The Multidisciplinarian

When I was a kid, mom and dad went out for the evening and told me that Frank, whom I hadn’t met, was going to stop by. He was dropping off some coins from his collection. He wanted us to determine whether these gold coins were legitimate, ninety percent gold, “.900 fineness,” as specified by the Coinage Act of 1837.

After the 1974 legalization of private gold ownership in the U.S., demand surged for pre-1933 American gold coins as bullion investments rather than numismatic curiosities. The market became jumpy, especially among buyers who cared only about intrinsic value. Counterfeit U.S. gold coins did exist. They were high-quality struck fakes, not crude castings, and they were made from real ninety percent gold alloy. Counterfeiters melted down common-date coins to produce rarer ones. Gold-plated base-metal fakes also existed, but those were cast, and Frank would never have fallen for them. We know that now. At the time, reliable information was thin on the ground.

The plan was to use Archimedes’ method. We’d weigh the coins, then dunk them in water and measure the displacement. Weight divided by displaced volume gives density. Ninety percent gold with ten percent copper comes out to 17.15 grams per cubic centimeter. Anything lower meant trouble.

The doorbell rang. Frank was a big guy in flannel shirt and jeans. He said he had something for my dad. I told him dad said he’d be coming. Frank handed me a small bag weighing five pounds – avoirdupois, not troy. About fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of gold at the time. You could buy a Corvette coupe, not the cheaper convertible, for six thousand. He handed me the bag, said thanks, and drove off in his pickup truck.

A few years ago I went on a caving trip to the Marble Mountains of northern California. The walk in didn’t look bad on paper. Five or six miles, maybe a couple thousand feet of elevation gain. With camping gear, food, and a load of heavy caving equipment, it turned out to be very bad indeed. I underestimated it, and paid for it.

A month before I’d been in Hawaii hiking to and through lava tubes in a recent flow, not the friendly pahoehoe kind but the boot-shredding a‘a stuff. A few days there destroyed a decent pair of boots. Desperate to make a big connection between two distant entrances, Doug drove me to Walmart, and I bought one of their industrial utility specials. It would get me through the day. It did. Our lava tube was four miles end to end.

I forgot about my boot situation until the Marble Mountains trip. At camp, as I was cutting sheets of moleskin to armor my feet for the hike out, I met a caver who knew my name and treated me as someone seasoned, someone who ought to know better. He looked down at my feet, laughed, and said, “Storage, you of all people, I figured wouldn’t wear cheap shoes into the mountains.” He figured wrong. I wore La Sportivas on the next trip.

What struck me as odd, I told my dad when he got home, wasn’t that Frank trusted a kid with fifteen thousand dollars in gold. It was that he drove a beat-up truck. I mentioned the rust.

“Yeah,” dad said. “But it’s got new tires.”