RUSSELL JAMES LOGAN -- Biographical Notes of Coin Collector Born December 6, 1941, Holyoke, MA, youngest of 3 children of Laura Russell and James Newton Logan. Childhood endeavors included paper route, baseball, trout fishing, canoeing, stamp and coin collecting. Saturdays spent sorting through bags of dimes at local bank. 1955-1959 at Choate (Rosemary Hall), Wallingford, CT. Hockey, lacrosse, wood-working shop. 1963 BSME, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY. Varsity Lacrosse under legendary coach Ned Harkness, hockey, DKE fraternity steward, summer engineering intern at Sonoco Products Co. Married July 13, 1963 to Brenda Lee Murph, Hartsville, SC. Hired as staff mechanical engineer at ALCOA, Massena, NY. Collecting early half dollars and dimes by die varieties along with father, using Beistle and Valentine. Also collecting mid-19th century US revenue stamps in multiples. 1965 son Robert Russell Logan born. Russell hand-builds boat house and dock at camp on lake in Adirondacks. Drives 1950 baby blue Studebacker pickup truck. 1967 daughter Harriett Russell Logan born. Russell active on board of Massena Jaycees, lastly as President. 1968-1976, Furnace Engineer at ALCOA headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA. Files several US patents for work on recycling aluminum cans, slitting scrap metal, and furnace design. Manages Junior Achievement team in award-winning aluminum coat hanger projects. Studies, buys and restores early American furniture from the 18th and early 19th century. Asked what he collects, he responds: "wood", by which he means walnut, maple or mahogany antiques, especially Queen Ann and Chippendale furniture with a New England origin. Attends local coin shows with well-loved copy of Al Overton's half-dollar variety book. Early 1970s -- discovery of Bust Half Nut Club opens fellowship of collectors to formerly-private father/son team. James N. Logan was buying bust coins from dealers in Savannah and Brunswick, GA, where he moved after retiring. One of these dealers mentioned the BHNC, and got great attention from Dad, who said his son might be interested in joining. The dealer contacted Sam Nolt, who contacted Russell, who promptly sent in a cesus of his and his father's bust half dollar varieties and was accepted to club membership. Thus began 30 years of avid correspondence with other collectors and sharing of interests and inquiries and friendship in annual meetings around coin conventions. Cherry picking may be a competitive sport, and crowing about rare finds and new varieties the ultimate brag, but to the onlooking wife these guys formed a real team, supporting and appreciating each other in an endearing way. James Logan corresponded with other collectors, but he never actually met them in person. Russell loved putting faces with the notes, and he shared all his coin contacts with his father. Logan vocabulary words, understood by growing Logan children but not general public: Varieties, cherry picking, bust, attributing, emission orders, edges, azures, gules, errors, cuds, brockage, pedigree, coin show, bust nut, obverse, reverse, cle, curled base 2, Overton, census, love tokens, itty bitty busties, Castaing machine..... 1976 move to Cleveland to work for Chase Brass & Copper, chief engineer for Narrow Strip Division. Meeting with David Davis and John McCloskey at Central States Coin Show in Dearborn, MI, begins long and beloved tradition of such Thanksgiving weekend meetings. The shared interests of these 3 lead them to Bill Subjack and Allan Lovejoy, all of them working on manuscripts for a "dime book". It took nearly 10 years to complete, with each of the five authors contributing valuable information and effort, but they got the book they wanted. They sought to do for dimes what Al Overton had done for half dollars, and to introduce even more collectors to the joy of classifying early dimes by die variety. In the process of work on the book, they became good friends. And when it was done, they invited others to join them in the John Reich Collectors Society, founded in 1985. Photograph of 5 dime book authors taken in Cleveland during a working session at Logan home, probably in 1983, is the only known photograph of all five of them together. James N. Logan died in August 1985. The solitary hobby of collecting early US silver coins by die variety, shared by father and son, was greatly enhanced by interation with the members of BHNC and JRCS. Stu Witham became a special friend and mentor for Russell in the 1980s. When Stu died, Russell realized that he had moved from the role of young apprentice to that of mentoring others. And that was a role he relished. Writing was difficult and unnatural for Russell. He was much more comfortable with numbers and ideas and action. But he did a lot of writing. The computer was a big help, with its spell-check and easy editing functions. His articles for the JRCS Journal won numerous awards. He understood the importance of studying, compiling, questioning and sharing the results with others. Russell's chief interest in the coins, as in many other things, was to appreciate and understand the human intervention in a mechanical process. 1985-1990 were the years when children were in college and wife wanted to travel, so Russell studied and wrote about coins, but did not buy as many as he would have liked. In 1985 he left the corporate world to co-found a consulting engineering firm with a fellow-RPI graduate, Clark Hungerford. Inovent Engineering developed and built prototype machinery for manufacturers, mostly in the Cleveland area, all very specialized in nature. One of its innovations was a hot-air-powered conveyor, for which they secured a patent, and various hydraulic systems for material handling applications. They were called on to provide machine modifications and to solve specific problems, and they built the pieces in-house in Solon, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. Every job was different, and they had a great time. Russell did some of everything there, and learned the latest computer-aided design systems too. But he and John McCloskey were talking about half dimes. And they met Mark Smith, who wanted to help write a half dime book. The 1990s were devoted to the half dime book project, writing articles for JRCS, and cultivating friendships with old and new variety collectors. Mark Smith's death early in the development of the book was a blow, but his coins were used in the research. ANA conventions continued to be a focus of every year, often including extended trips at convention locations with the Davis's. Russell and John McCloskey did every step of the book project themselves, but it was published under the auspises of the JRCS. Computers made the job much easier than the dime book had been. The book won the NLG Award for Book of the Year on its publication in 2000. Russell loved the oddballs in the coin world. He delighted in finding coins with errors in production. He liked knowing how the Mint operated. He built a scale model of the Castaing machine and demonstrated how it worked. He built an edge mirror to enable him to photograph the "third die". He lobbied for the inclusion of the cle as an official variety. He looked at every early US silver coin he could find, and he tried to attribute it and appreciate its characteristics. He did not buy the most expensive or perfect coins, but he tried to buy the most interesting ones he could afford. He was always eager to see other people's prize coins, and he was always happy to answer questions. He had the true collector's vivid memory, and he could tell you history and location of thousands examples. Many of his favorite coins were acquired by trading with other collectors, which he always preferred to buying or selling. I often asked him why he focused so narrowly on the bust coins, and his answer was that they were the last ones to use human hands to cut the dies and human hands to control the manufacture of the coins. Earlier coins were too expensive and rare, and later ones were too mechanically uniform for him. He found his niche.