Keith McCord, KSL-TVFebruary 16, 2002
Salt Lake City
Olympic pins first showed up at the Los Angeles Games in 1984. Since then, they've become an obsession for people all over the world.
Keith McCord decided to hit the streets, to see what all the fuss is about!
McCord says, "I've had these pins in my desk for several years. I don't know whether they're worth anything or very popular, so we thought we'd come over to the pin trading booth to see how it goes."
The pin booth is on South Temple across from the Delta Center, and any time of the day or night it's jammed with people and pins.
We wandered in with our meager selection.
A guy from California has been trading pins since the 1984 games. He actually liked one that I had! It was the America's Opening pin.
In exchange, we took an old Salt Lake bid pin and headed down the aisle where we ran into a guy from Toronto who calls himself "The Pin Man".
He has about 50-thousand of them -- really! And he brought bags and bags and bags of them here to trade with other pin enthusiasts.
Fair warning here, if the pin trading bug bites you, it will sometimes get overwhelming. It's like a kid in a candy store.
It's hard to decide which ones to trade for. The "Pin Man" is slick. He told me the pins I had were "terrible."
"This arrowhead is a big sculpture down at the end of the block. It's a terrible pin, sir, terrible. What do you want for it?" he asked.
One thing I learned in my first pin trading adventure, is that you'd better not get attached to your pins, because, well, sometimes, you won't keep them for very long.
I will say this... it's easy to get caught up in all this. With thousands of people clamoring for hundreds of thousands of pins, how can you NOT? And, as with all pin trades, the final part of the transaction is a handshake!
It doesn't matter whether you own one pin, or a thousand, just get in there and start trading!
If you have the patience to battle throngs of people, you can have a good time and make some pretty good trades, too. We did pretty well.
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