the United States". In 1939, Mehl employed 50 people, and boasted that he had more people on his payroll than all other U.S. coin dealers combined. During the commemorative coin boom of the 1930s, Mehl continued to push them, noting that they had gone up in value during the Depression years even as stocks sank. When representatives of the Arkansas Centennial Commission came to him in late 1935 after having sold out the year's issue of the Arkansas Centennial half dollar, Mehl advised them to get the Bureau of the Mint to agree to strike limited-edition varieties of the coin that could be resold to the public at high prices. The Mint refused, but did agree to strike more of the original coins, few of which were made available to the public, but were sold by Mehl at a premium above the issue price. In January 1936, with prices still rising for commemorative coins (the bubble burst near the end of the year), Mehl published an advertisement urging collectors to "BUY NOW—Potential $10 and $20 coins for a fraction of their near-future value!" In 1937, Mehl published a booklet on commemorative coins. Later years (1940–1957) According to Bowers, "in the decade of the 1940s, Mehl reached his glory." Mehl had 116 auction sales, all conducted by mail, between 1903 and 1955; those after 1940 included some that Bowers described as "awesome and incredible". Never a researcher, Mehl made exaggerations or errors in his catalogs that led to some criticism of him in the numismatic community. Among the post-1940 sales were the William Forrester Dunham Sale (1941), Fred E. Olsen (1944, containing the first 1913 Liberty Head nickel Mehl ever handled, despite his advertisements), and the duplicates from the King Farouk collection (1947). The Dunham collection included an 1804 dollar and another great rarity, an 1822 half eagle, and Mehl sold another 1804 dollar in the 1946 William Cutler Atwater sale for a record-breaking price of $10,500. Mehl dubbed the sale of the Farouk coins the "Royal Sale", though only about six percent of the lots in the sale had been owned by Farouk. Unable to gain permission to illustrate the auction catalog cover with a portrait of Farouk, Mehl instead used an Egyptian coin that depicted Farouk, and which required no permission to display. Mehl also handled the auction of the coin collection of composer Jerome Kern (1950). Coin dealer