(FORTUNE Magazine) – Louis Rukeyser, William Buckley, Charles Schwab, and Jack Kemp all appeared, for fees that ranged up to $15,000 a speaker. It was the 14th annual investment seminar put on by James Ulysses Blanchard III, a bayou businessman who enticed these and other honchos to New Orleans last month. Some 3,000 investors -- average income: $1.5 million -- paid up to $595 a head to hear the luminaries, most of them devout conservatives like Blanchard. Staging lucrative seminars is merely a sideline for Blanchard, 44. His privately owned precious-metals firm, James U. Blanchard & Co., boasts one of the largest coin collections in the world. The investment seminars help promote sales, which Blanchard says have reached $110 million a year. What really turns Blanchard on, though, are gold and guns. During President Nixon's inauguration in 1973, Blanchard hired a plane to fly over Washington carrying the banner ''Legalize Gold.'' Private ownership of gold was made legal. The former history teacher also collects antique weapons, including rifles from Custer's Last Stand. He has rebuilt an authentic 1890s Western saloon in his suburban New Orleans home. Though he has been in a wheelchair since an auto accident at age 17, Blanchard loves to travel. Next April he is taking his 8-year-old son, Anthem (named after Ayn Rand's novel), to the North Pole. The reason: to get the lad into the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person ever there.