Who cares why it was vacant!!! It could have been because Jerry fell ill. It could have been because he needed to go home. It could have been because Jerry wanted to start conspiracy rumors. It appears he at least did that. If the purchase price of the collectionis private, then who Jerry sold chips to at the convention should be private as well.

I also could care less if future or present officers were not at the chip swap! This is a club, not a government body, and as such I pay $20 / year for a magazine and free admission to the convention. As long as that continues to happen, I will remain happy. I don't care about anything else that people do in this hobby, as long as they are not defrauding the rest of the collectors.

I will try to define defrauding, so that the readers to this will not make interpretations of my words. Defrauding would be finding one or more chips and
representing them for something that they are not; i.e. obsolete; only x were found when the person knows of more, or has reason to know of more; representing forgeries and fakes as real chips, or starting to sell chips high and dropping them subtantially on each additional sale.

People will collect chips because they like chips, not because someone is or is not on the club board. I started collecting because I thought chips were nice, not because of the club. The only value of adding members to the club in my opinion is adding people to dealers mailing lists, and creating more demand for better chips. If the club, convention, and all the members were to go away tomorrow, I would still be collecting. Maybe, if some of the club members when away more people would join as well.

Finally, chip collecting is supposed to be fun! Once people forget about the chips and want to worry about other, less important politics in the chip community, the club will rot away into non existance.

Just my opinion.

John