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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 842804, member: 66&quot;]Half grades are retarded?&nbsp; Yet you constantly hear people talking about a coin being &quot;High end&quot;, &quot;low end&quot;, and &quot;solidly&quot; graded.&nbsp; That is third point grading, an even finer division than this coin.&nbsp; I guess all of these collectors and dealers today must be even more retarded today than they were back then.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the slab being &quot;Unprofessional&quot; looking, it was VERY professional looking for its time.&nbsp; You are looking at the FIRST style of slabbed coin in the United States, and the slab shell design that all the others were originally based on.</p><p><br /></p><p>Accugrade was the first grading service in the US to use a sealed hard shell slab to encapsulate the coins they graded.&nbsp; They began in 1984. (Two years before PCGS came around and PCGS was the FIFTH company to use slabs, and there is some claim that the PCGS rattler was designed by Accugrade.&nbsp; I&#039;m not convinced of that yet.)&nbsp; The slab in that auction is from around 1986.&nbsp; By that time Accugrade had three branch offices.&nbsp; The Main office was in Connecticut and the branches were in Des Moines, Iowa&nbsp; San Francisco, and Long Beach CA.&nbsp; These Branch offices didn&#039;t last long, only about two years at most.&nbsp; There were four slab designs that came from the California offices.&nbsp; Each office had one slab that listed their office on the back.&nbsp; The other two did not list the specific office.&nbsp; One has Accugrade California, and the other says Accugrade West.&nbsp; I do not know what the timing of issue was for these four slabs.&nbsp; Were the two offices open at the same time, or was it one office that moved from one location to another?&nbsp; If it was two offices did the &quot;California&quot; and &quot;West&quot; slabs come before the second office opened or after one of the two closed?&nbsp; Style of the labels tells me they both came from the same office, but I don&#039;t think they came from the San Francisco office.&nbsp; If they did they are from before the label with the San Francisco address on it.&nbsp; My real problem is I have only seen one Long Beach slab and I do not have an example or a picture of one for comparison purposes.&nbsp; The slab pictured in the auction was not known to me at the time of the publication of the Slab book.&nbsp; It is currently listed in my notes for the second edition as ACG 11.1&nbsp; It is also a fairly rare slab.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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