By Sam Farmer, Los Angeles Occasions
MILAN — Longtime friends Dan Presburger and Brad Frank are type of Olympic weightlifters.
They’re lecturers from the San Fernando Valley who go to all of the Olympics and lug a bunch of weights — suitcases containing tens of 1000’s of commemorative pins.
Presburger, who retired final Friday after 35 years of educating at El Camino Actual Excessive, caused 15,000 pins to Italy for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, requiring three hefty suitcases. He’ll spend the following three weeks buying and selling them with anybody and everybody he meets on the road. He’s continually scanning the horizon for the following swap.
“We’re like magnets,” mentioned Frank, a retired middle-school trainer from Burbank, his Dodgers jersey weighed down by about 100 pins, a fraction of the few thousand he introduced.
Presburger is simple to identify in a crowd. He’s tall and wears a pink bib coated in colourful pins. It’s as heavy as a weight vest, with a zippered pocket in again for the mementos he simply traded for and actually needs to maintain.
“After I’m sporting my pink, it’s an open invitation,” he mentioned. “It doesn’t matter the place I’m, folks simply method me. I carry just a few in my pocket to disclose to children and different folks.”
Nothing’s off limits. He’s made swaps in eating places, taxis, even bogs. His most dear is a choose’s badge from the 1908 Video games, which he figures is price about $3,500.
Eventually rely, he had roughly 125,000 at dwelling in Winnetka.
He took up the pastime on the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles after his childhood fascination with uncommon cash received too costly. He initially purchased 5 pins and started swapping them at Dodger Stadium. When he received a big elephant pin from Thailand — one handed out to athletes from that nation — he parlayed that into 35 smaller pins, and he was hooked.
Presburger has been to 16 totally different Olympics and infrequently travels with Frank. They discovered good lodging for 3 weeks on the opposite aspect of Milan for $1,000 per individual.
They plan to see some precise competitions, too.
“I do go to the occasions,” Presburger mentioned. “That’s the most effective place to get the pins.”
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