The Barney Kaplan Gold Coin Story

                                               The Barney Kaplan Gold Coin Story

                                                                       1975

                                                   A true story just as it happened

                                              Written 10/2011 Re-written 5/14/2016

                                                               Howard Yasgar

     

      I was reminded about this gold coin story, when I happened to see about fifteen of them sitting in an ashtray on a bookcase in my office.

     The gold colored coins were about the size of a United States quarter. They were  slightly thinner than a U.S. quarter and they had a little more of a copper color than real gold.

     It was sometimes in 1975, when I was in Barney Kaplan’s warehouse in Detroit, I had gone there to do business with him.

     Barney’s business was the buying and selling excess and surplus merchandise, and his warehouse was located on South Wabash Street in Detroit.

     I had met Barney several years before by doing a bit of detective work.

     We had started a new division of my company called “API Marine Inc.”

     Or main product was the rebuilding starters and generators for outboard engines.

     At the time, in 1975, our main source of parts was the Prestolite Company, located in Toledo Ohio, however we were always hampered by the fact we couldn’t get enough

Replacement parts from them, so it forced us to start looking for who was buying all their excess and surplus.

     After a bit of detective work, we were led to believe that it was a company located in Detroit, but we didn’t have any idea as to who it could be.

     Eventually we looked in the Detroit phone book to see if there were any surplus dealers advertising there,  and that’s how we found Barney Kaplan.

     Barney Kaplan invited us to come to visit him at his warehouse, and I’m glad he did, because we found it to be an amazing place.

     Barney was a true entrepreneur, he was like a hoarder he collected all kinds of automotive electrical parts which was exactly what we needed.

     Barney specialized in buying and selling all kinds of new and used automotive surplus, and of all things he just happened to specialize in marine electrical, which was our business.

     Barney, being located in Detroit, which at the time was the automotive and industrial parts capital of the United States, he was constantly bombarded with all kinds of surplus and excess material that most people never even knew existed.

     We found that Barney had in his warehouse large quantities of perfectly good merchandise, they were things that were discontinued or left over and thrown away by various parts manufacturers.

     Barney’s had so many items I often wondered if he remembered what he had, in those days there were no computers to keep track of everything. So Barney had to depend on his memory.

     I started flying to Detroit on a monthly basis, just to rummage through  his inventory.

     One day, while I was in Barney’s warehouse, I was looking around to see what he had recently purchased.

     After a while, I found myself in one of his back rooms that had several fifty five gallon drums all filled with interesting parts.

     As I was looking through one of the barrels, I removed a cardboard box to see what was below it, and boy was I surprised.

     Under the box, appeared to be, thousands of brightly colored gold coins, and the barrel was about three quarters full with them.

     I took out a handful and studied them.

     Each coin had an image of a different State imprinted on one side as well as the name of the state, and it explained what the state was famous for. The opposite side of the coin it had the states name, and when it was admitted to the union, it also had the states capital, the states flower, and the state bird.

     The coins were really neat, they looked very bright, and very valuable, so I  immediately ran to Barney’s office with a handful of them. I thought that perhaps Barney didn’t know he had a hidden treasure in his building.

     “I see you found my gold coins,” Barney said, He then told me the story about how he was at a local Detroit scrap metal dealer when he noticed the coins.

     The dealer had just bought the coins from Shell Oil Company for scrap copper.

     Barney said he became fascinated with them, because they looked so much like real money, so he bought the whole barrel of coins by the pound. 

     Barney told me he found out that the coins, once were part of a promotional program that Shell Oil Company had come up with, but they had eventually decided to give the program up, before it even got started.

     The Shell Oil Company had a coin made for every one of the states and they were going to give them away at their gas stations.

     They were  hoping that people would want to keep coming back to collect the entire coin set.

     Barney said, he had owned the coins for about a year, and was having tons of fun with them. He said he carried the coins in his pocket and gave them to little kids whenever he had the opportunity.

     He also had a lot of fun at all the airports, when he was traveling.

     Barney, like many other  people had the habit of checking for money at every pay telephone as he walked by them.

     Barney did this by sticking his finger in the little coin return box.

     But once Barney had the shiny Shell Oil Company coins, he started placing one coin in the coin return of some of the telephone he passed by them at the airport. Sometimes he sat down just to watch the expression on the faces of the people when they found the gold looking coin in the telephone.

     Then Barney said, “Why don’t you take some of the coins back to Miami with you, I promise you will have a load of fun with them.”

     So I found an large empty coffee tin and filled it up with several hundred of Barney’s coins. I just couldn’t wait for them to arrive in Miami so I could sort through them to see if I had all the states.

     The very next week my partner and I were leaving for San Jose Costa Rica to call on our customers there.

      I took a pocketful of the coins with me to have a little fun with them.

      The first evening we were there, an opportunity presented itself, our balcony was right above the giant hotel swimming pool, so I threw several coins into the pool.

      In the morning, I awoke to hear a loud fight going on outside. Several of the grounds keepers were fighting over the coins that I had thrown in the pool.

      It appears that I had created a real problem, everyone was now diving in the pool and they were fighting each other over what they thought were real gold coins.

     That evening, we took our taxi to a restaurant located in downtown San Jose. Our driver was a regular taxi driver that we used all the time.

     He parked in front of the restaurant, and there was a parking meter there.

     I saw him grumbling and sorting through the coins in his pocket looking for a fifty centavo coin.

     I got out of the cab, to take a look at what the meter said, and then I tried one of Barney’s coins, and it worked perfectly.

     The cab driver was astounded, and so were we, so I gave him a handful of the coins.

     The following month, my partner and I were calling on customers in Cancun Mexico.

     I had brought a pocket full of Barney’s coins with me.

     When we were at the tourist port, we saw there was a cruise ship anchored there, and there was a big crowd on the ship throwing coins into the water.

     On the dock there were Mexican kids diving for the money.

     I couldn’t resist, and I threw in a handful of Barneys coins, in the ocean.

     I was sorry I did it as it nearly caused a riot.

     The kids thought they were gold they wanted to kill each other to get them.

     So we quietly exited the area before anyone said anything to us.

     That was when I started to have second thoughts about playing around with the coins.

     However I couldn’t resist fooling around with them.

     The following year I took my family on a vacation trip to Port Au Prince, Haiti.

     While we were vacationing there, we took a local taxi on a sight seeing trip into the mountains.

     When we reached the top of the mountain there were lots of native vendors selling novelties like paintings, wood carvings and other kinds of trinkets.

     Our taxi stopped, and we were immediately surrounded by the vendors.

     My kids picked out a couple of small wooden trinkets, and after a lot of  haggling over the price, I simply reached into my pocket to get some change.

     Mixed in with my coins were some of the Barney Kaplan’s gold colored coins.

     So as all the vendors were sticking their hands in the taxi windows, I handed out a few of Barneys coins. Soon everyone wanted one, they thought they were really gold.

    As we started to drive away, I saw several of the natives biting the coins with their teeth testing them for gold.

     The next thing I knew they were throwing the coins back at us. A couple of them nearly broke our cabs side windows.

     When we got back to Miami, I got to thinking, about how much trouble the coins were causing, so I gave most all the coins away, but  I kept about 15 of them, and I put them in an ashtray on a shelf in the office, and there they sat until today.

    When I saw them, I remembered, and I wrote this story.

   I will always remember, whenever Barney and I traveled together, he always carried some of the coins in his pocket.

   He always gave one or two away every time he saw a child. He said those coins were the best thing he had ever bought.   

  When my friend Barney passed on, at the age of  96 in 2014, his sons Jerry and Larry told me they put some of the coins in his pocket, so he could hand them out wherever he was going.