Bend coin store in its third decade

Published 5:00 am Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Mike Graham has always had an eye for history, ever since he was 12 years old, looking for rare coins in Southern California. But it took until the 1990s for him to start capitalizing on his love for collecting coins.

A Central Oregon resident for nearly 30 years, Graham opened Mountain High Coin in Bend in 1990. Mountain High Coin is a one-stop shop for collectible coins and paper dollars, as well as for jewelry and other historical memorabilia. He also runs American Heritage Mint, a catalog company.

Graham, 67, began collecting whatever he could find in his early teenage years and kept it up through high school in the Los Angeles area.

After graduating college in 1970, he worked a number of jobs, including as an industrial manager for an aerospace engineering company and as a teacher.

A few years later, he was hired by A-Mark, a major global dealer in precious metals, to work in the company’s coin division. There, he got an introduction to the ins and outs of the coin business, from making contacts overseas to appraising rare coins.

But Graham was looking for a change of scenery. In 1980, he and his family moved from Southern California to a ranch in Sisters. Four years later, they moved to Bend. It took a few more years for him to pool the resources to open Mountain High Coin, first located in the former Bend River Mall before moving to its Third Street location in 1993.

Today, he’s celebrating more than 20 years as a business owner. Mountain High Coin is a family venture: Graham co-owns the business with his son-in-law, Dave McGrew.

McGrew crosses the country, looking to buy and sell coins, and to bring the Mountain High Coin name to new markets. Graham’s wife, Carolyn, works in the store, as well as his daughter, Colleen, and niece, Elizabeth.

Graham’s specialities include creating story cards — the coins and informational cards that feature American states, presidents and other themes — for groups such as Publishers Clearing House.

Graham can’t help but feel lucky that, for the past 20 years, he’s been able to take a childhood hobby and transform it into a moneymaking business.

Q: What services does Mountain High Coin provide?

A: We are a coin shop. We’re a jewelry repair shop. We provide story cards for packaging concepts. We do business with the big promotion houses such as Publishers Clearing House.

I would say about 20 percent of our business is from local customers. The rest is done in providing concepts, like the story cards with coins in them people sell on TV. We run a customer-oriented, customer-service retail business for those who are interested in coins, or in the liquidation of their precious metals.

Q: Why do you find coins interesting?

A: Coins are history. You can go back to the Byzantine Empire and go all the way up through history to when the George Washington dollar coin came out a couple years ago. The coins had a mistake. (Some were printed without the “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust” inscriptions). All of a sudden it was a $500 coin.

There’s a lot of tradition in coins; a lot of our nation’s history has to do with coinage. The first coin in U.S. history, a 1792 coin, goes for several thousand dollars. And the U.S. government has done a great job reinvigorating interest in coins with the state quarters that started in 1999. That created a lot of new interest.

Q: What impact are current economic conditions having on the market for coins and metals?

A: Gold is becoming a real commodity. You’ve got all the crisis and uncertainty in Europe with the economy. The dollar, the euro, the yen, it’s all linked. So when the economy is hit hard like it is right now, gold becomes more of a currency, and not just a precious metal anymore.

Gold has been a safe haven; it’s running at nearly $1,600 an ounce today. That makes coins a sort of investment, a hedge against other currency. Because there’s a tradition associated with each coin, it can be counted on to go up in value over time, like high-end art, Rembrandts and the like.

Q: What types of customers shop at your store?

A: For our customers that are local, it’s about 50-50 between people that are collectors and those bringing in stuff to sell because they need money to pay the bills, or that they’re cleaning out their homes and don’t necessarily know what they have. I had a couple that wanted to go on a cruise come in with some jewelry; they wanted to know how much it was worth. I ended up giving them $1,100.

People may have coins or jewelry that they don’t really know what it’s worth. That’s a part of my interest. But then there are the people that are mostly interested in the collection aspect. There’s a lawyer in town who brings his son into the store every weekend to talk about the history of coins. The kid is very fascinated by it.

The basics

What: Mountain High Coin

Where: 185 S.E. Third St., Bend

Employees: Seven

Phone: 541-385-7113

Website: www.mtnhighcoin.com