I first learned of the series from a Victor GADOURY price list in 1991, and didn't pay too much attention to it since I had very little interest other than Nevada and didn't really become interested until about a year later after trading with a few European collectors.

I referred to the list while comparing values of other chips and plaques that I picked up from running my want ads and at one point thought that ,maybe I should look and ask around and that's when it hit. Started looking for these and had no luck though, when Seymour published his work and sent me a copy, there was a full color photo of one which I used to look at every day for years. By then, I had a lot of contacts in Europe with coin dealers and antique shops and constantly asked if they knew anything of the pieces from GADOURY'S inventory, which they didn't and, I dug deep asking and evenrually finding a few folks who knew when and how GAD9URY latched on to the few pieces he had of the 500 and 1000 and not too much more... Then, after a few more years past, I kind of gave up and figured wherever they are (in collections), they were probaboy going to stay put and never surface (though the example in Dale's book turned up in a P&P sale in 2017). Well, that wasn't the case; they hit eBay about two years aho and a few of us got lucky and I even got a couple of the ones with the same serial numbers that were in GADOURY'S list. I also managed to win enough auctions to build two each of the five pieces in the series. The one 5000 is out there, somewhere...

j