posted 08-25-2008 06:09 PM            

Here, in America, the political convention process starts tonight. Does anyone have any convention / election Silver to share with us? I can image that it exists (trophies, awards, buttons, jewelry, etc) but I don't recall ever seeing any?

posted 08-29-2008 11:39 AM            

Adlai Stephenson commissioned the California silversmith Allan Adler to make a pin for his most ardent supporters during the 1956 presidential campaign. The sterling pin is in the shape of the sole of a right shoe with a hole in it, after the famous photograph by Bill Gallagher of Stevenson with his feet up on a desk with a hole in his shoe. The photo had appeared in Life magazine and won Gallagher a Pulitzer Prize in 1953. This image of Stevenson came to symbolize his style. Adler made several thousand of these pins and they appear from time to time on that large internet auction site. I bought one for a friend a few years ago, and she is always surprised by the number of people who recognize the iconography of the pin when she wears it.

In the following presidential campaign, Adler was commissioned by the financier Burt Lytton to make a coffee urn that was used at a major California fund-raising event during the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. The candidate was served the first cup of coffee out of the urn. The urn now is in a private collection.

posted 08-31-2008 01:36 PM            

I went looking and this is some of what I found: