Remembering Donald Erlenkotter (1938-2024)
Don and the Civil War Token Society From The Civil War Token Journal Fall 2004 “Meet CWTS President #22: Donald Erlenkotter” My life began in August 1938 at Ithaca, New York, where my father, Robert Erlenkotter, was completing his master’s degree in civil engineering at Cornell University. He was an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a 1934 graduate of West Point. After living in Ithaca for six more weeks, we moved south to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Just six months later we moved considerably farther south - to the Panama Canal Zone! For almost four years we were stationed there, and some of my earliest memories are of the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were expected to follow up with a strike on the Canal to block naval reinforcements from being sent to the Pacific. Often, we had air raid warnings in the middle of the night, and both families in our building had to huddle in the only substantial part of the structure - a ground floor concrete shower stall. There we remained until the all-clear was sounded, with our only source of illumination a single flashlight with a red lens. In 1942 my mother, sister, and I moved to Denver, Colorado, where my grandfather, Cyrus Boutwell, lived with his family. As is typical for an Army family, we moved frequently, and I had attended nine schools by the time I graduated from high school in 1955. My collecting activities began in 1947 when we were in Newport, Rhode Island, where my father attended the Naval War College for a year. He had been an enthusiastic stamp collector, and so I followed his lead. (I still have my great-grandfather’s stamp album, which was printed in Germany in the 1870s.) In 1949, when we were living in Louisiana, I received a Whitman Lincoln cent coin folder, and U.S. coins became a main interest. About that time I also received my first CWTs, which came from an assortment of miscellaneous coins in a family accumulation - a partially holed Doscher store card and two Indian head “Not One Cent” patriotics, one holed and the other with the “Not” scratched out. I knew nothing about CWTs at the time, and these weren’t attractive enough to stimulate much interest. My collecting activities were disrupted in 1953 when my father was transferred to Europe, where I spent the first year in Paris and a second In Heidelberg. U.S. coins weren’t part of the scene there since we used either local money or military payment certificates. I returned to stamp collecting and enjoyed the open-air bourse along the Champs Elysees and a couple of visits to the eminent stamp dealer Theodore Champion. In 1955 I graduated from the American high school in Heidelberg and entered Georgia Tech, spending the next four years studying civil engineering. When I graduated in 1959, I had a job in San Francisco to work on the redesign of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but no money to get there. So, I went to the coin department at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta and sold my collection for $600. (This was one of the worst collecting decisions I ever made, since the collection would be worth at least 100 times that amount today.) In San Francisco I spent a little time rebuilding a collection from the abundance of coins minted there. Some choice specimens were still available from bank coin rolls. But in 1961 I resumed my education at the Stanford Business School, and continue on for a Ph.D. In 1966 I went to India to work on economic development planning with the U.S. Agency for International Development. After three years there, I joined the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. The next thirty years were spent primarily in building an academic career. I had developed an interest in my mother’s Boutwell family, which had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. When eBay began operations on the Internet, I set up a search on eBay for items with Boutwell as a key word. To my surprise, I began turning up a substantial number of Boutwell Civil War tokens and found that there was an entire category on eBay for CWT. From my work on the Boutwell family I knew that Oliver Boutwell, Jr., had been a miller in Troy, New York, and these were his tokens. A couple of family sources had reported that Oliver distributed $10,000 worth of one-cent tokens, or a total of a million tokens. But before I encountered eBay, I had never seen one. As I began learning more about Civil War tokens, I found that very little was known about the number of tokens that had been produced, and what was reported seemed to be more myth than documented knowledge. If I could estimate the percentage of Boutwell tokens among all CWTs, I could calculate the number of CWTs that had been produced. I first spent a year tabulating information from eBay auctions, and then did a second calculation of the percentage of Boutwell tokens in CWTS auctions. These two estimates turned out to be amazingly close. Along the way, I also determined that the survival rate among Boutwell tokens was virtually the same as for all CWTs. I also came across the Civil War Token Society and became a member. Dale Cade invited me to a meeting in Long Beach, and then persuaded me to present a paper at one of the meetings. I discovered that there were many interesting things to write about in the CWT world, and this blended numismatic and genealogical knowledge in a way that appealed to me. In particular, I liked to examine generally accepted CWT myths to determine if they could be either substantiated or falsified. This led me to write and submit a number of papers to the CWTJ. A few years later Dale asked me to run for the CWTS Board of Governors. My first assignment on the Board was as a member of the Service Awards Committee. I was surprised to find that there was no convenient record of past award winners, and that several Service and Literary Awards had never been reported in the Journal. With the help of Cindy Wibker, I completed a record of the awards. I also discovered that the Society’s By-Laws were inaccessible and out-of-date. So, I became the chair of a committee to revise them. A collection of this material and additional essential information for the CWTS was assembled into an Executive Board Handbook. After a couple of terms on the Board, I was induced to run for CWTS president. What I didn’t know was that I was walking into a membership and secretarial crisis. Then the CWTS publisher retired, and I stepped in as acting CWTJ editor so our then-editor could take over as publisher. Two months before the end of my term as president, our new publisher suddenly died. This left me with a little over a week to figure out how to produce the Winter 2010 Journal. Looking back, I still find it hard to believe that I got the Journal switched from an archaic cut-and-paste operation to a fully digital format with a PDF print-ready final product under that tight time constraint. Following three more years as editor, I would say that my most enjoyable experiences in the CWTS have been seeing a new issue of the Journal arrive with interesting, well-written articles that are produced in an attractive format. I hope that the Society will continue this tradition.
From John Ostendorf: Don was a friend. Don and I collaborated on a great deal of research for which he had quite a passion. He helped me polish up my book on Cincinnati Civil War store cards and we would go on to work on a number of other research projects. He took over as interim Secretary in 2009 or so and overhauled an antiquated system which made my life easier when I took the position in 2011. He served with me on the SC3 book committee where we found opportunities for additional research. He and I spent many hours together at the CWTS table at various ANA shows and we could talk Civil War tokens and CWTS business for hours. His articles were always well researched, sources documented, and interesting to read. It was my pleasure to nominate him for induction into the CWTS Hall of Fame. Don received many awards in his professional career and in the CWTS; but I know he took particular pride in his Hall of Fame induction. Sadly, Don was stricken by Alzheimer’s a few years ago and we could no longer communicate. I miss those days of research collaboration and sitting at the CWTS table with him. Don was a good friend and will be missed by all who knew him.
From Scott Blickensderfer: Don may have very well been the first member of the CWTS to introduce himself as I attended my first Society meeting in San Francisco in 2005. I had just started collecting Civil War tokens that year after buying a box lot of them (with the two Fuld "black books") at a local auction. He took me right under his wing and introduced me to the various dignitaries of the day; Allen Bleviss, Susan Trask, Sterling Rachootin, Dale Cade, Bill Nash, Tom Reed and the "Two Steves" Tanenbaum and Hayden to name a few. He was a gracious host and was keenly interested in the directions I was heading as an early collector. His guidance and ideas in research topics and techniques I still reflect on today. He went so far once as to dig up a relative of an issuer I had written an early bio about, interviewed her, and added his touch to that article. He showed me how to "put meat on the bones" of whatever I was working on. His avocation was professor of business management at UCLA; his twin passions were collecting and researching tokens. I also have a complete set of his CWTS Hall of Fame tokens; he was fiercely proud of that accomplishment and honor bestowed by friends. It will be my goal going forward to emulate the dedication, passion and intensity that Don possessed in his pursuits of advancing both the Society and its members.
Bio Written by Don in 1995 My two years at Benedictine were an important part of my life ~ notably, it was one of only two schools that I attended for much more than a year. (The other was in Denver for first and second grades.) In the fall of 1952, the Army transferred my father to Europe, and my grandparents came out from Denver so I could stay in school. They had to return to Denver in April 1953 because of a family emergency, and I was left with friends for the rest of the school year. That summer I traveled on a troop ship to Germany, and arrived in Bremerhaven to find that there was no one to meet me since my father was in a hospital in France. At the age of fourteen, with a schoolboy's knowledge of French but no German, I found myself on a train to Frankfurt with instructions to transfer there to one for Paris, where my mother and sister were waiting for me. Most of my junior year was spent in the Army high school in Paris, which was on the second floor of Louis Bleriot’s old airplane factory. (The ground floor housed the post boiler works, which made its presence audibly known to us on the floor above.) For all its charms, Paris wasn’t a great place for an American teenager. My nearest friends were several miles, and three Metro stops away. We lived on the eighth floor of a venerable apartment building, which did have a commanding view of the Auteuil race track. The landlady’s father had been in charge of erecting the obelisks brought back from Egypt, and the apartment was decorated with many drawings of their installation. In the spring of 1954 my father was transferred again, to Karlsruhe, Germany. There was no American high school there, so I went toa five-day boarding school in Heidelberg. In my senior year I frequently stayed in Heidelberg on weekends, ostensibly for school activities, but often for travel with friends. One could buy a military rail ticket to the next major city for a quarter, and expenses were a dollar a night for a place to stay and a dollar a day for beer. (There was no age limit for consumption of alcohol, and sufficient food came with the beer!) One memorable trip was to Frankfurt and on to Mainz for the Rose Monday parade, populated by an astounding number of drunken Germans. We returned to Heidelberg in time that night to go to Zum Zeppl, a bierstube on the Neckar River that was a hangout for Rommel’s Afrika Corps veterans, One of its comer tables was under a fake spider that descended from the ceiling at midnight. Another trip, after graduation, was to Munich and the Hofbrauhaus. There we stayed in a room in a German family’s apartment, and woke up the next morning to a loud pounding noise, The building, which had been damaged in the war, was being demolished from the other end! Even with all these diversions, there was time for schoolwork. I ended up as the class valedictorian, although this was in doubt for a while because I was suspended for two weeks early in May for operating a bar on the bus during our senior class trip. (The trip covered five countries in four days, with major stops in Innsbruck and Venice.) Graduation and the Junior-Senior Prom were held in the King’s Room of the Heidelberg Schloss ~ this was the last year that the American military controlled just about everything in the American sector of Germany. At the end of the summer, I returned via another troop ship and made my way back to Savannah. I was on my way to Georgia Tech, which had been about the only place where I could qualify for in-state tuition rates. I stayed with Col. Thomas DeForth Rogers, a West Point classmate and close associate of my father, who had succeeded him as Savannah District Engineer. Tommy McDonough and I left for Tech together on the Nancy Hanks, which was a great help to me since all my orientation materials were still enroute to Germany. At Georgia Tech I majored in Civil Engineering ~a choice due mainly to family background and a preference for materials and soils labs over machine shop work. I joined one of the harder drinking fraternities, whose members included a number of Korean War veterans. In the summer of 1956 worked out of Savannah on a survey crew for the Corps of Engineers, traveling all over Georgia. This was hot work, especially in the marshes along the Savannah River. One of the members of the crew was Roy Gilligan, who had been a year ahead of us. Several vacations were spent in Savannah, mainly with Tommy McDonough and his family. My family had moved to the Presidio of San Francisco, and I spent the summer of 1957 there working for the Engineer Section of Sixth Army. In 1959 I finished my degree at Georgia Tech, a month before my 21" birthday. A few months before, Tech had threatened to reclassify me as an out-of-state student and collect the difference in tuition for four years. I think that I managed to convince them that I had a right to be a resident of some state, and that Georgia was the only logical candidate! By this time, I had decided that there were two things I had to do next in life: work in San Francisco and drive a sports car. I bought a bright red 1958 Triumph TR-3, loaded my footlocker in the passenger's seat, and hit the road for San Francisco, where I had a job working on bridge design for the state. After two months there, I headed back to Fort McClellan, AL for six months in the Army. When I returned to my job in San Francisco, which involved reconstruction for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, I soon decided that routine engineering work in a group headed by men with a Great Depression mentality wasn’t for me. In 1961 I entered the MBA program at Stanford University - the most important decision in my life. I became interested in the growing application of mathematical techniques in management, so when I completed this program in 1963, I continued on for an M.S. degree in statistics and a Ph.D. in Business (Management Science). There were a few extraneous adventures along the way, such as being evicted from my apartment because of racial discrimination and almost becoming a Supreme Court test case. In 1966, after five years of graduate academic studies and research, I was beginning to feel a need for something different. My Ph.D. adviser had spent a year in India, and I had worked with him on completing a book based on that experience. In the process, I realized that India was the largest experiment in planning in the free world. When he told me that a new group was being set up at the USAID Mission in New Delhi to do analytical planning studies, I jumped at the chance to join this group and was successful. This led to a three-year adventure involving many ironies. It turned out that the wonderful group I was to join was eliminated just before I arrived. Fortunately, my adviser had agreed to go over for a year as the Economic Advisor to the Mission, and we were able to carry out much of what we had intended, But, due to a lengthy drought, the three years I was in India became known as “The Planless Years"! In addition to planning studies, most notably on the fertilizer industry, I was involved in evaluations of projects ranging from iron ore mines to aerial crop spraying to jeeps for family planning. In 1969 I returned to the United States and took a faculty position at UCLA in what is now the Anderson Graduate School of Management. On the trip back, we took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to visit Cambodia. Six months later the hotel where we had stayed at Angkor Wat was burned to the ground by the Khmer Rouge. I retired from UCLA in 2004 but was recalled this year for various activities. In addition to normal faculty duties, I have been Director of the Executive MBA Program, Chairman of the Faculty, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. The year 1979-80 was spent at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. (The latter is an East-West venture created as an outcome of a conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev.) In 1994-95 I was a Fulbright Research Scholar and Lecturer at Kathmandu University in Nepal, where I was half-an-hour late to my first class due to evasive measures taken to avoid burning vehicles which had been overturned in a minor riot. Shorter assignments included a month in Iran in 1975-76 with UNIDO, where I learned much about the problems that later led to the downfall of the Shah, and a week with a UCLA team in Saudi Arabia exploring the developing new cities of Jubail and Yanbu. In 1979 we did a program in Guangzhou, China on the economic development of Guangdong Province. At that time China was just emerging from the turmoil of the Great Cultural Revolution. In 1967 I was married in India to Sharon Johnston, whom I had met in California, and we have one daughter, Bimla Elisabeth, who was born in India. Bim received B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from UCLA and is married to Dr. Thomas Hascall. In 1993 I married Sandra Hunnicutt, with whom I had participated in the Tibetan independence movement. My travels have been cut back substantially since 1997, when I had quintuple bypass surgery and had to move my mother into a nursing home due to Alzheimer’s disease. Retirement activities include working to complete a volume on my mother’s family, which came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and some writing on Civil War topics. I had two great uncles who served with the Confederacy, one of whom was killed in action, and a great-grandfather who was a Union soldier and prisoner of war who escaped while being sent on a train to Andersonville, I have transcribed manuscript left by my great-grandfather describing his life as a prisoner of war, and his escape and experiences in making his way back to Union lines, and will receive two awards this summer for articles that I have had published in the Journal of the Civil War Token Society.