Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (26 page)

The satellite navigation tool known as Global Positioning System, or GPS, is handy for helping lost drivers find their destinations. Just don’t rely on your GPS too much…or you’ll end up like these folks
.

• In 2008 a bus carrying high school students became wedged under a bridge in Seattle, Washington. The driver had been looking at his GPS display instead of the road and missed the big, yellow sign that read “CLEARANCE 9 FEET.” (The bus was 11'9".)

• A Czech truck driver followed his GPS and it led him deep into a hedgerow (a narrow alley of trees) in rural England. After the truck got wedged between two trees, the driver left it there for three days because he “didn’t want to pay for a costly weekend rescue.”

• A California man named Bo Bai got lost in his rental car in Bedford Hills, New York, in 2008. His GPS ordered him to take the next right, so he did…onto train tracks…as a commuter train was speeding toward him. Bai, a computer technician, tried to back out but his tires were stuck. So he jumped out of the car and started waving for the train to stop. It didn’t. The collision totaled the car and delayed 10,000 New York-area travelers.

• In England in 2008, a cab driver—dutifully following his GPS—ignored detour signs and drove directly into a river.

• In 2004 a 70-year-old French driver on an 80-mph highway missed the exit for his hotel. When the GPS ordered him to “make a U-Turn immediately,” he did…causing a multi-car accident that backed up traffic for hours.

• Edna Wickens lives on a narrow alley in Kent, England. Her house had never been hit by a truck…until truck drivers started using GPS. Since then, her house has been bumped and scraped numerous times, causing more than £20,000 ($37,000) in damage. In fact, the number of GPS-related mishaps has become so high in England—around 30,000—that in 2008 new signs were erected on some roads, reading: “Do Not Follow GPS Very Narrow Road.” (Now, whether the truck drivers will actually
see
the signs…)

Think coin collecting is boring? Well, here’s the story of the rarest, most valuable coin in American history, a story that takes us through back-alley coin-dealing shops to the royal palace of Egypt and the World Trade Center
.

T
O COIN A COIN
Ever wonder what happened to the gold that was mined in the California gold rush? Much of it was purchased by the United States government. Following one particularly massive purchase of gold ore in 1850, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia began production of $20 gold coins. Earlier $10 coins had eagles on them, so because they were twice the value, the new $20 coins were called “Double Eagles.” (The name didn’t mean the coin has eagles on both sides; there was an eagle on the back and a profile of Lady Liberty on the front.)

These $20 Double Eagles were produced until 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to redesign all the nation’s coins. One side of St. Gaudens’ new Double Eagle depicted a full-length image of Lady Liberty surrounded by rays of light, holding an olive branch in one hand and a torch in the other. The other side featured a bald eagle soaring across a setting sun. Coin collectors cite the St. Gaudens Double Eagle as one of the most beautiful coins ever made.

In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. As one of his first acts upon taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt moved quickly to protect the U.S. economy. One of his measures was to retain government control over the circulation of gold by banning its export, ending the production of gold coins, and making it illegal for regular citizens to own gold coins or gold bullion. (They could exchange their gold for currency.)

A total of 445,500 Double Eagles were produced in early 1933,
just a few days before Roosevelt’s order to stop issuing gold coins came down. Here’s what happened to them.

• 445,034 were sealed in a vault at the Philadelphia Mint.

• 466 were sent away for testing, and 437 came back to the Mint (29 were destroyed in the testing).

• Those 437 were locked in a safe in the office of the Mint cashier, which could be opened only with two keys, both of which were in the possession of the cashier, George McCann.

• Two of the 437 were sent to the American coins collection at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Those were the only two 1933 gold Double Eagles ever to leave the Mint.

• After Roosevelt’s order, the 445,034 in the vault and the 435 remaining in the cashier’s safe were, according to Mint records, melted back down into gold bullion in March 1937.

In the 1930s, Philadelphia was a major gold-trading center. An entire district around the Mint was dedicated to gold, including the stores and offices of jewelers, coin dealers, and scrap gold merchants. One of the most prominent gold men was a jeweler named Israel Switt. He had lots of friends and business associates who worked at the Mint, including the cashier, George McCann. And Switt and McCann had something in common: Both men had criminal records. In 1934 Switt had been arrested for trying to sell gold bullion. McCann was arrested (and fired from his job at the Mint) for trying to help steal $10,000 in scrap gold.

But their biggest crime would go undetected for years. Sometime in the early 1930s, McCann stole a handful of 1933 gold Double Eagle coins. It was relatively easy, since he had access to the safe where they were kept. A few days before they were scheduled to be melted down, he smuggled some out and sold them to Switt. Switt, in turn, sold five of the coins to a dealer named James MacAllister in 1937. Price: Three for $300 each and two for $350 each. (In today’s dollars, that’s about $4,400 and $5,100, respectively.) Switt sold four more Double Eagles to other coin dealers, who resold them to private collectors.

Officials at the U.S. Mint had no idea that any of the coins were missing—they thought all 1933 Double Eagles had been destroyed.

One of Switt’s coins was quietly sold to a Fort Worth, Texas, coin dealer named B. Max Mehl. In 1944 Mehl sold the coin to a very high-profile buyer: King Farouk of Egypt. Farouk liked to collect very expensive things, including rare stamps, jewels, art, Faberge eggs, and, especially, gold coins, of which he possessed more than 8,500. Despite the fact that he frequently dipped into Egypt’s treasury to buy such collectibles for himself, Farouk liked to keep his transactions legal. So when he found a 1933 Double Eagle in the United States, Farouk sent a delegation to Forth Worth to obtain the coin from Mehl, and then, in accordance with United States law, applied to the Treasury Department for an export license for the Double Eagle. Unaware that it was an incredibly rare, incredibly valuable, and incredibly
illegal
coin, a low-level bureaucrat in the Treasury approved the export license on February 29, 1944. The coin returned with the delegation to King Farouk in Egypt.

Just a few days later, in early March,
New York Herald Tribune
stamps and coins columnist Ernest Kehr was writing an article on the sale of a collection by Stack’s, a rare-coin house in New York. The last item listed in the auction: a 1933 Double Eagle. “Excessively rare,” read the listing, “the first one that ever came up in any public auction.” To find out just
how
rare, Kehr wrote to a friend who would know: the acting director of the U.S. Mint, Leland Howard. Howard did some digging and found out how rare the 1933 Double Eagle was: It was so rare that none were technically supposed to exist outside of the Smithsonian.

Howard immediately notified the Secret Service, which, like the Mint, is a branch of the Treasury Department, and let them know that at least one 1933 Double Eagle coin was being illegally circulated. The Secret Service seized the coin from the Stack’s auction, and the agent in charge of the investigation, Harry Strang, quickly assembled a team of agents to look into the possibility of there being more Double Eagles in circulation, and to get them back. (Why did the government want the coins back? It was a security issue—it was the middle of World War II, and the theft of coins pointed out holes in United States government security.)

Strang started poking around both legitimate and underground coin dealing circles, and that quickly led him to jeweler Israel Switt and former Mint cashier George McCann. After discovering the gold-related criminal records of both men, Strang concluded that McCann must have swiped multiple 1933 Double Eagles from the vault in his office and passed them on to Switt. Strang presented his case to the Department of Justice, expecting to get arrest warrants. But Strang couldn’t arrest either man. Why? Eleven years had passed since the theft, and the statute of limitations on the crime had expired.

Strang and his field agents concluded that there were a total of nine stolen 1933 Double Eagles in circulation. By the end of 1945, the Secret Service had found and seized three; four more were turned in voluntarily. That left two: One was still unaccounted for, and the other was in the possession of King Farouk of Egypt.

Strang lobbied his bosses to try and get the Egyptian coin back to the United States, but the Treasury’s lawyers decided that, despite the tremendous effort to recover all the other Double Eagles, Farouk owning one really didn’t “present a problem.” In other words, trying to get back a coin from a sovereign head of a foreign country was a potential diplomatic nightmare and could create an international incident, an especially unsavory scenario in the middle of World War II. (In 1949—after the war was over—the Treasury Department changed its position and asked the State Department to help them get the coin back via diplomatic channels. The State Department refused, calling the idea “politically inadvisable.”)

The owner of the ninth coin, a collector named L. G. Barnard, came forward in late 1945. He had a Double Eagle…but he refused to give it up. He bought the coin legally from a reputable dealer, he said, and neither he nor that dealer had known it was stolen. So what did the government do? They sued Barnard for it. And they won: In 1947 a federal judge ruled that the Double Eagle was still the property of the government because it had left
the Mint via theft. Later that year, with possession of eight Double Eagles, the Treasury Department melted them down.

That was about the end of the story—eight Double Eagles had been located, seized, and safely destroyed, and the last one was never going to leave King Farouk’s palace. Except that Strang’s investigation team had made a mistake: Israel Switt had stolen and resold
10
Double Eagles, not 9. The owner of the 10th coin, a collector named Louis Eliasberg, came forward out of the blue in 1952—three years after the case had been closed—and surrendered the coin to the Treasury Department. It was immediately melted down.

But the Double Eagle saga still wasn’t over. In 1952 the Egyptian army staged a coup, took over the country, and deposed King Farouk (due in some part due to his frequent raiding of the treasury to buy himself expensive trinkets). Farouk had to leave behind many of his most valuable possessions, and so in 1954 the Egyptian government, under former general Gamal-Abdel Nasser, announced that King Farouk’s collection of more than 8,500 gold coins would be sold at auction. The event would be handled by the New York office of Sotheby’s, who predicted the auction would “rival the great sales of the past and will take its place in the bibliography of numismatics.”

Officials at the Treasury Department, who had been keeping tabs on all high-end coin auctions since the sudden surrender of the Eliasberg Double Eagle, obtained a catalog for the Farouk auction. Sure enough, one lot interested them: lot 185—it consisted solely of a 1933 Double Eagle. The Treasury contacted the Egyptian government and requested that lot 185 be removed from the auction and immediately returned to the United States. Egyptian officials (and Sotheby’s) complied, and the coin was not included in the nine-day auction. That’s because the coin, the only remaining 1933 Double Eagle at large, had disappeared.

Did the 1933 Double Eagle ever resurface? To find out, turn to Part II of the story on page 301
.

You probably remember these 1980s catchphrases and slogans because at the time, they were inescapable on T-shirts, TV, and the radio. But do you know where they came from
?

S
logan:
“Choose Life”
Story:
In 1983 fashion designer Katharine Hamnett created a line of political protest T-shirts, all of them white with simple slogans printed in huge black letters: “Worldwide Nuclear Ban Now,” “Preserve the Rainforests,” “Save the Whales,” “Save the World,” and the best seller, “Choose Life.” The phrase wasn’t anti-abortion or anti-capital punishment. Inspired by the Buddhist principle that all life is sacred, Hamnett specifically meant the shirts to protest nuclear proliferation. More than 100,000 “Choose Life” shirts sold in 1984, helped immensely by George Michael when he wore one in the Wham! video for “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”