J. L. Hargett had a huge presence in the token world. We often referred to him as “the mountain,” because you had to go to the mountain to get the tokens. Like Cher and Hillary, he preferred to go by one name. I doubt there were a dozen people in the hobby that even knew what the initials “JL” stood for (Joseph Lowrance). However, there was never any question in that world to whom you referred when you said “Hargett.”
Hargett started collecting Oklahoma trade tokens in 1938. In addition, he collected transportation tokens, precancels, O.T. and I.T. cancellations, and trade tokens from Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska and New Mexico. In the ‘50s and ‘60s he was traveling those states, collecting for the Robert Baughman collection and for his own collection as well. He listed those tokens on a card file, and the first ever version of a Kansas token catalog was an edition of seven Xerox copies of that card file, dated June 1968. The same is true of the Nebraska and Colorado catalogs—the first ones ever were copies of Hargett’s card file. Over the years he found many territorial and unique tokens while traveling the above states.
My acquaintance with him went back to 1976. I had just begun to collect and quickly encountered him. We traded extensively. I issued a supplement to his catalog in 1978. In 1981 I sold my first collection to him to get the funds to pursue a business opportunity. It has been like seeing old friends to see those tokens turn up, still in my original holders, as we sort through the Hargett collection.
Hargett had long planned to issue a definitive catalog, but was never able to assemble the team to do it. In 1991 Bill Waken issued his catalog of Kansas tokens, using the 1968 Xerox catalog as a basis, but was denied permission to catalog the massive number of additions which Hargett had made in the ensuing 23 years. Larry and I had proposed doing Hargett’s catalog in 1999 but were not able to come to agreement on the terms. By the NATCA Show over Labor Day 2001, he must have known his health was failing. He wanted to leave a legacy. He summoned us to his room and we worked out an agreement which gave us full access to his collection. In return we promised to produce a catalog with as many photos as we could fit in.
The next month we went to Okmulgee and picked up the Number One Kansas collection. There were sixteen double-row boxes and sixteen 3” binders, all full of tokens. We estimated it to be about 11,000 tokens.
We promptly began cataloging it. I did most of the actual descriptions and editing; Larry did all 5000 of the photos and the production work. We were using WordPerfect software, which was to lead to big troubles down the road. The actual cataloging was done by the following May, but as it was no printer would accept the book in WordPerfect format. They needed it in Pagemaker or Quark Express or would even take it in PDF format, but not WordPerfect. It seems that the formatting would not hold still in WordPerfect, and even opening the document on another computer would change it. As there were so many photos in the document it was very tightly formatted, and sometimes even one space would cause a picture to jump to the next page and cause chaos all through the rest of the document. Even after consulting two professionals we could not solve this problem. We were looking at 9 months of work that was totally unprintable.
The manuscript lay idle for nearly a year, with no solutions in sight. Finally, somebody suggested printing a single copy, one page at a time, and using that as a master copy for photographic reproduction. We lost a generation in the photos, and so lost some of the quality, but after a good deal of tinkering I was able to get each single page to hold still long enough to print a clean copy, and thus generate a printable manuscript. This was a sizable project as the manuscript was 658 pages. It took months to complete. At last, the bookbinder delivered the initial run of 250 copies in January of 2005.
Mr. Hargett passed away in 2003 and did not live to see the completed catalog. Nonetheless, we think he would have approved. When it was finished, we took copy number one to Okmulgee and presented it to the family. They asked us to disperse the token collection for them, and we have been working on that since March of 2005.
Thanks, Kent, for posting this account of JL and his collection. I had always wondered, since I first was in contact with the gentleman in the late 80s, how his catalogue was coming along. He won a one item mail bid auction I conducted through the Vecturist for a Colby depotel token. I expect it is in the catalogue. Colbyite.
The catalog does not contain any transportation token listings, as they are fully cataloged in the Atwood book. Mr Hargett's transportation token collection was sold before we saw the collection; I don't know who he sold it to.
As I recall, Hargett's transportation token collection, and various other tokens, were sold to a coin dealer from California named Harlan(?) White. At the ANA convention that year he had these tokens for sale, and the better ones were quickly snapped up.
Harlan White would have good material for sale. Kind of took my breath away to see a $10,000 dollar note for sale on his 1996 Denver ANA table (or was that the pre-show?).
