| Collector-opoly 
Photo by Jeff Watts
During the day, Sandra Coaxum pays the bills for AU in her job at the Controller’s Office. By night, she counts her own money. Pink five dollar bills. Blue $50 notes. Orange $500 dollar bills. The accounting specialist has stacks and stacks of them, integral parts of a collection of Monopoly boards that currently numbers 56. There’s I Love Lucy Monopoly, in which players move tokens such as Ricky’s conga drum around the board. There’s a miniature Monopoly set found for her by an AU colleague, and a three-dimensional Monopoly set that was so hard to put together it just stays up. There’s Motown-opoly, in which players hope for gold records. And speaking of gold, she’s also got two Monopoly sets from the Franklin Mint with gold-plated hotels—“one I play with, and one that will never come out of the box.” One church-loving daughter is fond of Bible-opoly, which starts out “in the beginning,” while another daughter who hopes to be a nurse has a medical Monopoly game, in which hospitals compete to fill their beds with patients. It all started in Southeast D.C., where Coaxum grew up and used to run home from school to play Monopoly with her sister in the eight-story apartment building where they lived across from the Navy Yard. She started working during high school and held managerial positions at several different places before coming to AU to work at the Eagle’s Nest and later at the Controller’s Office. Some people know Coaxum from her work on Staff Council; others may recognize her car, which boasts a special “American University” license plate, one of only 11 cars in Maryland with an AU plate. The license plate makes it clear that she’s collected a lot of good memories over the years and is proud of her work at AU. “Even though we don’t immediately impact students, we do impact the university. Believe me, if we didn’t have any gas or electric, I think the students might notice just a wee bit,” she laughs. Coaxum lives in Oxon Hill with her ever-expanding collection of games and toys, which includes not only the board games but an uncounted number of Barbie dolls and Disney movies. Her son, Rufus Coaxum, recently began working in facilities at AU, and she has three grown daughters who “had AU everything when they were growing up,” from T-shirts to hats. You might say they had a monopoly. —SA |
