Passing of Michigan Dealer Bill Bradford

Bill Bradford died on Thursday, December 8, 2005. His passing did not
make the news here because he has not been an active coin dealer for
many years. However, he was my introduction to numismatics in the
1970s.

Bill owned Liberty Coins in East Lansing from 1971 to about 1981. He
then moved to Port Townsend, Washington, and launched LIBERTY magazine,
a libertarian journal in direct competition with Reason. You can find
both on the newsstands of larger bookstores in malls, etc. Bill was a
consistent Austrian. He excoriated the Libertarian Party -- and did so
on principle. Bill believed in the marketplace and had no faith in
political process. Like a hero out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged, he
made money trading in gold and silver -- and in buying and sellig ideas
-- after majoring in philosophy in college. For Bill, philosophy was
not a study; it was a way of life.

Bill was my first tutor in numismatics. He taught me "obverse" and
"reverse." I ceased collecting a few years back and sold off everything
except for some mementoes. Among them are two from his shop: a VF
Indianhead Cent and a Tibetan Tangka. He told me the history of the
tangka and it stayed with me for 20 years until I learned enough of the
language to write an article about the coins myself. He also told me
the story of "Levi Loomis and the Bank of Singapore," which I later
researched on my own and published twice. Thirty years ago, I wrote a
science fiction story set about 2020 AD, and I had Liberty Coins still
in business, the president being "Grover C. Bradford." I took the name
from his dog. He was afraid that when the story was published, he
would be sued by his competitor in paper money, Grover Criswell.

You can read a lot of memories about Bill Bradford on Objectivist and
Libertarian websites and blogspots. His other passions included
baseball history and the life of H. L. Mencken.

Mike Marotta wrote:



I remember him, he used to have a coin shop next to the old State
Theatre
in East Lansing. I went in there one time looking for something.