Put me in coach! Landry's Fedora(!) part of October Sports Auction

Sept. 2, 2009

Posted by Noah

In the second episode of the eighth season of The Simpsons, "You Only Move Twice," Homer is offered a job at The Globex corporation, working for a seemingly benign boss, Hank Scorpio, in the bucolic little burg of Cypress Creek. It turns out Scorpio is bent on world domination, but that takes a backseat to Homer's problems concerning his family's homesickness for Springfield. In fact, I'm getting choked up thinking about it...

It's one of my favorite episodes for many reasons, not the least of which is that Homer manages to do what so many great supervillains have not managed to do in more than 40 years; that is, stop James Bond. "I stopped a a slacker at work today," Homer tells his dejected family.

What I really love this episode for, besides Albert Brooks' awesome voicing of Scorpio ("You have 72 hours to deliver the gold!") and remedial kid Gordy in Bart's class who is in the class for no other reason than he is Canadian and speaks with an accent (I'm laughing as I write this just thinking about it) is that Homer, in order to motivate his workers to get the nuclear reactor online in time reveals to Scorpio that he has always dreamed of coaching the Dallas Cowboys, and subsequently buys a Tom Landry signed fedora for use as a motivational tool. Hilarity ensues...

All of that is a long way to get to the fact that you can have your own Homer/Scorpio moment this fall as a Tom Landry game-worn fedora, sported regally on the sidelines of Texas stadium during the 1980s by the legendary Dallas Cowboys coach, will be up for auction as part of the Oct. 1-2 Signature® Sports Memorabilia Auction.

The hat is just part of an impressive trove of Cowboys' memorabilia that will certainly have die-hards of America's Team keenly attuned to the early October event at Heritage's Uptown Dallas headquarters. Tom Landry represents everything hallowed about the glory days of the 1970s Cowboys and there was no symbol more emblematic of those amazing '70s teams than Landry's iconic fedora.

Along with Coach Landry's stylish 7-3/8s Churchill, Ltd. Gray hat, Heritage will also be offering a 1970s-era Coach Landry game-used clipboard complete with handwritten plays and coaching whistle, making a complete suite of game-used Landry memorabilia and an enticing grouping for any coach or fan aspiring to the greatness achieved by Dallas's favorite head coach.

A game-used jersey worn by Roger Staubach and an early 1990s game-used uniform from Troy Aikman - easily the two most-beloved Dallas Cowboy quarterbacks - are being offered in compliment to the Landry lots, and will be yet another reason for Cowboy fans to keep a close eye on the early October auction.

The Staubach jersey is from the early '70s. It's a version of the dark blue uniform worn by the cowboys mostly as road-jerseys during that part of the decade. My mother always insisted that the Cowboys would lose when they wore those jerseys, and I don't remember her being wrong. Ever. Since the dark blue jerseys were worn with much less frequency than the home white there is much less wear and tear on this shirt than you might otherwise find, which makes it all the more desirable.

Troy Aikman's circa 1992 game-used uniform comes to Heritage in fantastic shape and is a hard-to-find relic from the beginning of the 1990s Cowboy dynasty, of which Aikman was arguably the biggest part. Aikman may well be the one Cowboy player able to rival Staubach in terms of fan adoration. This uniform bears the battle scars of those intense 1990s-era battles that saw the team dominate like no other.

Yes, you too can own a Landry hat and motivate your employees like Homer did. If, by wearing it, you can help your employer take over the world, then good for you! You'll probably benefit greatly from your actions, though I can't guarantee that you'll be given - as Scorpio rewarded Homer - the Denver Broncos. I can guarantee, however, that, just like Homer, you'll be equally disappointed it's not the Cowboys...

Marge: I think the Denver Broncos are pretty good...

Homer: Oh... You don't understand.

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-Noah Fleisher

Coin Monday: “Seeing Double?”

April 27, 2009
Posted by John Dale

When coin collectors and auctions appear in popular entertainment, usually the writers get a few things right and much more wrong. An episode of Hawaii Five-O from 1973, “The $100,000 Nickel,” was entertaining enough, even if the plot point of a 1913 Liberty nickel getting dropped in a vending machine makes me shake my head.

More recently, the episode of The Simpsons that had Bart and Homer collecting coins, “All About Lisa,” started well enough with the two filling out a coin board with Lincoln cents culled from the change dish at the Kwik-E-Mart, among other sources. Many collectors, myself included, had a similar start. The fake variety, the 1917 “Kissing Lincolns” cent, I could tolerate as creative license. The scene at the auction house got too much wrong, though. The last straw for me was when the auction house referred to the “Kissing Lincolns” cent as a “penny.” No, no, and heck no! The United States Mint has never struck a “penny”; that’s a holdover term from colonial days, and even if Bart and Homer didn’t know any better than to call a cent a penny, that auction house in Springfield should have!

Earlier, the cult-classic Weird Al Yankovic movie UHF had its own coin-collector moment at the climax, when a coin given to a beggar turns out to be valuable. The moment I heard the line “1955-D Doubled Die,” though, I said out loud, “That’s wrong.”

My roommate, who had introduced me to the movie and was watching it with me, asked for clarification. I answered that there is a real 1955 Doubled Die Obverse cent that can be worth thousands of dollars, though it was struck at Philadelphia and not Denver.

The error is so dramatic that when it first turned up in circulation, comments, speculations, and rumors soon built up around it. What could have caused the dramatic doubling on the lettering and date? In the mid-1950s knowledge of the minting process was not as widespread as it is now, and many erroneous explanations were floated for the strange cents.

In its own way, the real story of how the 1955 Doubled Die Obverse cents came to be is just as wild and fantastic as the more outlandish vintage suggestions. The term “Doubled Die Obverse” means that the doubling on these cents comes from the die used to strike them on the front, or obverse. The error happened during the die-making process. Cylinders of steel called “working hubs,” which look like one side of a coin, are pressed against heat-softened blank steel cylinders, leaving a mirror impression on the heat-softened steel; the cylinder receiving the impression became a “working die,” which would then be inserted into a coinage press and used to strike coins. In the mid-1950s, this process, called “hubbing,” had to be done multiple times to transfer all necessary details from hub to die.

Most of the time, the two (or more) impressions made on the working die are perfectly aligned, or are at least close enough that any difference between them is not visible without high-powered magnification. On this obverse die, though, the two impressions did not match; there were several degrees of rotation between the first impression and the second. The result: readily visible doubling, boldest at the outer lettering and the date, less obvious but still visible on certain details of the portrait, such as Lincoln’s bow tie.

Unlike many other rarities which require specialized knowledge to appreciate, the 1955 Doubled Die Obverse cent was instantly recognized as an oddity by collectors and non-collectors alike. As a result, many were saved with only a little bit of wear. Completely unworn pieces are more elusive, however, particularly those that retain their original color. This MS65 Red piece is tied for top coin in the population data for PCGS, which certified it. It’s perfect for the error enthusiast, the Lincoln cent specialist, or—dare I say it?—the cult-classic movie re-enactor.

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-John Dale Beety