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Tales from a Pawn Shop: Our coin maven visits

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One event we at Kamaaina Loan look forward to each year is Dennis Ryan’s winter visit to escape the snows of his home in Albany, New York.

Dennis is a man of many parts. During his two months or so on Maui, he consults on archaeological digs, visits antique dealers (“They’re all disappearing” on Maui) and sorts through a year’s accumulation of strange and oddball coins and paper money for us.

He is also an expert in African art, works on the archaeology of the Erie Canal, and holds a master’s degree in Russian history — for which he wrote his thesis in French. There’s never a dull moment when Dennis is around.

Over the course of a year, the pawn shop accumulates bags and envelopes of hard-to-identify coins. Typically, we buy somebody’s collection based on one or a few valuable coins, and along with it comes a plastic bag of odds and ends.

We rely on Dennis to spot the unusual rarities in this pile of junk. This year, we presented him with a large shoebox of coins.

He’s still working his way through it, but so far this trip his prize find has been a J.F. Souza merchant token.

Souza had a shop on Luso Street in Honolulu. Shopkeepers in Territorial days would pass out brass tokens as advertising and promotions, or to use in slot machines, or sometimes as a form of store credit — like today’s gift card. (These tokens still exist; think of the Maui Trade Dollar.)

The token Dennis found — and it was in a jumble with a bunch of dross, so we don’t know where it came from — is not dated, but it must be from the earliest Territorial days around 1900, since the store credit it offers is for “half a cent.”

Metcalf and Russell’s “Hawaiian Money,” the standard reference, considers the Souza token among the most valuable of the island commercial tokens, along with the Lunalilo Home and St. Francis Hospital radio tokens — a generation ago, these were valued at $100. Recently, one sold for $150. Only the very first, the Hawaiian Gazette Co., and one or two other Hawaii tokens are rarer.

The Souza token is by no means the most valuable coin Dennis Ryan has rescued from the junk pile, but the reason we value his visits is not the money he finds. It is the stories.

Some of the interesting finds are worth nothing. Monday, for example, his eagle eye spotted a faked Liberty dime. He immediately noticed the bronze showing through the silver plate. At the end of each visit, Dennis accumulates a small stash of counterfeits and fakes.

About 99% of the shoebox was uninteresting coins: some contained enough silver to be worth melting down; some still pass current (you can spend them, if you’re in the right country); and some are worth from half a buck to a dollar to a collector. That accounts for about half.

The other half end up in the scrap metal pile.

Dennis Ryan sorts coins

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maui clout

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Twenty-five years ago, Maui County was riding high in the state Legislature. Mamoru Yamasaki was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the Senate, and Joe Souki was speaker of the House.

State government thought it was rich, because of $500 million a year in payments from Duty Free Shoppers, and the political word was that this would be the last time that Maui, or any Neighbor Island, would be so well placed to get state funding for local projects. Once the unusual combo of Yama and Joe ended their dominance, Oahu would take over.

And for a generation, so it seemed.

Then, one month ago, it looked like 1988 all over again. Well, almost. Souki was slated to be speaker again, after some years on the outs with Democratic House leadership. Yama had passed away, but young Shan Tsutsui would continue as Senate president.

Then Dan Inouye died. Brian Schatz was appointed to the U.S. Senate, and Tsutsui accepted an appointment to replace him as lieutenant governor.

So, although Maui County came within days of regaining its legislative clout, suddenly it dissolved.

Of course, DFS is out of the picture and the state no longer thinks of itself as flush. Gil Keith-Agaran, who is nominated to move up to the Senate; leaving a hole in the House leadership where he had a shot at majority leader.

So it remains to be seen how well Maui County will do in the jockeying for state funding, especially for CIP (capital) projects. Keith-Agaran notes that since the days of the Yama-Joe duo, the budget has been restuctured so that CIP is rolled into the overall spending program.

Maui County would dearly like to return to the days when the state picked up a big part of water, solid waste and sewage treatment obligations; but the outlook for that looks slightly less rosy than it did late in 2012. 

 

The newest pawn on TV entry

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“Hardcore Pawn Chicago” has begun showing, in case you cannot get enough via the original Detroit-based “Hardcore Pawn” or “Pawn Stars.”

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, Royal Pawn is in a tough neighborhood:

Royal Pawn Shop gets the occasional odd item, including a fake leg and dentures, but it’s the people who walk into the store that make the environment unpredictable. Wayne said the customers vary from crack addicts, gang members and mobsters to athletes (the Bulls’ Jimmy Butler visited in September), doctors and a priest who wanted to pawn a cross.

One thing about working at Kamaaina Loan, we don’t see a lot of mobsters. Maybe that’s why we don’t have our own show yet.

Tribune photo of Randy and Wayne Cohen

 

Gold’s good year

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Gold momentarily touched $1800 an ounce last year and is now trading under $1700, so it may come as a surprise that — taking 2012 as a whole — gold had its best year since 1920.

So reports Bloomberg News.

At Kamaaina Loan and Cash For Gold, we buy and sell gold. We do not predict whether it will be higher or lower next month or six months from now, because we just don’t know.

What we do know is that we offer you the best price you’ll find any day in the week.

Notice Bloomberg reports that some famous investors are betting gold to go up:

Investors from John Paulson to George Soros have a $140.6 billion bet via near-record holdings in gold-backed exchange- traded products after the Federal Reserve said Dec. 12 it would buy $45 billion of Treasury securities a month as of January, adding to $40 billion a month of mortgage-debt purchases.

That’s kind of funny reporting, because all last year Bloomberg was reporting the details of Paulson’s failed bet on Chinese trees, where his fund put hundreds of millions of dollars into what turned out to be imaginary forests.

Paulson got famous by making a spectacularly good guess about mortgage securities but it was just a guess.Maybe he’ll have better luck with gold. At least gold exists

 

The beginning of the end for Mount Trashmore?

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According to The Maui News. the county is issuing a request for trash-to-power proposals in order to divert a lot of opala from the Central Maui Landfill.

It will be interesting to see who applies and what technologies are offered. The county put on an all-day seminar 20-some years ago when trashpower was a hot item, but the then-director of  public works preferred to bury garbage. That got expensive in the ’90s when EPA began requiring environmental safeguards on dumps.

Oahu went ahead with H-POWER, against a lot of skeptics, but it seems to have been successful enough. At least, Honolulu is expanding it in a big way.

A question for Maui will be, do we generate enough trash? When plastic recycling was attempted, there just wasn’t enough plastic garbage.

By definition, garbage has low unit value, so you need a lot of it in order to make money, or to justify the considerable overhead of a biggish power plant. Unlike wind or solar, though, trash is firm power, available anytime.

Trash can have unusual properties. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is a flat as the back of your hand, the city piled up trash several hundred feet, covered it with dirt and grass and turned it into a park, called Mount Trashmore. (The city officials didn’t like that but the name stuck.)

Once they had a hill a couple hundred feet high, the city could finally have a Soapbox Derby competition. Before, it was too flat for the cars to roll.

President Obama and gold

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At Kamaaina Loan, we are always interested in gold —

buying it, selling it, lending money on it. But not in

 predicting where the price is going.

Not everybody is so cautious. Consider this quote from

the financial advice service Seeking Alpha:

the reality is that President Obama is good for precious metal prices.

We’re not saying he is or he isn’t, but that’s short

and easy to remember. Remember that gold

was around $1720 an ounce on Election Day, but

it had varied by $75 up and down over the past

 30 days. It’s about $1729 as this is posted.

Let’s see where it goes from here. Meanwhile,

if you need cash, we have it and will exchange

 it for gold at the going rate.

Read the whole article at: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1003041-2012-election-president-obama-and-precious-metals

Is this the future of gold prices?

Pawn 101: Check under the hood

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Here’s a story that every pawn shop operator can give

personal testimony about.

A man brought us a book to see what it was worth.

It was volume 2 of a 2-volume edition of one of

Charles Darwin’s books. Ordinarily, volume 2 is

worth more than volume 1, because 2’s tend to get lost

more often. In this case, however, and on Maui, the

book was virtually worthless.

That’s because a complete set, in excellent condition,

can be had on the Internet for about $50. Given

shipping costs from Maui, and considering how

unlikely it would be to find a volume 1 here; and that

it’s a heavy book, it would cost more to marry volume 2

 up with a volume 1 on the Mainland than it’s worth.

However, while the owner was talking about where he

got the book, our assistant was flipping pages. “It’s

worth at least $20,” he told the owner.

Because someone had stuck a $20 Silver Certificate

between the pages.

At last August’s pawnbrokers’ convention, a Mainland

broker told about how a good customer whose husband

had died brought him a fancy hunting knife, hoping

she could get $300 to pay bills.

“I looked under the cotton in the knife box and there

were four one-hundred dollar bills.”

 

A campaign high point

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Every campaign deserves a memorable hula, and kumu hula Patrick Makuakane delivers with the “Birth Certificate Hula.” If you follow the link, you’ll hear him say he was born at Kapiolani maternity just a couple days apart from Barack Obama.

The line “drunk in a taxi” is good.

Performance before enthusiastic audience here: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/288532_Birth_Certificate_Hula_-_Na_Le

Patrick Makuakane

Photo by Kathleen Bender

We don’t take collars any more

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Pawn shops will consider a loan on anything of value (unless, as we say, it eats), but fashions have pushed some items out of our universe.

For example, in 1838 Manhattan pawnbroker was happy to make a loan on 8 collars. He lent 37 1/2 cents.

Kamaaina Loan doesn’t make loans in fractions of a cent any more, or even fractions of a dollar,  but in 1838 37 1/2 was close to a day’s pay for some laborers.

Writing in Bloomberg News, pawn historian Wendy Woloson listed the loans made on a typical day, Aug. 31, in Simpson’s shop.

The full list is available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/a-brief-history-of-the-american-pawn-shop-echoes.html

Today, we’d take the accordian, the watch (although the “silver watch with broken hands” would be a close call), the broach, the saw (usually a power saw these days), the gold watch and chain and the silver medal.

It would have to  be a special table cloth these days at get our assent.As in 1838, most pawns are for small amounts, and most pawns are for jewelry or household items. But these days household items are more like to be TVs and video games than shawls and trousers.

The goods change over the generations but the business is mostly what it was long ago. As Woloson says,

Yesterday’s music box is today’s DVD player.

 

Are you too slow to vote?

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Frank Tanabe votes againAt the very least, you should vote because that other guy who’s for all the wrong things is voting this time, and you’ve got to cancel him out.

A more civics-class-positive view of voting is this story from Honolulu that’s catching the world’s attention (or, at least, that part of the world that uses the Internet):

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/175248241.html?id=175248241

Frank Tanabe, 93 and sick, is voting.