Convention Report-2007 by Joe DeGennaro Another RMS Convention has come and gone but many wonderful memories still remain.  I heard from many attendees that this year’s convention was one of the best they had ever attended.  I think this was due to the hotel being a great property with many restaurants in walking distance.  We had only 161 registered, down from past years, but these days we go for quality rather than quantity,   The tours were very enjoyable and I really liked my first visit to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery.  Although I had been to the St. Louis Arch before it was still a great experience.  The visit to St. Charles proved fruitful for some who did some antiquing there and a few people left the Ameristar Casino with more money than they came with.  The Riverboat Dinner Cruise was most enjoyable and the evening was only marred by the unfortunate occurrence of some lowlife trying to steal the pocketbook of one of our members.  Milt Wolf and a nice local young fellow were able to save the purse but the guy did get away.  The woman who was attacked was quite shaken, as you might expect, but was not badly hurt (thank goodness).   The meetings and auctions were well attended and well received and Wray Martin and his crew took in over $21,000 during the four days.  Janet Johnk and Mary Ross may have set a new record for raffle selling, taking in over $1000. I wasn’t there for the box trading session but heard it went well.  Since room hopping has been suffering in recent years something new was tried this year.  On Thursday night everyone who wanted to brought their trading stock to our main meeting room and laid it out for all to pick from.  I thought this went very well and may replace general room hopping in the future.   Bob Hofacker did a terrific job of stocking the grab tables each day and there were many treasures to be found among the mix. There were a lot of wonderful displays and Marc Edelman and I filled the Society’s three display cases with historical and interesting items we hope the membership enjoyed.  We’ll continue to do this and welcome any others who wish to bring such items in the future.   On Saturday morning our President, Grant Gehringer, gave a demonstration on how to open boxes and our Collector’s Forum that followed had one of the best speakers we’ve ever had, Harold Yalem, from Universal Match.  I first met Harold in 1984 and he’s as sharp now at 84 years old as he was then.  All of us who attended thoroughly enjoyed his talk and were kicking ourselves afterwards for not taping it.  He bought a framed uncut sheet of matches from the MGM Hotel in Las Vegas that was a souvenir of one of the largest, if not the largest match order ever, over one million dollars, and offered it up to be raffled (free) to some lucky winner at our Saturday night banquet.    Due to an unfortunate sprinkler system malfunction in one of the hotel’s guest rooms which inconvenienced us on one of the days, the hotel gave us a free cocktail hour on Saturday night including hot hors d’oeuvres.  This showed us what a class hotel we were staying at.  The banquet was a very nice affair with good food and good friends, all enjoying each other’s company.  A streamlined raffle helped to move the evening along much better. Bill Evans, Mark Quilling and Marc Edelman were multiple award winners, with Mark Edelman winning “Best of Show” for a really great display of older matchboxes.  John Woods was awarded the Outstanding Collector Award and Walter Hoffmann and Clarence Ginder were elected to the Hall of Fame.  As is tradition, many of us gathered in the hotel bar and John Woods gave his familiar toast, “not goodbye, but until we meet again”. Bob Borton once again sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to Mary Ross and the evening ended on a high note.  We all left on Sunday with lots of matches, many, many fond memories to treasure and looking forward to getting together again in 2008. Back to RMS Home Page