Marc Emory was born in northern Virginia, where he grew up as the son of a Washington correspondent of a newspaper in Upstate New York. A child of the Washington political scene, he was visiting the White House at age 13, and Capitol Hill many times before that. Like so many children of Washington, he attended the Sidwell Friends School. He than was accepted for the Schoolyear Abroad program in Spain, then sponsored by the two Phillips Academies (Exeter, NH and Andover, MA). After the year in Barcelona, he went on to graduate from Andover (1970), and four years later graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania (1974), with a degree in Spanish. He always had an interest in languages, and while at Penn got his introduction to German and Swedish, in addition to continuing his studies in Spanish and Russian from high school. In addition to those four languages plus Catalan, a byproduct of his year in Barcelona, he has since learned French, Italian and Dutch. Always interested in collectibles, he was impressed from early childhood by the Smithsonian collections of both coins and minerals, which were within walking distance of his father's office at the National Press Building at 14th and F streets in Washington, D.C. He maintains an extensive collection of minerals at his German home, near the Rheinland city of Dusseldorf, which he shares with his wife of 25 years. His wife, Elisabeth, is a German native, and they speak German at home. Their two bilingual daughters currently attend universities in the United States, after secondary school education in Germany. Marc also has a collection of U.S. coins and an assortment of guitars hand-crafted by legendary luthier Bozo Podunavac. A musician by hobby, he has made recordings and done solo concert tours in his spare time, a commodity which he finds in all too short supply of late. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Marc joined one of the two firms that later merged in late 1982 to form Heritage. He is has been with the company without interruption since joining in August, 1975. He founded and oversees the operations of the Heritage Overseas offices, which are now in France (since 1979), Germany (since 1979), Switzerland (since 1984), and the Netherlands (since 1990). The Heritage offices in France, Switzerland and the Netherlands are all run by natives of those countries, coordinating in their own languages through Marc at the German office with the Heritage world headquarters in Dallas.