not too many women involved in this hobby, never have been,” he said. “The internet has surely played a part in changing the landscape, but when we gather at meetings and shows there is no denying the passion and enthusiasm.”
Now retired after a career in the manufacturing business, most of them with the Melrose Park firm of Mech-Tronics, he is a respected collector and appraiser. He and Karen’s three children grown and out of the house, he has become a talented researcher/writer, contributing to a variety of publications and books and often giving speeches at coin clubs across the nation.
He is a member and past-president of the Chicago Coin Club (www.chicagocoinclub.org, where you will find much valuable information), which was born here in 1912 as the somewhat less catchy and certainly less alliterative American Numismatic Association Branch No. 1. It reorganized under its current name in 1919.
Here he is writing about the early days (as in 1850s) of the Bank of Chicago for one of the CCC’s publications. “A hired medium, Mrs. Herrick, was put on staff to provide officers with the advice of departed spirits, the most famous of which was Alexander Hamilton. If a potential customer was not approved by Mrs. Herrick or Alexander Hamilton, the bank’s burly bouncers would unceremoniously throw the person out into the street.”
You just cannot escape Hamilton these days in Chicago, can you? There is the hit musical, of course, and the coming-in-November “Hamilton: the Exhibition” on Northerly Island. And at the Money Museum there is a fine and informative exhibit devoted to the father of our country’s financial system. The place also has historic currency, interactive games and many other handsomely mounted exhibits, such as “U.S. Military Currencies,” “Evolution of Money” and “Guarding Against Counterfeiting.” Eye-grabbing are three displays, each containing $1 million: a suitcase of $100 bills, a mound of $20s and a spinning cube filled with $1s.
“Hamilton was on the first $5 note ever issued by the U.S. government,” said Feiler.
Then he said, “But look at this,” as he showed me an ancient Chinese money knife.
“And this too,” he said, and I was looking at some bamboo money from China, circa 1740.
On Feiler’s business card are printed the words “numismatist-syngraphist.” You might have heard of that first word, it means a person who studies or collects coins. The second word means a person who studies or collects paper money. “For a long time collectors who focused on paper money did not get any respect,” says Feiler. “They were called ‘rag pickers.’ That started to change about 30 years ago, and I have found myself more interested these days in currency than coins.”
For him, every bill, every coin, tells a story. “That’s the key for me, the history of it all,” he said. Indeed, listening to him is like auditing a fascinating history class being taught by a man who knows, more profoundly than any one you are likely to meet, the value of a dollar.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @rickkogan
https://modules.wearehearken.com/chicago-tribune/embed/618.js
