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Lord M's "XXX" thread! (AND THE WINNER IS... 66RB!)
lordmarcovan
Posts: 43,232 ✭✭✭✭✭
(The "XXX" in the title refers to my 30th anniversary, you pervs.) 
It was thirty years ago this Thanksgiving Day that it all began for me, numismatically speaking. (Actually, since Thanksgiving fell on the 25th of November in 1976, Saturday will be my actual anniversary date).
I was ten and a half years old. I was in my Grandmother Dobbs' house on Lenox Road in Atlanta. It was a wonderful old house full of nooks and crannies for us kids to explore, and full of all kinds of old treasures.
On this particular day, I was in the kitchen with Mom and Grandmomma, who were cooking. I apparently got underfoot, so Mom banished me from the kitchen and told me to go upstairs and take a nap. I told her I wasn't tired. She looked at me menacingly and said she didn't care if I slept or not, just get out of the kitchen and go lie down upstairs! So I went. I figured I could read, at least. There were books everywhere in Grandmomma's cool old house. One whole wall had stacks of Reader's Digest magazines with dates on the spines going back to the 1940s, if I recall correctly. Wow. And there were old hatboxes on top of that. And an old ceremonial sword (which I played with and later accidentally broke, but never confessed to the crime until now).
In a dresser drawer in the guest bedroom, I found some old coins. There was an 1872 half dime and a gold Spanish cob from a shipwreck, that belonged to one of my uncles. Also a 1971 Black Book of United States Coins. Wow, I'd never heard of a half dime. Maybe the book would tell me something about it. It did. And I read about all sorts of obsolete coin types I had never heard of or seen. I began to get excited.
When it was safe to return downstairs, I tiptoed back into the kitchen, Black Book in hand, excitedly babbling about the old coins and the book and the half dime and so on. Grandmomma told me to put the half dime back, as it was part of an uncle's collection. But she could see I was excited, and she struck a bargain with me: if I set the table for Thanksgiving dinner, I could maybe find some more old coins in the sideboard drawer where the silverware was kept!
I was off like a shot. Found the silverware and set the table. I also found... a 1936 Winged Liberty, or "Mercury" dime! Wow, I had just looked at those in the book! What a treasure! It was... forty years old! Wow, really OLD! And there was a funny-looking 1943 penny, too. It was all silvery, and it had the wheat ears on the back which I'd learned to look for even before I became a collector. The book said it was steel, and sure enough, it stuck to one of the refrigerator magnets! Grandmomma said I could keep the coins!
I also found a 1948 Franklin half that had a bullet hole through the middle of it, but Grandmomma didn't let me keep that one because it was a keepsake of one my uncles' riflery skills. Later she gave me a silver 1951-D quarter she said she'd dug up out of the flowerbed in the front yard. Wow.
That Thanksgiving feast was special. Not only did Grandmomma make better biscuits than ANYBODY, she had the coolest treasure-laden house in the world.
Alas, the house is long gone now, and the woods behind it where we played. I hear it's all a restaurant parking lot now, thanks to urban sprawl. Grandmomma too has moved on from this world. Now I am exactly as old as that "really old" forty year old dime was when I found it in the drawer that day. But I still hold the memories dear in my heart... and I still have the dime.
I don't have any pictures of it handy, but it's your basic VG Mercury dime. I probably wouldn't take several hundred dollars for that humble coin that's worth less than a dollar. It's priceless to me. I need to pull it out and scan a picture of it, and also scan a surviving copy of one of the thankyou letters I sent her that Christmas, with some coin wish list stuff included. Pretty amusing.
Here's thinkin' of you, Grandmomma. I wipe a tear as I type this.
Now, this thread is not all about reminiscence. Well, it is, but to make it fun, I of course had to do a giveaway, too, right?
Post your own anecdote about the coin that got you started, and if you still have it, post a picture of it!
Those who share their stories about their first coin will be entered into a drawing.
I remember 66Tbird telling his story a long time back- it was also in the 1970s and involved a Mercury dime. He was on the playground and threw a marble and heard it clink on something in the grass, I think. But I'll let him tell his own tale.
Post only once to this thread, since the winner of the giveaway will be selected by random number generator.
So, what is my 30th Anniversary giveaway prize? What else could it be but a 1936 Mercury dime, of course!
I had no luck finding a decent one within my giveaway budget on eBay so I went to Heritage and won one tonight.
Sorry, you can't have my raw VG 1936 that I found in Grandmomma's silverware drawer.
You'll just have to settle for a PCGS MS66.
Winner will be selected on or shortly after my true anniversary date on the 25th of November. Post your stories about "the coin that started it all for you", and when that was.
Happy Thanksgiving.
AND THE WINNER IS... another Rob! "66RB"!
It was thirty years ago this Thanksgiving Day that it all began for me, numismatically speaking. (Actually, since Thanksgiving fell on the 25th of November in 1976, Saturday will be my actual anniversary date).
I was ten and a half years old. I was in my Grandmother Dobbs' house on Lenox Road in Atlanta. It was a wonderful old house full of nooks and crannies for us kids to explore, and full of all kinds of old treasures.
On this particular day, I was in the kitchen with Mom and Grandmomma, who were cooking. I apparently got underfoot, so Mom banished me from the kitchen and told me to go upstairs and take a nap. I told her I wasn't tired. She looked at me menacingly and said she didn't care if I slept or not, just get out of the kitchen and go lie down upstairs! So I went. I figured I could read, at least. There were books everywhere in Grandmomma's cool old house. One whole wall had stacks of Reader's Digest magazines with dates on the spines going back to the 1940s, if I recall correctly. Wow. And there were old hatboxes on top of that. And an old ceremonial sword (which I played with and later accidentally broke, but never confessed to the crime until now).
In a dresser drawer in the guest bedroom, I found some old coins. There was an 1872 half dime and a gold Spanish cob from a shipwreck, that belonged to one of my uncles. Also a 1971 Black Book of United States Coins. Wow, I'd never heard of a half dime. Maybe the book would tell me something about it. It did. And I read about all sorts of obsolete coin types I had never heard of or seen. I began to get excited.
When it was safe to return downstairs, I tiptoed back into the kitchen, Black Book in hand, excitedly babbling about the old coins and the book and the half dime and so on. Grandmomma told me to put the half dime back, as it was part of an uncle's collection. But she could see I was excited, and she struck a bargain with me: if I set the table for Thanksgiving dinner, I could maybe find some more old coins in the sideboard drawer where the silverware was kept!
I was off like a shot. Found the silverware and set the table. I also found... a 1936 Winged Liberty, or "Mercury" dime! Wow, I had just looked at those in the book! What a treasure! It was... forty years old! Wow, really OLD! And there was a funny-looking 1943 penny, too. It was all silvery, and it had the wheat ears on the back which I'd learned to look for even before I became a collector. The book said it was steel, and sure enough, it stuck to one of the refrigerator magnets! Grandmomma said I could keep the coins!
I also found a 1948 Franklin half that had a bullet hole through the middle of it, but Grandmomma didn't let me keep that one because it was a keepsake of one my uncles' riflery skills. Later she gave me a silver 1951-D quarter she said she'd dug up out of the flowerbed in the front yard. Wow.
That Thanksgiving feast was special. Not only did Grandmomma make better biscuits than ANYBODY, she had the coolest treasure-laden house in the world.
Alas, the house is long gone now, and the woods behind it where we played. I hear it's all a restaurant parking lot now, thanks to urban sprawl. Grandmomma too has moved on from this world. Now I am exactly as old as that "really old" forty year old dime was when I found it in the drawer that day. But I still hold the memories dear in my heart... and I still have the dime.
I don't have any pictures of it handy, but it's your basic VG Mercury dime. I probably wouldn't take several hundred dollars for that humble coin that's worth less than a dollar. It's priceless to me. I need to pull it out and scan a picture of it, and also scan a surviving copy of one of the thankyou letters I sent her that Christmas, with some coin wish list stuff included. Pretty amusing.
Here's thinkin' of you, Grandmomma. I wipe a tear as I type this.
Now, this thread is not all about reminiscence. Well, it is, but to make it fun, I of course had to do a giveaway, too, right?
Post your own anecdote about the coin that got you started, and if you still have it, post a picture of it!
Those who share their stories about their first coin will be entered into a drawing.
I remember 66Tbird telling his story a long time back- it was also in the 1970s and involved a Mercury dime. He was on the playground and threw a marble and heard it clink on something in the grass, I think. But I'll let him tell his own tale.
Post only once to this thread, since the winner of the giveaway will be selected by random number generator.
So, what is my 30th Anniversary giveaway prize? What else could it be but a 1936 Mercury dime, of course!
I had no luck finding a decent one within my giveaway budget on eBay so I went to Heritage and won one tonight.
Sorry, you can't have my raw VG 1936 that I found in Grandmomma's silverware drawer.
You'll just have to settle for a PCGS MS66.
Winner will be selected on or shortly after my true anniversary date on the 25th of November. Post your stories about "the coin that started it all for you", and when that was.
Happy Thanksgiving.
AND THE WINNER IS... another Rob! "66RB"!
0
Comments
Sorry about the small pics but i'm not on my computer so these will have to do
Coins for sale at link below
https://photos.app.goo.gl/i3Hq4WazXaWPmvH78
You can read about it here in a post that I made about it in July of 2005. To this day, Franklin halves are still my passion.
http://forums.collectors.com/messageview.cfm?catid=26&threadid=417855
i cant say what THE coin was that got me really into coins.
my brother however showed an interest at a very early age i remember.
we were like 6 and 7 years old and he was telling me about this `rare` buffalo nickel
unlike the one (we) had that showed the buffalo on a mount instead of a plain.
we also would go through lots of pennies looking for wheats,of which were quite easy to find usually in 1966 or so.
we didnt know what we were picking out other than they were wheats and not memorials.
for dad i guess it was like quality time with the kids and we werent tearing up something.
Why step over the dollar to get to the cent? Because it's a 55DDO.
LM...you really need to post more of your coin stories.
A few years back I bought an absolute hell hole of a house because the one I bought only a short while before was winning the war I had declared on it. I needed a better place to live while I gutted and remodeled the first house so when my neighbors offered their shanty for sale for the meager sum of $1000 I jumped on it.
Naturally, when you buy a house for such an unbelievably low price it comes with a staggering laundry list of problems. This house was certainly no exception. The tar roof leaked so badly that one room of the house had to be written off as a total loss. There was no heat source of any kind (the kindly folks that sold me the place took the unvented space heaters with them when they left). The electrical service was the old knob and tube burn your house down while you sleep variety and only 30 amps. I set out quickly to fix the most demanding of the problems and after a few solid months of devoting every spare second I was able to move in to what was now essentially a fully appointed hunting cabin.
After about a month of living in my shot gun shack I had settled in as well as could be managed. For the price I would certainly never complain, but after doing a bit of cosmetic work (tearing out all of the old carpet and slathering on SIX coats of Kills in every room of the house) the place was actually getting almost comfortable. The only thing that bothered me (beyond the extreme cold caused by the combination of rickety windows, sparse heating and and a total lack of insulation) was the fact that there wasn't a single level spot in the whole house because the "foundation" was just a pile of broken pieces of shale the builders had dug from the hillside. Undaunted, I bought a few trailer jacks and went downstairs to see what could be done.
Most amusement parks have an old attraction that people generally refer to as a funhouse. Some have catchy names to go along with their bright colors, mirrors and flashing lights, but the one thing they definitely all have in common is that they are built to be so slanty as to throw you off balance when you stroll through. My house was that dramatically out of kilter. It pitched and swayed so much that while I was in the basement setting up those jacks in the the spots I figured would do the least structural damage I spotted a small tin on top of one of the floor joists.
When I retrieved it I found that is was your run of the mill mint tin and it didn't appear to be very old. I popped it open anyway and was floored by what I found - an 1875 CC half dollar. I wasn't even a casual collector at the time, so I had no knowledge about what I had found. Indeed I was naive enough that I briefly entertained the notion that my find might be a significant windfall. With profit in mind I took to the internet.
Of course my coin didn't turn out to be worth a fortune (it later graded VF30 at ANACS), but my interest in numismatics took hold quickly because of that coin. I guess you could say that while the coin didn't make me any richer, it did end up enriching my life.
Unfortunately my "discovery" coin came up missing some time ago. I may have lost it while moving or it may have been stolen by an unscrupulous acquaintance, but I can't find it. I hope it turns up somewhere because there's just no replacing a coin like that.
PS- too bad it wasn't an 1870-CC in VF30. That would've paid for the shotgun shack, and then some!
I paid fifty bucks for an 1870-CC half, once (back in the 1980s). It was a FR02 with an old yellow tape stain across the reverse. But, fifty bucks for an 1870-CC half, well, that's something to talk about, even if the coin was ugly.
Seriously though, probably about my age
Anyway, my grandmother had given me a few coins as well....VG-VF mercs. I think the one that started me off, originally, was an 1881 IHC. It was OLD. I was entranced by such an old penny!!!
Looking back (it got lost in a few moves), it was probably a VF. I liked it though. So old. So cool.
Grandma also gave all us kids a 1922 Peace dollar (year of her birth) but ours got stolen by a neighborhood kid/thief
So, when my uncle was getting out of coins a few years ago, as I was getting back into them, I traded/bought his 1921-1922-1923 Peace dollars in memory of Grandma. They are tucked away for my son's collection as I don't care for the Peace dollar designs and don't feel like selling them (MS64-MS64-MS65).
Seems Grandmas were the instigator to a few of us collections
I've been told I tolerate fools poorly...that may explain things if I have a problem with you. Current ebay items - Nothing at the moment
The trolley car was missing!
I showed it to my mom who had collected coins around the Bicentennial and she soon hooked me up with my first Red Book and Whitman album. The coin turned out to be a 1953 S, though only in AG. Someone else will have to provide the scan since I put it back in circulation (after upgrading to an EF) hoping it would inspire another collector.
Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.
After that my grandparents gave me some buffalos and mercs.
From then on I was hooked.
Then my grandmother gave me a 1982 Washington commemorative half.
Now I am a commemorativeholic.
End of story...
Fullhorn, from these boards, actually got me started collecting just a few years ago. Looking through his collection of buffalo nickels and seeing his excitement was all it took. And then I remembered that I had a silver eagle somewhere and when I found it again I was on the hunt! I never knew there were such things as "coin shows" and coin stores. And ebay and these boards gave me an excuse to keep looking and learning late into the night.
I still have my silver eagle.....somewhere.....I think....
Collecting:
Conder tokens
19th & 20th Century coins from Great Britain and the Realm
"Thanksgiving day 1970 is the day I first sat my eyes upon her. My uncle had brought her to dinner and I was in awe of her elegance, grace and beauty. Knowing I had to have her as my own, I called my uncle to the side and had a man to man talk with him. Me, being a young man of twelve, and my uncle being a worldly man in his forties, he introduced me to her and there my infatuation began.
Excitement and questions buzzed in my head; when and where was she born were my first two questions. This beautiful woman, my uncle and I sat down and had a long talk. She had been born in 1921, a result of the Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I. My appetite and thirst for knowledge about her had just begun and has never ceased!
You may be asking who this beautiful, graceful, elegant woman with the flowing hair was. She was Anthony de Francisci's Peace dollar..."
Spring National Battlefield Coin Show is September 5-7, 2024 at the Eisenhower Hotel in Gettysburg, PA. WWW.AmericasCoinShows.com
I found it in a small park in NYC.That was in the early "1960". The park is the highest natural point on Manhattan island.
The coin was on top of the dirt. It had been walked on for many years. Looked like a washer to me.
I picked it up to chuck it off the field where we were playing football.
That is when I turned it over and could see the outline of the liberty head on a SLIVER DOLLAR :-)
I had that coin for many years..:-( Don't know what happened to it.
Jerry
Too many positive BST transactions with too many members to list.
Thanks Lord M for the entry.
To support LordM's European Trip, click here!
When I was 6 or 7 years old (had to outrun dinosaurs on the way to school
I opened the box. The first thing that caught my eye was the most beautiful old tarnished silver coin I had ever seen. It was a 1926-s Oregon Trail Commemorative Half Dollar (Unc. for certain). I had never seen anything like it before and was completely awed by the gorgeous thing. That was the one coin that hooked me, and I've been a collector off and on ever since.
The other coins in that little box included a large cent (ugly old copper thing that didn't interest me at the time) which I gave to my brother, and a Barber quarter, Barber dime, and some other worn silver coins from foreign countries - I don't remember where though.
I'd love to say that I still have the Oregon, but I don't. I was nearly broke in my early twenties and had to sell my small collection at the time to pay for little luxuries like rent and food. I've looked for a nice 26-s Oregon off and on since.
As an aside, I was young, stupid, and liked coins to be shiny, so I grabbed the bottle of that pink stuff that cleans silver and ... Yeah, that particular Oregon wouldn't be worth much now because of my cleaning
My OmniCoin Collection
My BankNoteBank Collection
Tom, formerly in Albuquerque, NM.
My coin collecting started with my Grandmother. She was a bank teller in the 60's, 70's and 80's. She would occasionally bring home coins that she saw come through her bank. She was a woman of very little means and the coins she could afford were split between six grandchildren. The coins I received were immediately cherished. I would love to go through them and when I was around 12, I went to a hobby store and purchased 2x2 holders for my "awesome" collection. I can't say that any one coin started the addiction, but Grandma seemed to have an eye for Franklins. I still have those Franklins, in a box still in their 2x2 holders. All of them are heavily circulated but are as priceless to me today as they were 30 years ago.
nice giveaway Lord M!
Doug
As I was reading your story I was thinking of this coin. My grandparents lived up in Buffalo, NY so I only saw them about once a year. Every time I visited, my grandmother would give me some money, usually paper dollars. But on one occasion she gave me this Morgan (I remember that I couldn't believe how old it was). She and my grandfather were tailors with a storefront connected to the house, so I'm sure she got it at face value in payment for services and saved it. While I'm sure I had already started to collect coins (I got the bug from my father), it was a big addition to my collection. As for my grandfather, he never gave me any collectable coins, but I remember that he let us keep the change which we used when he taught us how to play poker. (Needless to say, I miss them both.)
Thanks for sharing your story.
Jonathan
Well it’s pretty much like Rob said but I’ll go a little farther. At least I think it went kind of like this.
I was in the third grade, and I was born in 64 so it was around 71-72. I was an avid marble player. Lots of kids played then and marbles were an item of barter, a unit of wealth you could say. In the few years I played I’d gather much wealth. I’d go to school with six or seven and return with a bulging pockets. Even carried a special bag in the fourth grade. Of when I found the slingshot, ammo was the least of my problems.
Well anyways, this one day I strolled over to the big kids playground to take on the 4th-6th graders. The game was chase and it took place in the open grass of the football field. I don’t recall get beaten so I must have been winning enough to keep going through the lunch period. I win this round just before the bell and the kid doesn’t give me the marble he was shooting with, but another and runs off laughing. It turned out to be a half a marble and not worth my keeping. So I casually shoot it over my shoulder and start the long walk back to class.
Then, way off behind me I heard a soft ‘Dingggg’. I turn around and nobody there. My pee brain starts thinking and I start looking for that half a green flippin marble I just launched. About ten feet away I catch a sparkle of silver in the grass. It turned out to be a Merc dime. Not only was I amazed at this old coin but the odds of hitting it, then finding it. I may still have it along with all the other coins I start collecting after that, but it was more the odds that really got me.
A few years later in the 6th grade I was walking home across that same field, pondering that marble day, watching the grass go by like I’d done so many times on my walks home, and I spotted a gold class ring in the grass.
I posted a tiny 3x5 card stating ‘Ring Found’ with my phone number, near the dugouts. Got a lot of calls before someone described it. It turned out to have been a teachers and I got a reward of $20
Two years later that man became my English teacher. Also turns out an older bully down my street had stolen that mans fancy army knife years earlier. So I got in the bully’s car one night and took in back. Then returned it to my teacher. Totally amazed, he ask what my hobbies were, I said ‘coins’. A few days later he give me a dozen cents from the teens, and of course passed my failing ass.
thanx
jim
Menomonee Falls Wisconsin USA
http://www.pcgs.com/SetRegistr...dset.aspx?s=68269&ac=1">Musky 1861 Mint Set
<< <i>My father owned a service station for many years. He of course had a ton of money travel through his hands in daily commerce. He had the forsight in the late 60s and early 70s to pull all silver out. All of it went into a large 10 gallon jug he kept hidden in a closet. When I was probably about 8 or so I discovered this jug full of silver and proceeded to look through it. The prize that got me going I think was at the bottom of the jug, was a 1922 Peace dollar (hole and all). That was all she wrote, my parents encouraged my hobby and bought me a Red Book and with my dad's business I had all the change I wanted to go through.
Hey!!! No fair using a pic of a holey to influence the judge!!!!
Anyway, my story is when I was about 7, I saw my first Whitman penny folder in a book store and pestered my mom to get it for me and every time anyone came into the house with a pocket full of change, I always demanded the pennies to see if any would fill the holes in my folder. Eventually I expanded into Jeffies and Buffs. Once in a while someone would toss an AG silver dollar my way, and that was about the greatest thing in the world to me. I kept a lot of them in an old tin cigar box my dad got for me because I always had more coins than I had holders at any one time. I thought everyone who collected coins did so from pocket change. I wasn't aware yet that there was a whole hobby built around it with dealers and grading and huge collections like the Eliasberg. Something like that would have been beyond my comprehension then. The first time I noticed a coin magazine on the shelf wasn't for a few more years and the grading scale in the back stopped at 65, so for a long time I thought that's all there was. I never knew grades 66-70 existed. It wasn't until I started working that I was able to start buying silver issues, so I bought (you guessed it) a Whitman album for Frankies and started filling it with VF/XF/AU coins. I have a short attention span, though, so a new collecting interest always drew my attention away before I ever completed any sets. Now that we have ebay, it's even worse. Casual browsing at the wee hours can cause me to go off on several tangents at the same time, and of course I can't keep up with all of them, so I fill sets in a very haphazard fashion. So that's pretty much my story. Who's next??
Most of those coins are long gone but the memories remain......
If I had it my way, stupidity would be painful!
coins i remember receiving were from Dad. He was the type of collector that rarely bought, but worked angles and promotions to get what he had. We were poor. In fact, if he were alive today. He'd probably be sitting here telling his story trying to win that merc dime.
So when one of those lake development things, popular back in the 70's invited our family to come and tour we always went for whatever the promotion. Sometimes it was a tv, other times a watch, but you always got rewarded for the complete waste of time.
It's a shame we went around like this, never intending to buy, but looking back i got to see and do some refined things in life that i never would have gotten to do any other way.
One of them we went to rewarded everyone with a roll of ike dollars. Dad always carried a handkerchief in his front shirt pocket. Available for cuts, sweat, tears or anything else that might happen. He wrapped them ike dollars up in it and that's how they sit today. All 71 and 72 clad uncirculateds. I can almost see the smile on his face wrapping them things up and tying them baby's off like he'd jsut walked out with a double eagle.
Silver in a burnt-out miser's shack, a freak find resulting from a one-in-a-million marble toss, a Carson City Seated half beneath a shotgun shack, a giant potmetal "Franklin half" coaster, a holey Peace dollar at the bottom of a ten-gallon jug, and lots of generous grandparents and parents.
The stories have been more interesting than I expected. Keep 'em comin'.
It's almost a good thing that the prize will be awarded randomly, since I would have a hard time picking out what the most interesting or entertaining story was.
Thank you
My cousin, Fred, had come back from being on tour during the
Vietnam War. I had always liked Fred and when he saw me he
said that he had something for me.
He reaches in his pocket and gives me a square nickel. I thought
it was a joke, but he told me it was real, just from another country.
I almost threw it away several times because I thought it was play
money. After I got a little bit older I looked at the coin with a
magnifying glass. It was definitely a real coin. They don't make
play money with that kind of detail.
I put it in my treasure box. I had collected junk from all over the
place. You know... rocks, shells, coins, bottle caps, etc.
I carried those treasures with me to Atlanta, Dallas and back to Ohio.
Finally, about 2 years ago I was going through some of my 'stuff'
and noticed that I had accumulated quite a few other coins over
the years. I started organizing them... and I still am. The square
nickel was later determined to be a 1940 Netherland 5 Cents coin.
It is still in my collection, as it will always be.
Thanks cousin Fred!
-------------------------
Good trades with: DaveN, Tydye, IStillLikeZARCoins, Fjord, Louie, BRdude
Good buys from: LordMarcovan, Aethelred, Ajaan, PrivateCoinCollector, LindeDad, Peaceman, Spoon, DrJules, jjrrww
Good sale to: Nicholasz219
My interest in coin collecting began in 1978 with a folder of 30 dimes given to me by my grandfather.
See My first post...updated with pics.
My first post...updated with pics
I collect mostly moderns and I'm currently working on a US type set.