Green Bay’s Nicolet Coin Club

The Nicolet Coin Club held its first coin show – under the banner “Coin Jamboree” – at the Elks Club on Sunday, March 25, 1962. They continued as spring shows, with venue changes from time to time, without interruption through 2019. That run was interrupted in 2020, when the 59th annual event, scheduled for Sunday, April 20, was cancelled due to the imposition of nationwide “Social Distancing Guidelines” to fight the coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic.

That same year, the club organized a “Fall Get-Together” to “Wheel and Deal,” at the YMCA, an event that was moved to the Downtowner Motel the following year, but was cancelled for 1964 due to conflicts with the Packers schedule. After a few years, this event morphed into a fall show, which has been similarly hosted annually at various venues since that time. For many years now this show has generally been scheduled on the bye week Sunday of the Packers schedule, or occasionally on Sundays when the Packers have been scheduled for a Monday Night Football Game, or a Sunday evening out-of-town game.

In 1965 the Nicolet Coin Club hosted the fifth annual convention of the Numismatists of Wisconsin at the old Hotel Northland in downtown Green Bay, on June 4-6, in substitution of what would have been their fourth annual spring show, an event that was organized by Tom Fruit. The club had moved its annual spring show to the “Crystal Ballroom” at this venue in 1964, with a visitor registration count of 245.

Among the special guests at the 1965 convention were Eva Adams, Mint Director of the U.S. Mint, and Norval Parker, Master of the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa, the first time the heads of the two North American minting operations had met. The event was a financial success, with total revenue being $1,934.16, against expenses of $1,772.20, for a net profit of $161.96, which was split equally between the Nicolet Coin Club and the Numismatists of Wisconsin at $80.98 each.

Building on the success of its 1965 hosting of the NOW convention, as the years rolled on through the late-60s, the Nicolet Coin Club became a finely oiled machine. The annual spring shows became resoundingly successful; the fall events sputtered along the way but, prevailed and forged ahead into the decades to come.

In 1969 the tempo of activity was turned up a notch. For the spring show, held in late March at the Hotel Northland, the club sponsored the Green Bay appearance of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s “Billion Dollar” currency exhibit as an attendance attraction. Accompanying the exhibit from Washington, D.C., was BEP director James Conlon. Bourse dealers reported doing “a brisk business . . . the coin show was terrific.”

Discussions at the first meeting in April centered on the club again hosting the Numismatists of Wisconsin convention at Green Bay in 1970; at the May meeting a month later that possibility was “tabled.” At the first meeting in June the membership authorized extending an invitation for hosting the NOW show in 1971; at June’s second meeting the invitation was revised to “1970 or 1971.” The following month the club received notice the invitation extended for hosting the NOW event in June, 1970, had been accepted.

In September, the club settled on January 18, 1970, as the date for the 1969 fall show, at the Downtowner Motel. As the year was closing out the active membership of the Nicolet Coin Club stood at 124, of which 31 were junior members, with the average length of membership being 2.8 years. Through the roughly ten years that had passed since the club’s reactivation, roughly 450 individuals had joined, a turnover of roughly 70-percent.

The 1970 NOW convention, again hosted at the Hotel Northland, was chaired by Jim Medd, a Nicolet Coin Club charter member who had served as president on two occasions (1963 and 1965), who was elected president of NOW for the 1970-72 term. The educational programming featured R. S. Yeoman of Red Book fame, Chester L. Krause from Iola, and Val Pasvolsky from New Jersey, who treated attendees to the intrigue of the American colonial era, sharing his vast knowledge and collection of Indian and colonial numismatic artifacts of the era with attendees. The bourse was sold out and the aisles attendee packed throughout the two days; the profit split was $348.53 each for the club and NOW.

Those 1965 and 1970 Numismatists of Wisconsin conventions hosted in Green Bay by the Nicolet Coin Club were arguably the most outstanding numismatic events hosted in Northeastern Wisconsin in the last 60 years. They epitomized the dynamism of the club’s membership . . . during an era in time when coins of silver were still being plucked from circulation and pressed into Whitman coin folders . . . before the investment craze wrapped its arms about the hobby community . . . as it forged ahead into the 1970s and beyond.

One of the Nicolet Coin Club’s active members in 1965, Ross J. Quatsoe, implored Wisconsin’s federal legislators, Senator William Proxmire, a member of the Senate Joint Economic Committee, and Rep. John W. Byrnes, a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, to vote against a legislative proposal introduced by Senator Alan Bible of Nevada, proposing to virtually prohibit the collecting of U.S. coins by Americans. The “Bible Bill,” tagged the “Bill to Kill Coin Collecting” in the hobby community, would have made it illegal to collect, sell for more than face value or export any coin not designated as rare on a list to be promulgated by the Treasury Department, making the collector community the scapegoat for the coin shortage then being experienced nationally. Quatsoe received favorable responses from both Senator Proxmire and Congressman Byrnes as seen below.

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