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≡ PIN TRADING AND MORE ≡
“My first Olympic Games was Munich in 1972. My family, we were on vacation in Europe, and we were in Salzburg, Austria, which isn’t far from Munich and I begged my father – since we had a rental car – could we drive up to Munich for day to see what’s going on in the Games.
“And he acquiesced and it was a nice little drive, and I just fell in love with it there. I picked up a couple of pins at the Games. They were actually handing out ‘I was there’ pins – in German – they were these plastic ones that you see pop up from time to time, and they had women with baskets of them handing them out to people in the Olympic park. And that really got me bitten.”
That’s Jonathan Becker, President of the Lake Placid Olympic Museum and treasurer of the Olympin Collectors Club, explaining how he got hooked on Olympic memorabilia at a fun online forum on “Collecting and Preserving Games History” organized by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum on Tuesday (9th).
He was joined by Olympic super-collector Gordy Crawford, for more than 40 years a senior executive of Capital Research and Management, retiring in 2012 as Senior Vice President, and Karen Rosen, a long-time Olympic writer in Atlanta, but also an Olympin board member.
The session was hosted by U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum Chief Content & Integration Officer Lindsay Huban, who asked Crawford how he got involved:
“In the fall of 1983, my wife and I got invited by ABC to be their guest at the Sarajevo [Winter] Olympics in February of 1984. I went over and on the flight over, with all these ABC advertisers, they handed me an ABC Guest pin and then a bag of regular ABC pins. And I said, like, ‘what’s this for’ and they said, ‘oh, people trade pins at the Olympics.’
“So the next day I make my first Olympic event, which was speed skating and I put on my ABC pin and I was immediately surrounded by five guys from the Soviet Union – in the middle of the Cold War – who had these big fut hats and fur coats, and for the next 20 minutes, we traded pins.
“I was hooked. By the evening, I was working the lobby of the hotel, stopping the Icelandic representative to trade pins. And that was the start.”
Crawford didn’t get just the collecting bug, he wanted the whole hive, explaining:
“Somewhere along the line, I decided, ‘you know what, I’m going to try to collect the entire physical history of the Olympics,’ and then, if I’m successful, I’m going to give it away, somewhere it can be seen by the public.”
And, over 40 years, he amassed a spectacular collection that included a complete set of winner’s medals from every Olympic and Winter Games, all of the Olympic torches and much, much more and in 2018, gifted it to the U.S. Olympic Committee Foundation (USOPF today). The Crawford collection can be seen as the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs today.
Rosen talked about a long history that led to her collecting passion:
“In 1976, at my first Olympics, I got one pin, because I really didn’t know pins were a thing.
“And then in ‘84, I got some ABC pins because I worked for them and my Dad [Mel Rosen] was a coach, and he got a medal. And I had no idea that the medals went all the way back to 1896.
“So in 1990, I was covering Atlanta bidding for the [1996] Olympics. And after they won, there was a big party in Atlanta, and the person who held the party, he had a collection of participation medals, and there’s one from 1900 … it was just gorgeous: it was an angel over Paris.
“And I said, ‘I’m going to collect these.’ And so it started with participation medals, because there’s usually only one from each Olympics. So what else [can] you get? So there’s pins and there’s badges, and as Gordy said, you just get hooked and you get everything. Tickets, programs, official reports.
“So if it has the [Olympic] Rings on it, I’m interested in it, unless it’s ugly. I don’t get ugly things.”
She said she decides herself whether an item was ugly or not!
Asked what they are looking for now, Becker said that he wants the Lake Placid Olympic Museum to have a 1932 Olympic gold and silver medal; it has a bronze.
Crawford, the first head of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation, said he still collects the occasional item, but is now committed to collecting a full set of Paralympic Games medals, also to be displayed publicly.
Rosen has her eyes out for a 1932 Los Angeles Olympic gold badge provided to International Olympic Committee members, but also for a – get this – pin celebrating the Olympic bid from Bangkok (THA) for the 2008 Games!
So, how do you get started?
Rosen had excellent advice:
“If you want to collect pins, unfortunately you have to have pins. So I would say, go on eBay and find these things where someone is selling 200 pins for maybe $100. If you can get a pin for 50 cents, that’s a good deal. Because retail, sadly, it’s like $12.99 and that’s a lot to invest in one pin that you’re then going to trade away.
“So if you have these pins, then you can go trading, or look on eBay for things that just attract your attention.”
And she pointed out that one never knows what will end up being sought after, mentioning “the Atlanta [1996] Varsity pin, which had the Olympic rings – The Varsity is a fast-food restaurant [in Atlanta] – and it had the Olympic rings in onion rings! And it was promptly banned [as a trademark violation] and so that was a highly sought-after pin and it still costs maybe $200.”
It was a fun hour, part of the “Games History Hour” series from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum.
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