Twenty-two years ago, noted numismatist Walter H. Breen died at Chino's California Institute for Men, part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. A convicted serial child molester, it's hard to imagine that Breen's stay at the facility was ever meant to rehabilitate the man. Instead, that duty seems to have fallen to a very few of his friends and associates in the world of numismatics, a community that benefited tremendously from Breen's work for over 30 years.

As numismatists, it's difficult to be "objective" when writing about Breen. We benefit too much from what he did for the hobby, and most of us were not directly affected by the things Breen was accused of doing - and admitted doing - in his private life.

Plus, it evokes in many of us an impulse not to talk about him. Better to leave well enough alone lest it taints the hobby, one might argue. To this day, numismatists-ourselves included-continue to cite Breen's work in auction catalogs, books, and articles; his sins sequestered from his expertise.

But does this reticence nurture, or possibly inflict, the very harm that some in the hobby worry about?

To an extent, we understand the impulse to keep quiet. Consider this: as a hobby and an industry, we're actually quite fortunate that the Breen scandal erupted when it did. Had Breen's crimes come to light in the Internet Age, the hobby as a whole could have been implicated. And not because of some kind of guilt by association (though in some eyes that's bad enough, and it's an understandable fear). No, the problem lays in the deference the hobby showed to him, treating Breen like a guru or a numismatic "institution" that was "too big to fail". The industry could have experienced something like what happened to Pennsylvania State University, when public opinion accused the University and its fans of prioritizing football over the safety and lives of underprivileged children. That scandal didn't just bring down a child molester, it ended the career-if not the life-of a Hall of Fame football coach and tarnished the reputation of one of the nation's most prominent public universities.

That didn't happen to coin collecting. Yet the fact remains that by continuing to so closely associate Breen with numismatics, we open ourselves up to the same criticism and contempt.

Silence about his crimes merely reinforces those ties.

We doubt that Jerry Sandusky and his achievements on the gridiron will be reevaluated on the basis of his football IQ, but for Breen, there remains the possibility that his reputation as a preeminent numismatist may be rehabilitated. We don't say this to be alarmist; we say this because we know people who want to make it so.

But in some ways, it's curious that Breen still lingers in our hobby. It's been more than two decades since his last meaningful work was published. Much of what he knew and wrote has been superseded by more recent scholarship, and a number of his claims and theories have been discredited.

Walter Breen himself has no say in the matter. He has no heirs in the coin business. His children, who have accused him of crimes against them, have not lobbied on his behalf. The fact that some of us still do shows that it is we who continue to be drawn to him.

So let's do what so many of us are loathe to do.

Let's have that conversation about Walter Breen, the one that's long overdue. The one we're so afraid to have because of what we're afraid it might say about us. The one that by not having it has said more about us than we'd like to admit.

To read the complete article, see:
Confronting Breen (www.coinweek.com/education/confronting-breen/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
TALE OF THE TAPE: PITTMAN, BREEN AND THE TAXAY BOOK BLURB (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n04a10.html)