By ROD LEE

There is a story behind the picture of himself with Rick Warren of the TV show Pawn Stars that Mike McDonald has hanging on a wall in his office, but he would have preferred a different ending than the one he experienced a number of years ago.

 During a visit to Las Vegas to see if he could sell an Abraham Lincoln 1864 campaign token, Mr. McDonald had his picture taken with Rick Warren of Pawn Stars.

Then again, that is the nature of the business Mr. McDonald is involved in, as the owner of Central New England Collectible Authority (CNECA).

Mr. McDonald probably knew that a conversation we had on the second floor of the Baker Building in downtown Whitinsville on October 18th would inevitably turn toward the photo and the trip he made to Las Vegas to sell an Abraham Lincoln 1864 campaign token.

He had obtained the piece at a local flea market.

“I kept throwing coins into a coffee can, eight pounds of tokens. When I went through them, the A.L. 1864 campaign token was the very last,” he said.

Mr. McDonald had already found out the token wasn’t worth the $1500 he was planning to ask for it, but “I had gotten offers of $1000,” he said. In Las Vegas, “they brought [Rick Warren] in in the middle of the night. They let me into the store and brought him in. He offered me $300, said he could sell it for $400.”

On the plus side, Mr. McDonald was told his appearance on Pawn Stars would appear as “a season-ending episode;” it did, and has been re-run “over two hundred times,” he said. Also, Mr. Warren agreed to Mr. McDonald’s request for the photo of the two of them, as a keepsake of his visit. There was the word too that Mike McDonald got from his friend Brian Snay—“let’s do a party”—at the restaurant Mr. Snay owned in Linwood at the time.

Although coins are a big part of CNECA’s business, “we do a lot of collectibles too,” Patrick Gannon, Mr. McDonald’s twenty-three year-old right-hand man, said. “Comic books, baseball cards, we have five rooms, we are always acquiring.

“People call us,” Mr. Gannon said. “They come to us or we go to them. One day it could be Babe Ruth’s baseball bat and the next George Washington’s suit. As Rhode Islanders,” he said, of his place of residence, “if it’s more than half an hour away it’s too far!”

Mr. McDonald says “I couldn’t do this without Patrick. He has turned this company from good to great. He worked for a big paper dealer and is a master of the Internet.”

Mr. McDonald’s wife Robin is indispensable to the business, he said, as is Kevin Palardy, who works one day a week. Mr. Palardy “is very into eBay and Lincoln cents,” he said.

Of the inventory that CNECA takes in, “if we don’t know what something is worth we can find out,” Mr. Gannon says.

“Our secret is we don’t hold onto stuff,” Mr. McDonald points out.

Mr. McDonald does “twelve monthly shows in Uxbridge, every third Wednesday at the VFW,” and two a year in Woonsocket, spring and fall.

He credits the late Dave Williams of Charlton for “getting me into coins” and his dad for sparking his initial interest. “He left me a pile of coins, half dollars and wheat pennies,” Mr. McDonald said of his father.

A former chef, Mike McDonald owned a restaurant in Holden with his wife and his sister until forced to give it up because of knee issues that required multiple surgeries, he said. After addressing financial difficulties, “I started collecting little by little, with nothing.”

Today, Central New England Collectible Authority is a force in the industry; as Mr. McDonald puts it, “we are the Swiss army knife of collecting.”

Nor is he deterred by the disappointment of that first visit to Pawn Stars; “we have a rare Disney dollar” that he is eager to show off, he said.

Contact Rod Lee at [email protected] or 774-232-2999.