The annual South Carolina Numismatic Association (SCNA) conventions hosted in Greenville were for many years, back in the 80s and 90s, a Halloween weekend event that was pretty much a regular travel calendar stop for me. My recollection is that my first SCNA attendance was in Charleston at the Gaillard Auditorium in 1979. I also attended at least two that were hosted in Columbia back in the 1980s. I’ve attended innumerable renewals in Greenville since the event began anchoring there in 1986, although this year’s was the first in perhaps the last 15 years or so.
Given that the 25th anniversary event in 1997 was among those attended, I determined early on that this year’s travel calendar would include attendance at the organization’s 50th anniversary event. While I’d flown many years, more often than not during the ’90s my travels were by road, accompanied by my father, delivering him from spending summers in an apartment in Iola to his winter home in Lakeland, Fla. Given dependability issues where airlines are concerned these days, this year I again opted to drive.
My travels to Greenville got under way early Wednesday morning, firing the Audi up at about 6:30 a.m.
