• Contents of this Issue
  • Notes
  • Minutes of the 1290th Meeting
  • The Paper Trail of Democracy: Election Banknotes Around the World
  • Exhibits
  • Upcoming Meeting
  • Important Dates
  • Chatter Matter
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Chatter

Editor’s Notes

I will be in Pittsburgh, for the ANA’s World’s Fair of Money®, during my usual week for printing the September Chatter issue. That means the September issue might be printed and mailed a week earlier than usual but, most likely, the printed issues will be mailed later than usual, one week before our September meeting. If you plan to submit something for the September Chatter issue, please email it to me within a few days of our regular August meeting.

And remember, the 2027 and 2028 World’s Fairs of Money® are scheduled for Rosemont (suburban Chicago) in the first half of August.

Paul Hybert, editor

Minutes of the 1290th Meeting

The 1290th meeting of the Chicago Coin Club was called to order by President Melissa Gumm at 6:45pm CDT Wednesday, July 8, 2026. This was an in-person and online meeting with 18 members present at the CBA and 15 members online, for a total of 33.

Club Meeting Minutes

The June club meeting minutes were approved as published in the Chatter, both in print and on the CCC website.

New Memberships

Secretary Scott McGowan completed the second membership application reading for Philip Cantore of Chicago, a collector of US and world coins and precious metals. Following the reading the club voted to approve his membership.

Treasurer’s Report

Treasurer Lyle Daly presented the June period report indicating revenue of $345.00 (Dues, ANA Banquet, Donation) and expenses of $421.00 (Chatter expense, CBA room rent, PO Box Fee, AV Consult), for a period total of -‍$76.00.

Old Business

1. Committee Reports:
   1. Special Projects Committee: another meeting will be called for use of funds in treasury.
   2. Hall of Fame Committee: No recommendations yet.
   3. Legacy Project: No Report.
2. Reminder to do the CCC membership: survey was sent out in June; 47 surveys have been received so far. The survey is not mandatory but helps us understand the vast numismatic interests of the club.
3. Mark Wieclaw reported on the CCC Shirt orders – cutoff date July 15th. We have enough to meet our minimum and close to another price break. The order form was in the CCC meeting invite.
4. Deven Kane reported the calendar for speakers this year is full but if anyone has interest in doing a featured speaker presentation for 2027, let him know.

New Business

1. Mark Wieclaw is looking for CCC members to help plan the club’s 1300th meeting on May 12, 2027. Ideas are to form a committee, create an elongated and medal, and possibly a banquet.
2. Volunteers are needed to help with the November auction on November 11. Deven Kane and Rich Lipman will oversee the coordination but Rich is not available to be at the auction for set up, so someone is needed who will be at the auction to help execute the various needs. We currently have 20 lots for the auction so the club is open to donations and consignments. Contact Deven or Rich if you have items to be considered for the auction.
3. Volunteers are needed to help plan the location and logistics for the December Banquet. The club was asked, for those who attended last year’s banquet at the Des Plaines Elks Club, would you be interested in returning to the same location. Several members responded in the affirmative.

General Announcements

1. Steve Zitowsky updated the club on Carl Wolf’s recovery after he suffered a stroke in May. Carl is currently in rehabilitation in Evanston working on gaining strength. Hold off on requests for visiting him but cards sent in c/o the club PO Box address are welcome.
2. CCC member Steve Starlust, who authored a book Referencing Columbiana based on his 1,500 piece collection of medals, badges, and souvenirs of the World’s Columbian Exposition, reported that Heritage will now be selling the collection. The date is yet to be set, but some lots will be previewed at the 2026 Pittsburgh ANA.

Featured Program

Tyler Rossi on The Paper Trail of Democracy: Election Banknotes Around the World. Following the presentation and Q&A, Deven announced that Tyler will be presented with a speaker’s medal and ANA education certificate at a future date.

Show and Tell

Vice President Ray Dagenais announced the evening’s eight Show and Tell presentations. A reminder to the club that in the summarizing of points for the show and tell, presenters receive extra points per presentation after giving five presentations.

President Melissa Gumm reviewed upcoming numismatic events, then adjourned the meeting at 8:48PM.

Respectfully submitted,
Scott McGowan, Secretary

Speaker’s Wor[l]d
The Paper Trail of Democracy: Election Banknotes Around the World

by Tyler Rossi
presented to our July 9, 2026 meeting

Tyler Rossi’s subject was election banknotes: flyers and handbills printed to look like real currency and handed out during campaigns. Nobody saves them. They were made to be dropped in the street, so these examples survived by accident, which is half of what makes them interesting.

He sorted them two ways. By type, they are imitations that copy a real note closely, fantasies that invent a currency outright, or stamped notes, meaning actual money with a slogan printed across it. The more useful split is by intent. Bad money attacks, usually by showing you what the currency will look like after the other side wins. Good money promotes. It either promises your money will be worth something again or puts the candidate’s face where the head of state belongs.

He stopped to define Propaganda before getting to the notes. He stated that it is planned rather than spontaneous. It serves whoever made it. It runs on symbols and feeling instead of argument, it selects real facts rather than inventing fake ones, and it needs saturation to work. Then he asked the room whether the notes qualified.

Bad money took up more of the evening. Three Australian pieces, all from maritime unions, show how little the format changes across thirty years. The 1972 “three dollar” leaflet brands McMahon’s government the Government of Inflation, hangs it on Treasurer Billy Sneddon, writes off the Prime Minister as the “prize muddler,” and works in a “Tricky Dick” Nixon reference to suggest the Coalition took its orders from Washington. That last jab landed harder in 1972 than it reads now. Two decades on, the same union printed a $4.25 note to dramatize what John Hewson’s 15% GST would do to the dollar, complete with a grocery list of what bread and butter would cost afterward and a shadow cabinet renamed the Boys from Brazil. The 2001 note goes after Howard’s broken “never ever” pledge on the GST and lists the firms that collapsed on his watch: Ansett, HIH, Pasminco.

The same instinct turns up everywhere. An Armenian note denominated 00000 dram carries a two-panel cartoon labeled before the elections and after the elections, which is the entire joke and does not need more. Belgium’s liberals put Prime Minister Théo Lefèvre’s face where Mercator’s should be on a 1000-franc note, declared it payable to Théo, and worked out that inflation had left the thing worth 850. They also invented an Article 17 of the Lefèvre Code sentencing bad taxpayers to forced labor.

For Canada, the Diefendollar is the famous one, printed by the thousands in 1962 after Diefenbaker’s government devalued the dollar and pegged it at 92.5 US cents in the middle of a campaign. Whatever the economics, the timing was a disaster, and the note is generally credited with helping cut his 1958 landslide down to a minority that fell apart inside a year. The other is a Créditiste parody issued by the Banque du Monopoly à Caouette, a worthless piastre from the Canadian Banqueroute Co. Ltd., marked non-negotiable and insufficient funds, denominated une douleur instead of un dollar.

Two German notes bracket the century’s worst memory from either end. One is a 500-million-mark note from 1923 laid out as a newspaper death notice: Maria Reichsmark died on the night of November 14, having borne five years of suffering with great patience, survived by the entire Mark family. The other is from the 1980 federal election. A pro-Strauß group reprinted a hundred-thousand-mark Reichsbanknote of February 1923, dropped Helmut Schmidt’s portrait into the medallion, called him the Debt-Chancellor, and predicted a coming 1:10 currency cut. Reaching for hyperinflation in a peacetime campaign is about as hard as anyone hits.

There was something comparable in Israel in 1959, overprinting a facsimile one-lira note in red with a line about Mapai devaluing it further. The Hebrew carries a pun that the English translation loses. Italy’s 1948 election produced a 00.000 lire note from the Banca dell’Inflazione warning voters that a Popular Front win meant the fate of Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary. And a Swiss piece from the 1922 referendum on a one-time capital levy imagines the franc reborn as a 100,000 Schweizer-Rubel, signed by Robert Grimm, Fritz Platten, and a Dr. A. Schmid. Forging the left’s signatures onto the currency of ruin, twenty-six years before the Italians thought of it.

Tyler then discussed the so-called “Good money.” Argentina’s Menem trucho notes carried Carlos Menem’s portrait, the Justicialist shield, and a serial number lifted from his national ID. Ciccone Calcogràfica printed them, which is the same firm that printed the real pesos, and a few reportedly got passed as money in Bolivia and Paraguay. A Bosnian party promised 100 convertible marks a month to every unemployed person until it found them work. Reporters in Sarajevo later documented activists offering the same 100 marks for a vote, with a 20-mark bonus for every additional voter you brought in. A Belgian note reduces an entire platform to four words: Moins d’état = Moins d’impôts.

For Chile he discussed a counterstamp on an obsolete peso reading “with Alessandri, this banknote will have value,” which is a promise made about a currency the candidate himself had abolished. Then, twenty years later, the same country produced a note from the “Banco de la Democracia” celebrating Patricio Aylwin, who won and took the country out of the dictatorship. Hungary’s is the shortest and the best. Somebody took a one-billion-pengő note from the dead currency and stamped a line diagonally across it: strong democracy equals stable money, vote Social Democrat.

Three from the post-Soviet years closed things out. A Latvian party issued a 1000-lats note in 2002 under the slogan vote for your own welfare, which is more than any real Latvian note; the party took 1.3% and elected nobody. A Novosibirsk gubernatorial flyer from 1995 puts Ivan Starikov in the banknote oval over the line “your choice is worth more than money,” which turns the format against itself. He lost. The last was an Odesa note from 2006, denominated 15 because 15 was the bloc’s number on the ballot, the numeral set against a cut orange in case anyone missed which side they were on. Print run of 100,000.

Money is the one piece of campaign rhetoric everybody already knows how to read. You can argue with a voter about inflation or you can put a worthless bill in his hand.

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Show and Tell

Items shown at our July 8, 2026 meeting,
reported by Ray Dagenais.

1. Laurence Edwards attended the annual meeting of the Early American Coppers (EAC) club in Charlotte, North Carolina from April 30 to May 3, 2026. He gave us a brief report on the meeting, including his own exhibit on tokens and other items related to Joseph Priestley, English chemist and Unitarian minister who spent the last decade of his life in the US. He also distributed to us a few copies of a booklet from the 2025 EAC meeting in Pittsburgh, Large Cents from the Clapp Collection.
2. In honor of the Semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Leonard showed a gold 1776 Great Britain guinea of George III. This coin is nicely detailed and well struck. It is a Fourth Head “Rose Shield” example, and a timely reminder of coinage being used during the turbulent times surrounding the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain.
3. Noah Graf has wanted a Celtic coin for his collection for some time, but he was waiting for one that was pre-Roman with strong eye appeal and distinctive imagery. He could not pass up this coin at the 2026 Central States Convention. Made of potin, a base metal, its diameter is 21mm. The seller believed it was from Gaul and likely pre-Roman, but he had done no further research on identification. Noah was able to identify it in the Catalog of Gaulish Coins in the National Library of France (Refs.: CMG 8153-8157) as a coin attributed to the Catalauni, a Gallic tribe from what is now the Champagne region in north-central France. Noah said dating most Celtic coins, especially those without legends, are all rough guesses, but this one is dated in the literature to between the late 4th century BC and the end of the 1st century BC. Since the Romans conquered Gaul in the 50s BC, this is almost certainly a pre-Roman coin. On the obverse is a male figure, seated and cross-legged, with braided hair outstretched on either side and holding a torc in his left hand. The figure is likely to represent either a chief, a king, or a god, symbolically apportioning out wealth or prosperity. The reverse is mostly taken up with a large figure of a wild boar, a popular Celtic animal motif, symbolizing strength and fearlessness. Above it is a coiled snake or a dragon – it could be either, since Celtic symbology held snakes to represent fertility or renewal, and dragons to represent wisdom and authority.
4. Robert Feiler showed a coin and a set of notes.
   1. A 3-color enameled challenge coin that Bob received from a fellow veteran while attending a 4th of July Parade. In the center of the obverse is an American flag over an image of the US Capitol; the inscription reads “Thank You Veterans with respect honor and gratitude.” In the center of the reverse is an image of an American flag with the inscription “veterans are my brothers.” An additional inscription reads “I took a DNA test and God is my father.”
   2. A set of five small colorful exchange notes issued by the Belarus National Bank. The front features “Pagonya” warrior on horseback. The backs of the following denominations feature:
      1. 50 Kopeck – red and brown-orange on pink underprint squirrel at center;
      2. 1 Ruble – blue green featuring a rabbit at center;
      3. 3 Ruble – green, red orange, and pale silver green featuring 2 beavers at center;
      4. 5 Ruble – deep blue, violet and multi-colored underprint, featuring 2 wolves at center;
      5. 25 Ruble – violet on red, green and multi color underprint moose at center.
5. Tyler Rossi showed two notes.
   1. A German propaganda leaflet dressed up as the Soviet 1-chervonets note of 1937. Among the devices on the front are a numeral 1 in each corner, the serial number 145275 in multiple places, a small Soviet state arms towards the left, and at the right an oval medallion with Lenin’s portrait. The reverse shows dense propaganda text addressed to a Red Army soldier, the ПРОПУСК / Passierschein marking turns the note into a safe-conduct pass, and the lower left has the printing code 237-10. 43 (which tells us it is leaflet number 237 from October 1943, with a print run of 150,000. At least four serials are recorded (145275, 178400, 803535, 947732) – they varied them to keep up the appearance of real circulating currency.
   2. Another German demoralization leaflet, this one imitating the 10 chervontsev bill from the same series of 1937 chervonets. They imitated at least the 1-, 3-, and 10-chervontsev denominations; archival examples survive at Freiburg, and the series was first published by Buchbender and Schuh in Heil Beil! in 1974. Compared to the 1943 1-chervonets 237-10.43 above, this one has no national emblem and no ПРОПУСК / Passierschein legend – this is a straight propaganda piece, nothing else. The banknote disguise here was purely about concealment: something \that looked like money would get picked up, and a soldier could carry it in his wallet without attracting attention. That mattered, because Soviet military tribunals treated possession of enemy leaflets as evidence of intent to desert.
6. Deven Kane showed three items.
   1. A medal from the “The Lore of Grandma” marathon (Deven’s 14th marathon) in Duluth, Minnesota in June 2026. When the race premiered in 1977, a mere 150 runners showed up on the starting line. Local banks passed on sponsoring it, but a brand-new local eatery, Grandma’s Restaurant (Grandma’s Saloon & Grill), stepped in to fund the fledgling event, and in exchange, they got the naming rights. For the 50th anniversary running in 2026, there were roughly 12,000 runners tackling the full marathon, and over 20,000 participants for the full, the half, and the 5K events combined.
   2. A silver tetradrachm of Tigranes II “the Great,” 95-56 BC, of Armenia, minted in its capital Tigranocerta. The obverse has a diademed and draped bust wearing a tiara five-pointed royal Armenian tiara. The reverse shows the famous “Tyche of Antioch” statue sculpted by Eutychides, a highly influential design in the Hellenistic world. Tigranes adopted this motif to emphasize his dominion over Syria and the Seleucid heartland after his conquests.
   3. A silver tetradrachm from Babylon or Northern Mesopotamia, imitating the classic Athenian issues with a helmeted head of Athena on the obverse, and an olive spray and a crescent moon to the left of the owl’s body on the reverse. The legends are in Greek and Imperial Aramaic script. Issued by Mazakes circa 331-322 BC, during the Achaemenid-Macedonian transition. Mazakes, who surrendered Egypt to Alexander without a fight in 332 BC, had been the last Achaemenid Persian satrap of ancient Egypt. This coin is a die match to lot 5473 in Triton XXIX.
7. Josh Benevento showed what appeared, at first glance, to be a large Bavarian thaler, but is actually an example of First World War patriotic memorabilia. Made around 1916, this privately produced “Box Thaler” opens to reveal an accordion strip of thirty connected chromolithograph discs featuring King Ludwig III, Kaiser Wilhelm II, famous military commanders, battle scenes, zeppelins, aircraft, and images of the German home front. Rather than serving as money, it functioned as a piece of wartime propaganda, celebrating Bavaria’s loyalty to the German Empire and telling the story of the war through colorful illustrations.
8. Mark Wieclaw showed five silver denarii, all from the Severan Dynasty, 193-235AD, and all from the former collection of Curtis Clay. On the typical denarii of Septimius Severus and his wife, Julia Domna, the coinage of the Emperor has a more masculine and military type theme, while the coinage of the Empress has a more feminine look.
   1. A pair of denarii, featuring Septimius Severus and Julia Domna, with reverse designs and legends that are almost identical. Here, the reverses featured crossed cornucopia and a wheat shaft in the center, indicating that there was an abundance of food; the legend “Felicitas Tempor” tells us that that everything was going well and harmoniously.
   2. Another pair of denarii featuring Septimius Severus and Julia Domna, also with shared reverse designs and legends. Here, the reverse designs feature a legionary eagle between two standards. These were issued to praise and typically pay the soldiers for their services.
   3. A denarius of Severus Alexander, nephew of Septimius Severus; this coin is an obverse brockage. Alexander did not want to go to war when the Germanic tribes threatened to invade the Empire; trying to be diplomatic, he literally bribed them. This did not sit well with his army, and led to his assassination by the soldiers, thus ending the Severan Dynasty in 235 AD.

Reminders:

• You can email to Ray a description of what you will show at a meeting, to give him a start on this write-up.
• Send it to cccshowandtell@gmail.com
• After a meeting, all members who viewed the meeting should email him their scoring sheet – a listing of each exhibit number followed by a score (from a low of 1 to a high of 10) is all that is needed.

Our 1291st Meeting

Important Dates

Unless stated otherwise, our regular monthly CCC Meeting is in downtown Chicago, and also online, on the second Wednesday of the month; the starting time is 6:45PM CT.

Chatter Matter

http://www.ChicagoCoinClub.org/

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Club Officers

Correspondence

All correspondence pertaining to Club matters should be addressed to the Secretary and mailed to:
CHICAGO COIN CLUB
P.O. Box 2301
CHICAGO, IL 60690
Or email the Secretary at Secretary.ChicagoCoinClub@GMail.com
Payments to the Club, including membership dues, can be addressed to the Treasurer at the above street address.

Payments

Renewing Members Annual dues are $20 a year ($10 for Junior, under 18). Annual Membership expires December 31 of the year through which paid. Cash, check, or money order are acceptable (USD only please). We do not accept PayPal. Email your questions to Treasurer.ChicagoCoinClub@GMail.com Members can pay the Club electronically with Zelle™ using their Android or Apple smart phone. JP Morgan Chase customers can send payments to the Club via Quick Pay. To see if your Bank or Credit Union is part of the Zelle™ Payments Network, go to https://www.zellepay.com Please read all rules and requirements carefully.

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