SilverTowne’s Leon and Ruhama Hendrickson, IN

“Our parents, Leon and Ruhama Hendrickson, were childhood sweethearts. They met in Winchester, Indiana in fourth grade and had been together for 64 ½ years when our mom passed away in 2010. They married when they were 19 years old — our father was then in the Navy— at our grandparents’ restaurant on the only day it was closed: January 1. We have one photo from the occasion, taken the day after, because photography was so scarce during the war. We treasure it.

Our father was a workaholic. He owned a restaurant, farmed 150 acres, was a mail carrier, and owned a roller skating rink. He started selling coins from people’s change at the counter of the restaurant around 1948, and by 1966, he quit his other businesses, sold the restaurant to my uncle, and sold coins full time. They moved the coin operation into our house, installed a vault and an elevator, and the next year sold 100 million dollars worth of coins.

If anything came into SilverTowne that my dad thought my mother would like, he bought it for her. There’s a tremendous amount of flatware and serving bowls; there’s a 1915 Pan Pacific Box. There’s a silver egg, too, with a golden yolk. Our father had 4-5 of them and told our mom he was trying to get enough to fill up an egg carton for her.

In the early nineties, we started doing TV sales through the Shop at Home network in Nashville, and then we did another show in Danvers, TN called Coin Country. Eventually, we built our own studio in Winchester. Coin Vault is in 60 million households and has been on the air for 30 years." — David and Tanda, son and daughter

Before the business moved out of your family’s home in 1982, did you have a lot of security?

We actually had a robbery in 1973. It was an organized crime hit – three guys came in from Chicago after hours, saying they had a flat. One went down in the basement with my dad and and his employee Chuck, and the other went upstairs to use the restroom. The one downstairs pulled a gun on my Dad; Chuck grabbed a gun, hit the clip release, but it wouldn’t fire. They managed to apprehend the guy until the cops came. The one upstairs kicked down the door to the bedroom, and my mom acted quickly – she jumped up, grabbed her gun, and she and the man shot at each other. She hit him, and he missed. At the time she was probably 5 foot 2; 125 lbs.