When Old Towne Coins opened in 2002, the clock was already ticking on owner Jim Mullikin’s life. He was three years into the nine doctors gave him after diagnosing him with lupus.
Doctors again told him he was going to die after delivering a diagnosis of histoplasmosis, also known as spelunker’s lung, in 2011. They said, then, he had five years left.
He heard the message again last September when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. This time, he had less than a year.
In all, he has probably heard it five times.
Through all of it, Mullikin has kept running the coin shop he started with Jan Frisell on North Sale Street 14 years ago.
“I lost my daughter in a car accident right after Sept. 11 in 2001. I felt if I could deal with that, I could deal with just about anything,” he said.
Gold was around $350 an ounce in 2002. Silver was $6 or $7 an ounce. Work had just begun on State Road 46, and a construction barricade was put in front of the shop a week after opening. It, and its collection, was a lot smaller then.
“I had about as many (coin) books as what’s on the top of that shelf right there,” Mullikin said, pointing at a wooden shelf in his office about three feet wide, half-full of coin books. “They were full of coins and we spread them out, and a bunch of loose stuff I picked up at auctions.”
With $3,000 or $4,000 in cash and a $5,000 limit on their credit card, they bought and sold whatever they could. Not just coins, currency, and bullion, but antiques, musical instruments, paintings, anything they thought could turn a profit.
Frisell left the shop for the first time in 2005 after she lost her health insurance. About six months later, Jim Mullikin’s mother Bonnie Mullikin joined the staff. She has been there ever since.
“Most people call mom ‘Mom.’ They don’t call her Bonnie. They come in and say, ‘How you doing, Mom?” Mullikin said.
He credited his mother with a story that helped inform his business practice.
She worked at Kroger until her retirement. There, she saw elderly people come in to buy cat and dog food for themselves, because they couldn’t afford both groceries and their prescriptions.
“Sometimes, when I started this shop, we’d get these people right here in Ellettsville,” he said. “It’s not like these people are rich and they’re selling their excess stuff off.”
Many times, it’s the opposite. People who have fallen on hard times come in to sell a collection they spent years working on, or one they inherited from a loved one, because they cannot afford rent or groceries.
Years ago, a woman from Spencer entered the shop with a small coin collection she had inherited from her dad.
“I hate to sell it,” the woman said.
Mullikin looked through the coin collection and saw common stuff–wheat pennies and silver dollars in circulated condition. Then, he saw an 1893-S Morgan silver dollar nestled in the bank bag with the others. It was the second rarest coin of its type. Even with the rim worn on both sides, he told her it was worth around $2,000.
“You know, I’m really not in the mood to be messed with,” she said after a moment.
She had taken the same bag of coins to another dealer who offered her $100.
“Ma’am, if you don’t want me to pay that, I won’t pay you,” Mullikin said.
She began to cry.
“You don’t realize how much I need the money right now,” she told him.
Mullikin has had many similar experiences over the last 14 years.
“I always thought it was most important that we instill in people that we tried to pay them as much as we could,” he said.
Business has fluctuated over the years. Frisell returned in 2011, when business was booming, and left again in 2015 after losing her health insurance because the shop could no longer afford it. Mullikin purchased and renovated the building in which the shop resides, and his health insurance climbed as high as $2,700 a month.
Most of Mullikin’s customers were coin collectors at the start, but the 2008 recession drove many of them to invest in gold and silver instead. Collectors are only now beginning to return to the same level.
Meanwhile, the price of gold rose to close to $2,000 an ounce before settling to around $1,260 an ounce over the last six months. Silver rose to $50 an ounce and slid back down to around $17 an ounce.
Mullikin said it was difficult for Indiana dealers to compete in coins, bullion, and currency, because the state had a 7% sales tax on them, while more than 30 states, including Illinois, did not. That will change July 1, as recent legislation discontinued sales tax for the category.
After more than a decade riding the ebbs and flows of his industry, Mullikin intends to keep going despite his poor health.
“(Our customers have) supported us throughout this whole time. What I told my wife and my mother is that while I can still get around, I feel that I owe it to them,” he said.
Old Towne Coins is located at 209 N. Sale St. in Ellettsville. Its hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
Originally published in Ellettsville Journal, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.