By Sam Farmer, Los Angeles Times
MILAN — Longtime pals Dan Presburger and Brad Frank are sort of Olympic weightlifters.
They’re teachers from the San Fernando Valley who go to all the Olympics and lug a bunch of weights — suitcases containing tens of thousands of commemorative pins.
Presburger, who retired last Friday after 35 years of teaching at El Camino Real High, brought about 15,000 pins to Italy for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, requiring three hefty suitcases. He’ll spend the next three weeks trading them with anyone and everyone he meets on the street. He’s constantly scanning the horizon for the next swap.
“We’re like magnets,” said Frank, a retired middle-school teacher from Burbank, his Dodgers jersey weighed down by about 100 pins, a fraction of the few thousand he brought.
Presburger is easy to spot in a crowd. He’s tall and wears a pink bib covered in colorful pins. It’s as heavy as a weight vest, with a zippered pocket in back for the mementos he just traded for and really wants to keep.
“When I’m wearing my pink, it’s an open invitation,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where I am, people just approach me. I carry a few in my pocket to give away to kids and other people.”
Nothing’s off limits. He’s made swaps in restaurants, taxis, even bathrooms. His most valuable is a judge’s badge from the 1908 Games, which he figures is worth about $3,500.
At last count, he had roughly 125,000 at home in Winnetka.
He took up the hobby at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles after his childhood fascination with rare coins got too expensive. He initially bought five pins and began swapping them at Dodger Stadium. When he got a large elephant pin from Thailand — one handed out to athletes from that country — he parlayed that into 35 smaller pins, and he was hooked.
Presburger has been to 16 different Olympics and often travels with Frank. They found good lodging for three weeks on the other side of Milan for $1,000 per person.
They plan to see some actual competitions, too.
“I do go to the events,” Presburger said. “That’s the best place to get the pins.”
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