Kenneth W. Rendell

Kenneth W. Rendell
Born	1943 (age 73–74) Somerville, Massachusetts

Kenneth W. Rendell, born in Boston, May 12, 1943, is the founder of the Museum of World War II in Boston, and an American dealer and expert in historical documents. His father, Harry, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Pauline, an art teacher. His first marriage (1967) to Diana Angelo ended in divorce (1985). Their first son, Jeffrey, was born in 1971; their second, Jason, was born in 1982 (deceased 2000). He married journalist Shirley McNerney in 1985; their adopted daughter Julia Louise was born in 1994.

In 1953 a customer in his father’s drug store paid with an 1806 Liberty half-dollar, and this launched Rendell into the rare coin business. The Somerville Journal recounted how he sold the coin for $3.50, used the money to begin his business, and later bought the coin back for $4.50. “The Liberty piece now sits in a position of honor in his office and 'showroom' on the back porch of his parent’s house.”

Rendell later elaborated on his early success. “In those days you could get an old penny and sell it for 10 cents; you could actually make money doing that. Then I got much more sophisticated—I got the guy who did the gumball machines at the drugstore to sell me all the coins. Now we started to get this thing organized! I could sort through large quantities. I was 12.” He soon branched out into the area of American colonial coinage and political memorabilia, and later wrote several reference works in this field.

As a teen, Rendell’s interests and growing expertise led him into the world of historical documents. “Coins are nice, but they’re cold compared to a letter, where you get the sense of the person,” he said later. In 1988 Architectural Digest noted: “Ideally, the autograph not only records a known person’s participation in a historical event, but as Kenneth Rendell says, is a ‘time capsule.’ It opens up the historical moment to a sense of the personal feelings involved and brings the contemporary reader right into that long-ago event.”

Rendell developed his business between 1959 and 2014, establishing galleries in New York, Beverly Hills, and Tokyo. He served as an expert witness for the Internal Revenue Service in the 1973 tax court trial of former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, Jr. “The judge quoted Rendell’s opinion extensively in ruling for the Internal Revenue Service.”

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