Good and old, or just old?
Greetings, I am just back from the Battlefield Show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bob Johnson puts on a great show. I was impressed by how high the attendance was. Table…
Greetings,
I am just back from the Battlefield Show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bob Johnson puts on a great show. I was impressed by how high the attendance was. Table sales may have been a bit lower than usual, but there was no shortage of potential buyers walking around. Bob does a great job of promoting the show which was held concurrently with a gun show and a flea market elsewhere on the State Fairgrounds.
Two things at the Battlefield Show reminded me that I am not the young kid on the block anymore. First, I realized that I had been going to Bob’s shows since I was 17 years old. That was nearly 30 years ago! Back then, Bob had a partner and a small shop in Minneapolis. Funny thing, he looks about the same as he did back then! I wish I could say the same.
The second reminder of the passing of time was a comment I heard from three different people when describing relics that they had recently purchased. Each one used the expression, “And it’s been in a private collection for 25 years!” The implication was that it must be real because it has been locked away for a quarter of a century.
The first couple of times I heard the expression, it didn’t really register. I simply accepted it in the manner in which it was offered: evidence of authenticity. However, lying in my motel after hearing it a third time, I did the math. 25 years means that the items entered the sellers’ collections in 1984—the same exact year I sat in my grad school-provided apartment, rubbing bogus Third Reich decals off of supposed “transitional helmets”.
Over the preceding couple of years, I had bought a number of helmets from a collector who “had them since soon after the end of WWII” (another 25 years!). I bought the “transitional” single decal M16 helmets from him for about $125-$155 a piece. And, as the flaking decals revealed, they were as fake as fingernails on a frog.
After rubbing the decals off, I was left with several nice WWI M16 helmets (then worth about $55-$75 a piece). It was a hard lesson, but it taught me that time in a collection does not establish believable provenance for items. When I was young, “25 years ago” equaled “right after WWII". Today, that same 25 years equals 1984—a peak in counterfeiting history.
Like other old timers, I have plenty of good stuff that has been in my collection for 25 years. Most likely, I some of it is bad. I want to suggest to collectors to take that old expression, “It’s been in my collection for nigh onto 25 years now…” with a grain of salt. It might be true. And there might well be a good reason the object hasn’t seen the light of day for a quarter of a century.
Be cautious and keep finding the good stuff,
John Adams-Graf
Editor, Military Trader and Military Vehicles Magazine

John Adams-Graf ("JAG" to most) is the editor of Military Trader and Military Vehicles Magazine. He has been a military collector for his entire life. The son of a WWII veteran, his writings carry many lessons from the Greatest Generation. JAG has authored several books, including multiple editions of Warman's WWII Collectibles, Civil War Collectibles, and the Standard Catalog of Civil War Firearms. He is a passionate shooter, wood-splitter, kayaker, and WWI AEF Tank Corps collector.