I see gold has slid below $900 this morning and silver is under $17, but I don’t want to dwell on those numbers as I write this.

I have just returned from a one-day show put on by the Mansfield Numismatic Society in Willimantic, Conn. It was held Sunday, March 30. I spent yesterday morning in transit.

My mission was to give two Numismatic Ambassador Awards. The award is given to hobby workers and volunteers who make organized numismatics what it is.

The first recipient was C. John Ferreri. He has been the show chairman since the first one in 1973. The place the award was given was at the entrance to the old high school gymnasium that is the location of the 75-table show.

Roger Durand blew the whistle at about 11:50 a.m. like a high school basketball referee and the room became silent – if you can imagine such a thing on a bourse floor. However, I had spent more than half an hour prior warning dealers at their tables that it was going to happen and not to think something was wrong.

I cited Ferreri for his work with the MNS and many in the room spontaneously clapped.

As the president of the MNS said, afterwards, “John is the man. He’s the life blood of the club.”

As a surprise, we had persuaded the second recipient to travel down from the Boston area to be present to see Ferreri receive his award. Then the second award went to Tom Rockwell of North Andover.

He is, I believe 96 years old, and he has been a stalwart in three clubs, the Boston Numismatic Society, where he has been secretary, the Currency Club of New England, where he has also been secretary and the Boston Numismatic Society, where he has been treasurer.

Adding all of the terms together, he has spent about 100 years as a hobby volunteer according to Durand’s arithmetic.

“I never thought I’d get it,” the surprised Rockwell told me over and over again as we posed for photos with the plaque.

Well, the people at the show thought it was about time they both got the awards. I was happy to be in the right place at the right time to make it so.

Then it was back to business.

I have never had the pleasure of visiting the state of New Mexico. I seem to recall that my uncle’s green 1960 Ford station wagon had a sticker in the back window indicating that he, my aunt and two cousins had made it there on a visit once.

I have known people from New Mexico and others who moved there to retire. I have even read about it in books about hot retirement places. The American Numismatic Association has even had a show there in Albuquerque during my career, but my travels have never taken me there.

It is funny how these thoughts pop into my head when I think about the New Mexico state quarter that will be released April 7. But then, that is part of the point.

Collecting coins is as much about the person who is doing the collecting as the coins themselves. The New Mexico quarter will educate Americans about a state that entered the Union in 1912 and its Zia sun symbol design.

But every American who acquires one of the new quarters and takes a moment to look at it will make the coin his or her own by the thoughts that come to be associated with it.

Will they know where New Mexico is? Do they know the name of the governor?

It is fortunate for the hobby that Gov. Bill Richardson thinks the coin is important enough to head the state’s dignitaries in introducing the quarter with Mint Director Ed Moy.

Richardson has the honor of having been in the cabinet in Washington, D.C., when the program was authorized by Congress and now is a participant near the conclusion of its 10-year run.

New Mexico’s motto is “Land of Enchantment.” Enchantment is a good word describing the basic appeal of coin collecting, don’t you think?

In my collecting career, medals have been the stepchildren to coins. Most collectors I knew years ago had no interest in them. After all, they weren’t coins. They were second class.

That may sound a little harsh, but the words capture the attitude. Sure there are niche collectors of Inaugural medals and other things. Generalists will become reacquainted with them as we near the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of the next President. The quadrennial bloom will be on that particular rose.

Nearly 30 years ago the John Wayne medal took the hobby by storm. I didn’t buy one, but I remember reporting on the phenomenon.

I raise this particular topic this morning as I look at the sales totals for First Spouse bronze medals. We know the gold coins for Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and Miss Liberty standing in for Mrs. Jefferson sold out in hours. Those totaled 40,000 apiece.

The bronze medal sales totals for the same three are 39,016, 36,426 and 34,268. Buyers of these pay far less for the same design as appears on the gold coins – just $3.50. But there is no real hope of making any kind of speculative profit, so the purchasing impulse has more to do with the collector impulse and the simple pleasure in owning them.

Those totals rise by 50 percent if you count the pieces included in the 2007 Presidential $1 Coin and First Spouse Medal Sets. These were priced at $7.95 each.

Admittedly, these totals are small when compared to, say, the 480,176 Presidential $1 Coin Proof Sets sold so far for 2008, but they strike me as significant.

Now I am tainted by my generational attitudes to medals. Has that attitude been thrown off by newcomers who have no memory of circulation finds, proof Ike dollars and the first U.S. Olympic coins?

Perhaps. What do you think?

Election years bring out politicians and campaign promises. Normally, these do not touch upon numismatics, but 28 years ago this week, candidate Ronald Reagan made an appearance 13 miles to the south of Iola in Courthouse Square in Waupaca. I was there. I listened to his speech.

Incorporated into it was a promise to make the U.S. dollar as good as gold again. That is not exactly an overt pledge to restore the gold standard that was abandoned in 1933 or the gold exchange standard that was abandoned in 1971, but it was as close to the subject as any American leader who had a strong chance of winning the presidency has ever gone since President Nixon closed the gold window.

He was as good as his word. He appointed the U.S. Gold Commission. Its report in 1982 did not bring back the gold standard, but it did make the topic a respectable one in government circles again, something that had not been the case for the prior decade.

The door was opened to striking gold coins again. The Olympic coin legislation had a $10 gold coin component and it was not laughed out of Congress or condemned. It passed and the Olympic $10 of 1984 was the first American gold coin struck since 1933. It sold reasonably well to collectors.

It was followed by the 1986 Statue of Liberty $5, which sold out in just a few weeks. It was a first hint of pent-up gold coin demand.

This was then followed by the creation of the American Eagle program in 1986 and we were off to the races. The gold standard did not come back but Americans were given an American option to invest in if they wanted gold to be a part of their investments.

Perhaps someday a candidate who has more electoral pull than Ron Paul will say something positive about gold or some other numismatic subject.

Tom Snyder in Waukesha, Wis., gets the credit for being the first person to report to me his receipt of one of the new $5 Federal Reserve Notes.

As he reports by e-mail, “It was spent by the customer ahead of me at McDonalds and the clerk was having a problem accepting it when the guy told her it was a new one. I, the next customer, agreed and so she accepted the note, but quickly paid it back out to me in my change.”

This raises the usual questions about the lack of awareness of many of Americans of their money. Fortunately for the clerk’s peace of mind, she could treat the new bill like a hot potato and quickly pass it to Tom, who could report it to me and the rest of the collecting community.

That got me thinking along historical channels about the economy. During the Depression of the 1930s there were many unorthodox thoughts about how to get the economy moving again.

One method was to spend into circulation pieces of paper that weren’t money but passed as money. The technical term is scrip. The kicker, though, was this scrip expired, so the point was to spend it as quickly as possible. It was thought that these quick expenditures would help jump start demand much like the recently enacted stimulus package that will be paid out in May.

This was before John Maynard Keynes formalized the Keynesian economic theory of demand management through public expenditure to keep economies going.

Perhaps we can get the rest of the public to treat the new notes like hot potatoes and spend them more quickly.

No? Well, that’s the best I can do on a Monday morning this week.

I can choose gold as my topic this morning or I can mention the phone call I received yesterday from a fellow who wondered if I published poetry.

I responded to the inquiry that occasionally I will run something in the letters section if it relates to coins, but I certainly wasn’t interested in buying anything.

His reply was it was a love poem that mentions Queen Victoria.

Are you ready for gold? Yeah, me too.

It would seem that investors have once again had an attack of round-number-itis.

The $1,000 level for gold was such a shock, pleasant reality, target point or whatever that the price plunged, down now by more than $80.

I expect there will be a great deal of dissection of this event, but it will be helpful to remember that the big innovation for gold buyers in this cycle was the creation of exchange traded funds, or ETF’s, which allow persons unfamiliar with commodity markets or coin dealers to get in on the action.

ETF’s are convenient, but when Wall Street gets involved with gold or coins, we in numismatics get involved in Wall Street’s problems.

Individuals and firms who have taken a bath with their investments in the banking industry and bank-generated mortgage securities might have been eying their gold holdings as salable to raise funds to shore up their overall financial positions, or to meet margin calls.

This kind of activity has nothing to do with underlying fundamentals – at least initially.

We will learn if this is a temporary hiccup or the start of a new trend lower, but only over time. The present fall is not anything like as severe as the decline of the first two days from the 1980 peak, so this could very easily be nothing more than a routine price fluctuation.

There. Gold or poetry? Perhaps we will find someone who says gold is poetry.