During the Hunt brothers run-up I was working in downtown Atlanta. During my lunch hour I would visit department stores and specialty shops buying sterling flatware etc. at retail and sell it at Georgia Stamp & Coin at a handsome profit on my way back to work. Those were the days.
it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide
I remember 5 gallon buckets of walkers as junk silver many BU.
I was quite young and had no money, so it didn't do me much good.
One thing I regret most is one of my favorite dealers had two milk pails full of AU/BU CWTs, many full Red...$5 each. I only bought a few and he died in a car crash. Seeing how much CWTs have gone up over the years, those buckets would have been an insanely good investment. That guy had a 7-figure inventory in the 80's, I never heard how it got dispersed. He was also the first person who ever showed me what $500k in cash looked like....banded stacks of $100s.
I recall in the 80's going to a Federal Marshal's auction where they were selling several hundred siezed $20 BU gold pieces for $300 each. I didn't have much money then and bought only one. I also got a nice AU Lafayette dollar there for $50. No internet then and not a lot of bidders.
@topstuf said:
When can we do the 1970s? BU Morgans were 3 dollars and prooflikes were 5.
Since we’re all likely to have some free time for quite a while, I’m thinking we can let this run through the week to catch everyone. Then we can do the 70’s next weekend and the 60’s the following..... Start a new decade in review each Saturday.
I’m loving all this stuff 👍🏻
You guys are awesome.
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
Can’t speak much about the coin market but it relates to the cardboard market. Local B&M stores had 50’s and 60’s cards for $.10-$.50 each. Mickey Mantles ranging from $20 up depending on condition. Common T206’s were $2-$5 with stars in the $25+ range. They couldn’t give away football which was fine for me since I collected ‘60’s AFL. Came 1989-90 and the boom was on. Modern junk produced by the billions. Everyone buying to put their kids through college. Scammers on TV hawking worthless sets and unknown grading companies. All that 90’s wax worthless. I can’t tell you how many collections I’ve seen and disappointed looks when I tell them it’s only good as firewood.
W.C.Fields "I spent 50% of my money on alcohol, women, and gambling. The other half I wasted.
Bid Boards were the BEST thing. It got about fifteen to twenty locals together at one shop on Tuesday and the other on Thursday. I was among the younger fellas there and not a woman in sight ever. Back then it was mostly a man's hobby but there were some ladies in the business. During the week I would try and move the lots I wanted into a small area. Others must have done the same thing because this continued until the day of the auction. Right up to the time I would pretend to be looking at a lot nas close to the board I could get to so as to block a coin I wanted. I'm going to start a new thread
I bought every Machin's Mill Copper coin I own (except for a junk box find or two) on bid boards for under $8 because "foreign" coins were not popular. I'm sure there are some great stories about the boards. Randy Campbell tells one about two collectors fighting to win a BU Morgan dollar bidding the coin up higher and higher. When it was over the looser walked over to the store counter and found/bought an identical piece for half the price! worked at a store
@2dueces said:
Can’t speak much about the coin market but it relates to the cardboard market. Local B&M stores had 50’s and 60’s cards for $.10-$.50 each. Mickey Mantles ranging from $20 up depending on condition. Common T206’s were $2-$5 with stars in the $25+ range. They couldn’t give away football which was fine for me since I collected ‘60’s AFL. Came 1989-90 and the boom was on. Modern junk produced by the billions. Everyone buying to put their kids through college. Scammers on TV hawking worthless sets and unknown grading companies. All that 90’s wax worthless. I can’t tell you how many collections I’ve seen and disappointed looks when I tell them it’s only good as firewood.
Circa early 1990s:
A local coin and card shop was very big on promoting baseball cards by the full cardboard box. (Not just one small box but an entire large cardboard box full!) I was in the shop one afternoon looking for coins while the owner was doing his baseball card sales pitch to another customer. He was selling the cardboard box lots with the promise that he would call the buyer and buy them back at a big profit when the price of the cards rose. The dealer in question died about 15 years ago. His customers are probably still waiting for the call telling them to empty the garage and bring in their "valuable" cardboard box lots for sale.
A coin shop that always bothered me. Early 1980's I was stationed at Ft. Riley, KS, living in Manhattan KS a few miles away. I had gotten back into coins after a trade of stereo equipment for coins. 1 coin shop in the area. The guy who ran it seemed a bit "off". A lot of guns in the shop, not for sale. He mentioned, after I had been there a few times, that he carried 3 guns at all time. A lot of black helicopter conspiracy talk, Next Civil War, overthrown the government type talk in that shop. He struck me as the "Might have been a cook or truck driver in the Military, but bought a whole bunch of medals and told everyone he was a war hero" type person.
Fast forward to the Oklahoma City Bombing. Timothy McVeigh had been stationed at Ft. Riley, and had obtained money by stealing cons at coins shows, and disposing of them somehow. I went back to MAnhattan several times as my wife's parents lived there. At some point after the bombing, the coin shop had vanished. I knew several of the places that Mcveigh had used to buy /rent stuff (the truck, the fertilizer, the accelerant). At least one was within a mile of that coin shop.
It bothered me that there was a connection in all of that.
Susan B Anthony was just introduced to the public in '79. By 1980, a 1909 *strong D , $2.5 gold piece was almost $18k. By 2019 a guy could get 3 at that price in an MS 62 PCGS holder.
The overall market was wild and (no pun intended) high in 1989. Speculation was intense and many coins were rising in value on a weekly basis.
I remember going to a show with a box or two of freshly graded classic silver commemoratives (which were close to all-time high prices) and quoted a dealer-friend somewhere between 20%-30% over CDN. He said something like “I’ll take them”. I asked “Don’t you want to look at them first?”. He didn’t think that was necessary and quickly bought them!
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
When the new PCGS and NGC started you had to wait 3-4 months to get coins back. there was no internet information on how things graded ; so when a package arrived it was like Chrismas opening up a unknown gift!
Started collecting in the 60's. Nothing high dollar. In the late 60's early 70's bought a lot of silver Roosies and Mercurys from the owner of several businesses in the area. Silver dimes two for a quarter. Still have them all. Resisted the urge to sell any during the Hunt Brothers run up.
Still have a couple newspaper articles from the Hunt Brothers. Article dated March 29th 1980, The Hunt brothers Nelson and W. Herbert Hunt of Dallas, Texas had ownership and futures contracts of hundreds of millions of ounces of silver. The New York Commodity Exchange on Jan. 21st 1980 severly restricted the amount of a given commodity any one person, group or interest could hold, possess or have a vested interest in. Silver dropped from $ 50.00 to $ 10.80 in a few short weeks.
I remember lines of people at the local hotel holding bags of coins, silverware etc. to sell. Then the rrules changed. A lot of businessmen lost their butts from buying, only to find they couldn't sell it.
The Hunt brothers had to sell theirs on the open market and pay their margin calls. Wasn't a good time for a lot of people.
@shorecoll said:
I remember 5 gallon buckets of walkers as junk silver many BU.
I was quite young and had no money, so it didn't do me much good.
One thing I regret most is one of my favorite dealers had two milk pails full of AU/BU CWTs, many full Red...$5 each. I only bought a few and he died in a car crash. Seeing how much CWTs have gone up over the years, those buckets would have been an insanely good investment. That guy had a 7-figure inventory in the 80's, I never heard how it got dispersed. He was also the first person who ever showed me what $500k in cash looked like....banded stacks of $100s.
A CWT story a little like yours. In the late 80s I bought a CWT issued by a merchant with my last name and got hooked. Steve Tanenbaum used to run small classified ads in Coin World for 10 diff CWTs for $49 or something similar. Money was tight but when I could scrape together some cash,I would mail in an order. All were nice XF-AU pieces and I got a nice start on my collection. I liked the distinctive way he labelled the 2x2s, so I kept them like that.
I also remember buying low grade early large cents from junk boxes for $2-3 bucks, pull out my copy of Sheldon 's book, and practice attributing them. Was able to sell some better varieties for a profit, which was always fun for a college student.
Look at topstuf's PCGS Index plot carefully. Average collectors frequently did not have a good feeling for what was common vs. scarce. Many of them, and most investors, viewed high-MS coins as 'rare', no matter what. The MS generics of many types (Morgans, late-date Walkers, etc.) have not recovered from the slide off the top, and probably won't during my lifetime.
Member: EAC, NBS, C4, CWTS, ANA
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
You don't want the 70's again. If you bought from one of the coin newspapers you didn't know the dealer, There was no "Feedback", nor could you check his "Reviews". It was a song and a prayer.
In addition to collecting baseball cards, I remember avidly collecting beer cans with my son (correct decade?). Very decorative display or so it seemed at the time. Ended up selling them to an antique mall guy. He probably ended up recycling them. Silly but lots of fun. Also enjoyed collecting high-end Lincolns, breaking up original rolls, having them graded and then selling. About the only time in my life that I've accurately predicted a "market" - guessed that Lincoln cents would do well in high grades. They were hard to find as a collector, but cheap. I still have some nice partial 30's rolls... if ever.
@oldabeintx said:
In addition to collecting baseball cards, I remember avidly collecting beer cans with my son (correct decade?). Very decorative display or so it seemed at the time. Ended up selling them to an antique mall guy. He probably ended up recycling them. Silly but lots of fun. Also enjoyed collecting high-end Lincolns, breaking up original rolls, having them graded and then selling. About the only time in my life that I've accurately predicted a "market" - guessed that Lincoln cents would do well in high grades. They were hard to find as a collector, but cheap. I still have some nice partial 30's rolls... if ever.
@oldabeintx said:
In addition to collecting baseball cards, I remember avidly collecting beer cans with my son (correct decade?). Very decorative display or so it seemed at the time. Ended up selling them to an antique mall guy. He probably ended up recycling them. Silly but lots of fun. Also enjoyed collecting high-end Lincolns, breaking up original rolls, having them graded and then selling. About the only time in my life that I've accurately predicted a "market" - guessed that Lincoln cents would do well in high grades. They were hard to find as a collector, but cheap. I still have some nice partial 30's rolls... if ever.
The beer can craze was actually in the mid-1970s.
Thanks, just looked up Billy Beer, Introduced in 77, closed up shop in 78. Still collectors out there I noted but mine were the fad variety.
OK . . deep enough in the thread that few, if any, will ever see this . . .
Back from USAFA and the Air Force . . .was doing another degree at Utah . . . and determined to make it on my own although living expense were tight. Had put away $30-$40 face of silver back in 1964-5 with mom and dad and had it in a safety deposit box. I remember 3-4 times going there in the space of a few weeks and grabbing just $5-$7 face and taking it to "EG" coins here in SLC (5300 S???) and cashing it in. I could buy enough Ramen to live for another several weeks . . . . . . .
I was kind of oblivious to the market. I graduated in 1980, enlisted in the Navy and went to boot camp January 1981.
The few coins I had were mostly wheaties and buffalos, some from circulation and some purchased from a friend of mine was trying to help me develop and interest in coins and bullion. That would have been around 1977-1978 when this started. His father was somehow involved in coins, but his parents were divorced so I never met his father. What I do remember is most people had very little confidence in bullion. I had a paper route, so purchased a few bars (not called antique bars) from him.
I told my father I was planning to buy gold and silver. He pretty much told me to not do this. You could buy constitutional and .999 gold for under $250 an ounce, silver bars and rounds were about $6. My plans were to buy an ounce of gold and whatever silver I could every month. I took my fathers advice for the most part, but did as I mentioned above a few silver rounds an bars. I remember a dealer set up in a parking lot with cases, at a local flea market in a grocery store parking lot. I purchased some toned rounds and bars for about $6 each. I remember my first visit to Gaithersburg Coin Exchange, and purchasing some there as well. Back then they were a coin shop, that had bullion but it was not well displayed. Now they are a major bullion dealer in the area, they have coins but their bullion activity seems to have taken prominence as far as over the counter. The owner developed a well known reputation for their coin knowledge and fair business practices.
I did not realize that prices shot up through 1979 into the early 80's. At the few coin shows I attended, I had very little focus. Coins were all raw, in those 2x2 cardboard coin flips. I trusted whatever a dealer/seller wrote on the flip. I also limited my purchased to a few dollars for coins. Eventually I purchased on vinyl pages and put things in an album. I also had a Whitman cent book, did not put many cents in it.
I was over seas through January of 1983, did not develop an interest again until the middle of 2010.
My closest competitor had just fled with the coins (and stamps) that belonged to his customers ...and... partner.
Then the partner committed suicide.
By .... drinking nitric acid ....
That seemed suspicious.
Interpol must have thought so, too. They were looking for him.
@topstuf said:
My closest competitor had just fled with the coins (and stamps) that belonged to his customers ...and... partner.
Then the partner committed suicide.
By .... drinking nitric acid ....
That seemed suspicious.
Interpol must have thought so, too. They were looking for him.
Golly!
😮 oh my! Now that’s a story!
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
@TwoSides2aCoin said:
Susan B Anthony was just introduced to the public in '79. By 1980 a 1909 strong D , $2.5 gold piece was almost $18k. By 2019 a guy could get 3 at that price in an MS 62 PCGS holder.
I think you meant 1911-D. I'm surprised no one caught this.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
I had a number of circulated Morgans I had picked out for a grading display I did and a partial set of BU Franklins. Silver was at around 15 X face as I remember and I had gotten most of these for 3 or 4 times face so decided to cash them in so I could concentrate on my type set. My local dealer, who probably smelled a rat and knew a big drop was coming, only offered me 9 X face (he probably wasn't to happy to buy them back since all of the Morgans I had purchased from him!). I then took them to a coin show and the dealers were all clamoring wondering what I had in the sack I was carrying. I sold them for 11 X face as I remember.
"Ain't None of Them play like him (Bix Beiderbecke) Yet." Louis Armstrong
At the start of the 80's I was 21 years old and buying bulk 90% at Midwest coin shows and shops every week/weekend. Trusted as already doing this for several years and had respected dealer support. Thankfully still had a check float period back then. Immediately sold and delivered/driven to Chicago with very small margin. But a margin.
When the rules were changed on the Hunt's it all collapsed. Got out a bit earlier and never received a bad check.
Amazing what you saw if you were the top buyer of 90% back then.
I went to the Jack Tar Coin Show in San Francisco, can’t I remember when in the mid 80’s There were bags of BU Morgans Dollars $1000 face on the floor. I found a bag of 1880-S proof like with some DMPL, a full bag! All 80-S. I had to carry that bag all the way home, we slipped a pillow case over it and went through the airport. It went as carry on baggage! Most were sold over the next year or so. To this day I still have several put away.
I was born in early 1980s, in a small suburb of a small New England state. My grandparents were immigrant factory workers, and me having a paper route at age 5 was a very regular thing. If you could tire yourself out by playing outside then you can tire yourself out working outside. :P
A year or two later I'd start working at a pet store and upgraded my paper route to a few hundred customers and started an afternoon one. The younger crowd were hip with the times and paid by mailing in a check. Otherwise I got to meet and love all of my neighbors.
"Old ladies" would still pay in plenty of copper, liberty, buffalos have been dateless far back as I remember, 3c pieces still showed up in change on accident. I really liked spending time with them, and not just the coins or silver, but it was nice having a positive adult in my life supporting my hobbies and help educate me.
Found a 2 cent outside a cigarette machine at the local pool in 91 or 92. I'd regularly come home with pockets full of wheats and honestly not-that-bad 90% and old nickels from the pet store. War nickels were around but not really as much, since the MM is the only glaring obvious pickup point you need. Silver certificates were a very regular and fairly common thing (I still have one!!)
Keys still showed up all the time I remember my dad being excited over a 1932 circulated WQ slicker deal in change. It was probably a bigger deal then than it is now. I think I still have a 3 cent and a liberty I got from the lady at #136 Flagler. I'm pretty sure I have that 32 still, too, with the Morgan from my 11th birthday I think.
My grandfathers were both WW2 veterans, immigrants, and survivors of the depression. So nobody trusted banks. Grandma had been ferrying away dimes out of the grocery store when she was a teen and again later when she returned to part time work. Everyone says grandpa was the collector.. she had the most points for her long game. Grandpa stacked enough gold on a sailors salary to SOMEHOW care for the entire extended family in 2008-10.
He had already been gone 20 years and his kind heart, critical thinking, and actions reverberated strongly even then.
A great deal of our family stopped coming over around 1935.. the stories about what happened to our people and "oh, we still have family, honey, they're just in heaven" made it very hard for me to enjoy international coins. I'm coming up on 40 and am just now buying gold from the motherland.. and some of the gold that was stolen from them but that's a whole other thing.
Anyway, coin shows were amazing. They were more packed than minor league baseball stadiums and that blew my mind. I remember being surprised there were so many people who were like family than cutthroat vendors. 20 years later I'd go to a show and wish I had left the memory alone.
It was like a memorial day BBQ with a huge family ad everyone played with coins not footballs.
The world was so much slower and simpler. I still have dreams of my paper route and the pet store. Sometimes when I get sad about my youth I think of some of those nice little old ladies who took time out of their day just to be kind.
Realistically, they were just paying their bill and it was just another Thursday. But to me, it was everything.
I spent a week in the hospital in the early 60’s when I was around 7. My mother and father bought Whitman folders for me and I would pass the time of day going through rolls from the bank. I remember dateless Buffalos and Standing Liberty quarters and an occasional Indian head cent. I could never convince mom or dad to get half dollar rolls. I never did find a 1909-S VDB or 1916-D Mercury but I did find a 32-D and 32-S Washington.
Oh boy. Where do I start? I started (well Nana started me) collecting in the late 60's at the end of the circulation finds era.
Through the 70's I started learning some painful things.
I bought "some lovely coins " not, from Littleton.
In the early eights(my college years)I thought it would be cool to collect as much as possible. Another words, quantity over quality. Another wrong assumption.
Later on, I think it was 1985, I bought a "lovely " 09SVDB Lincoln. Wrong again . Glued on S MM!
Along came the certified coins era. I bouht my first certified coin in 1986ish. An MS 64 Morgan.
After that coins took a backseat. Marriage, family etc.
Sold everything in 2012 to pay for college.
Got back into it a couple of years ago.
Little more than what you were looking for but hope you enjoyed.
I was hired by ANACS in the Fall of 1978 to add a grading service to their existing, and very successful, authentication service. As I understood the mission, we expected to be grading coins that had already been sold where there was some dispute between buyer and seller. We expected to eventually be grading 100-200 coins per month.
By coincidence, at the same time the Hunt Brothers (oil tycoons) decided to try to corner the market in physical silver. Back then anybody could list a 1,000 ounce silver futures contract for sale even if you did not have the silver to back it up. Usually at the end of the contract the holder simply sold it back to the originator for current market value, and either made a few cents per ounce or lost a few cent per ounce. If the holder demanded delivery, as Kodak typically did back in the days when cameras used film that had a silver emulsion in them, the seller bought physical silver and delivered it, typically through a depository.
The Hunts bought up all the physical silver they could get AND they bought up a bunch of contracts and sat on them both.While they were buying and holding the price moved up somewhat, but not so much that they could not buy more contracts from people who thought that the rise could not last and they would make a nice profit when the market corrected.
Finally their oldest contracts matured, and they demanded physical delivery of ALL of it. There is an old investing maxim: "He what sells what isn't his'n, must buy it back or go to prison!" People scrambled to find physical silver to deliver or else go into default. Prices jumped and jumped again. No doubt some of the physical silver that people bought to avoid default was bought from the Hunt Brothers, and delivered right back to them. Prices continued to go up, and there were still more contracts to mature. Gold went up as well because of increased demand, even though the Hunts were not playing that market to the best of my knowledge.
Against this backdrop, coin shops began buying in more and more junk silver coins, Franklin Mint medals, sterling silver dinnerware and anything else that could yield .999 silver once refined. Refining took a while, and the shops found that they were selling the refined product at a much higher spot price than when they bought. Every shop was awash in profit, and much of it got plowed into collector coins at higher and higher prices.
In this bull market grading standards were completely ignored. Let us consider as a benchmark a common date Morgan dollar, say an 1881-S, in the literal textbook definition for an MS-65 coin. The Coin Dealer Newsletter, aka The Greysheet, listed a Bid and an Ask price for this coin. They kept going up.
Meanwhile, on the floors of coin shows and in coin shops across the land, grading standards deteriorated. A nice, shiny 1881-S with more bag marks than the textbook allowed, let's call it an MS-64 or even an MS-63, would still be sold as an MS-65, and even bought as such because the dealers knew that they could sell it as an MS-65 at a profit. The textbook perfect MS-65 coin would be called something higher, and sold at an exorbitant price.
Then in January of 1980 the U.S. government changed the rules in the commodities market, and the Hunts were forced to sell a significant portion of their physical silver. The silver and gold markets crashed big time. By then the refining pipelines were backed up so badly that some metals buyers had millions of dollars worth of precious metals out of their hands that they could not get paid for for months. When they did get paid, it was at a much lower spot price than the metal had been purchased for.
(End Part 1)
Numismatist. 50 year member ANA. Winner of four ANA Heath Literary Awards; three Wayte and Olga Raymond Literary Awards; Numismatist of the Year Award 2009, and Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Winner numerous NLG Literary Awards.
@DRUNNER said:
OK . . deep enough in the thread that few, if any, will ever see this . . .
Back from USAFA and the Air Force . . .was doing another degree at Utah . . . and determined to make it on my own although living expense were tight. Had put away $30-$40 face of silver back in 1964-5 with mom and dad and had it in a safety deposit box. I remember 3-4 times going there in the space of a few weeks and grabbing just $5-$7 face and taking it to "EG" coins here in SLC (5300 S???) and cashing it in. I could buy enough Ramen to live for another several weeks . . . . . . .
I still remember it . . . . . .
Drunner
What no Spam ?
The Hunt Brothers trying to corner the silver market was madness.
I manage money. I earn money. I save money . I give away money. I collect money. I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
The great stuff continues. A ton of historical context that has surely filled in some knowledge gaps that I had.
I also really appreciate the heartfelt stories of collecting and the good memories that went with. It’s easy to get caught up in all the numbers: prices, dates, quantities, etc... and forget about the good vibes.
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
The ANA Grading Guide had been published in 1977. It listed three Mint State grades, MS-60, MS-65 and MS-70. MS-70 was by definition a perfect coin, which as a rule does not exist outside of Proof coinage. We did not expect to be grading modern coinage, so when I was hired in late 1978 that left me with two Mint State grades I could use.
I had been cherrypicking and collecting, and occasionally selling to cover college tuition costs, Morgan Dollar die varieties ever since Ted Clark published a series of articles on the various 1880/79 Morgan Dollar overdates in Coin World's Collectors Clearinghouse page in 1970. This actually led to me working at Clearinghouse by 1974, but that is another story.
I looked through a lot of BU rolls of dollars while looking for overdates and varieties. While looking I could see that some coins were nicer than others. The actual grade was not important in cherrypicking, but I learned a lot about dollars while doing it.
During the four months while we were preparing to open the grading service on March 1, 1979, we asked every major dealer in the country to send us a package of ten or so coins in ungraded holders, with the dealers' grades sealed in an envelope that we did not look at until the other two Authenticators and I had graded each coin. Many dealers participated, while others declined. It was a great learning experience, but none of them sent a common Morgan dollar. They sent classic U.S. numismatic coins from the 1790's to the early 20th Century.
The main thing I learned was that we needed more grades, so I added AU-58, MS-63 and MS-67 before we started accepting coins for grading. I don't remember anybody complaining about these numbers when they got their coins back. Eventually other numbers were added as well.
This was the situation when we launched the grading service. Silver, which had crept from $5 to $6 during all of 1978, was between $7 and $8 in March and still under $10 by August. Then it started really jumping in September and the coin market exploded as well.
(End of Part 2)
Numismatist. 50 year member ANA. Winner of four ANA Heath Literary Awards; three Wayte and Olga Raymond Literary Awards; Numismatist of the Year Award 2009, and Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Winner numerous NLG Literary Awards.
Cherry picking was nowhere near as rampant back in the 80's. I was in my late teen early 20's, and in our local B&M shop, just about everything was in 2x2's, except a few Lucite encased pieces. Dark shop it was, except for the spot lights over the glass display cases and a huge safe in the back room. I often wonder how many varieties slipped past through my fingers.
oih82w8 = Oh I Hate To Wait _defectus patientia_aka...Dr. Defecto - Curator of RMO's
In the 70s, on kwhy channel 22 in la, Jonathan hefferlin of Jonathan’s coins at 525 w Manchester Inglewood had a daily show at 7:50, 11:50 and 5:50 about bullion prices and some coin talk. For my 14th birthday 2/23/80 I got a trip there and met him and Richard Schwary in person. Jonathan would say to try and buy the CC dollars from the GSA and I got 6 at $15 ( common toned) and 4 at $45 (80,81,85cc toned).
What a deal.
At his shop I got an 1878-cc raw unc choice (64 best) for $222....
He truly was an icon
In Chicago, when you could get it to come in, there was a program on Ch. 26 called the "Stock Market Observer." Periodically, a numismatist named Walter "Bud" Perschke would come on and talk about coins. Pershcke would go on to own some pretty incredible coins including a Brasher Dubloon for which he paid a world record price for a coin at the time of $430,000. Thirty-five years later he sold it for $3.9 million ($4.5 million w/buyer's fee). He also owned a Nova Constellation Quint which for which he paid $50,000 and later sold for $1.2 million.
Mr. Perschke hand carried an Extremely HR $20 to the certification service in DC. It was valued at about 4K. His story was that a lady had four HR Saints and gave him his pick. He picked the one that didn't look like the others. He told us he believed it was either a special coin or a counterfeit. I took a cab out to a coin dealer in Virginia who said it was authentic. When I got back we took it to the Smithsonian the next day. Mr. Perschke gave a big donation to the ANA after we certified it.
Comments
During the Hunt brothers run-up I was working in downtown Atlanta. During my lunch hour I would visit department stores and specialty shops buying sterling flatware etc. at retail and sell it at Georgia Stamp & Coin at a handsome profit on my way back to work. Those were the days.
it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide
An "Original Gentleman". There are few of us left.
I remember 5 gallon buckets of walkers as junk silver many BU.
I was quite young and had no money, so it didn't do me much good.
One thing I regret most is one of my favorite dealers had two milk pails full of AU/BU CWTs, many full Red...$5 each. I only bought a few and he died in a car crash. Seeing how much CWTs have gone up over the years, those buckets would have been an insanely good investment. That guy had a 7-figure inventory in the 80's, I never heard how it got dispersed. He was also the first person who ever showed me what $500k in cash looked like....banded stacks of $100s.
OG=Old Guard. That's how I took it.
When can we do the 1970s? BU Morgans were 3 dollars and prooflikes were 5.
I recall in the 80's going to a Federal Marshal's auction where they were selling several hundred siezed $20 BU gold pieces for $300 each. I didn't have much money then and bought only one. I also got a nice AU Lafayette dollar there for $50. No internet then and not a lot of bidders.
Since we’re all likely to have some free time for quite a while, I’m thinking we can let this run through the week to catch everyone. Then we can do the 70’s next weekend and the 60’s the following..... Start a new decade in review each Saturday.
I’m loving all this stuff 👍🏻
You guys are awesome.
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
I wasn’t alive in the 80s. What did coin collectors look like?
Did coin collector look like this in the 80s ?
I sure remember bid boards. I remember seeing a few fights break out in the last few seconds of the auction.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
Can’t speak much about the coin market but it relates to the cardboard market. Local B&M stores had 50’s and 60’s cards for $.10-$.50 each. Mickey Mantles ranging from $20 up depending on condition. Common T206’s were $2-$5 with stars in the $25+ range. They couldn’t give away football which was fine for me since I collected ‘60’s AFL. Came 1989-90 and the boom was on. Modern junk produced by the billions. Everyone buying to put their kids through college. Scammers on TV hawking worthless sets and unknown grading companies. All that 90’s wax worthless. I can’t tell you how many collections I’ve seen and disappointed looks when I tell them it’s only good as firewood.
"I spent 50% of my money on alcohol, women, and gambling. The other half I wasted.
Bid Boards were the BEST thing. It got about fifteen to twenty locals together at one shop on Tuesday and the other on Thursday. I was among the younger fellas there and not a woman in sight ever. Back then it was mostly a man's hobby but there were some ladies in the business. During the week I would try and move the lots I wanted into a small area. Others must have done the same thing because this continued until the day of the auction. Right up to the time I would pretend to be looking at a lot nas close to the board I could get to so as to block a coin I wanted. I'm going to start a new thread
I bought every Machin's Mill Copper coin I own (except for a junk box find or two) on bid boards for under $8 because "foreign" coins were not popular. I'm sure there are some great stories about the boards. Randy Campbell tells one about two collectors fighting to win a BU Morgan dollar bidding the coin up higher and higher. When it was over the looser walked over to the store counter and found/bought an identical piece for half the price! worked at a store
Circa early 1990s:
A local coin and card shop was very big on promoting baseball cards by the full cardboard box. (Not just one small box but an entire large cardboard box full!) I was in the shop one afternoon looking for coins while the owner was doing his baseball card sales pitch to another customer. He was selling the cardboard box lots with the promise that he would call the buyer and buy them back at a big profit when the price of the cards rose. The dealer in question died about 15 years ago. His customers are probably still waiting for the call telling them to empty the garage and bring in their "valuable" cardboard box lots for sale.
A coin shop that always bothered me. Early 1980's I was stationed at Ft. Riley, KS, living in Manhattan KS a few miles away. I had gotten back into coins after a trade of stereo equipment for coins. 1 coin shop in the area. The guy who ran it seemed a bit "off". A lot of guns in the shop, not for sale. He mentioned, after I had been there a few times, that he carried 3 guns at all time. A lot of black helicopter conspiracy talk, Next Civil War, overthrown the government type talk in that shop. He struck me as the "Might have been a cook or truck driver in the Military, but bought a whole bunch of medals and told everyone he was a war hero" type person.
Fast forward to the Oklahoma City Bombing. Timothy McVeigh had been stationed at Ft. Riley, and had obtained money by stealing cons at coins shows, and disposing of them somehow. I went back to MAnhattan several times as my wife's parents lived there. At some point after the bombing, the coin shop had vanished. I knew several of the places that Mcveigh had used to buy /rent stuff (the truck, the fertilizer, the accelerant). At least one was within a mile of that coin shop.
It bothered me that there was a connection in all of that.
Susan B Anthony was just introduced to the public in '79. By 1980, a 1909 *strong D , $2.5 gold piece was almost $18k. By 2019 a guy could get 3 at that price in an MS 62 PCGS holder.
Edit a correction
The overall market was wild and (no pun intended) high in 1989. Speculation was intense and many coins were rising in value on a weekly basis.
I remember going to a show with a box or two of freshly graded classic silver commemoratives (which were close to all-time high prices) and quoted a dealer-friend somewhere between 20%-30% over CDN. He said something like “I’ll take them”. I asked “Don’t you want to look at them first?”. He didn’t think that was necessary and quickly bought them!
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
When the new PCGS and NGC started you had to wait 3-4 months to get coins back. there was no internet information on how things graded ; so when a package arrived it was like Chrismas opening up a unknown gift!
Started collecting in the 60's. Nothing high dollar. In the late 60's early 70's bought a lot of silver Roosies and Mercurys from the owner of several businesses in the area. Silver dimes two for a quarter. Still have them all. Resisted the urge to sell any during the Hunt Brothers run up.
Still have a couple newspaper articles from the Hunt Brothers. Article dated March 29th 1980, The Hunt brothers Nelson and W. Herbert Hunt of Dallas, Texas had ownership and futures contracts of hundreds of millions of ounces of silver. The New York Commodity Exchange on Jan. 21st 1980 severly restricted the amount of a given commodity any one person, group or interest could hold, possess or have a vested interest in. Silver dropped from $ 50.00 to $ 10.80 in a few short weeks.
I remember lines of people at the local hotel holding bags of coins, silverware etc. to sell. Then the rrules changed. A lot of businessmen lost their butts from buying, only to find they couldn't sell it.
The Hunt brothers had to sell theirs on the open market and pay their margin calls. Wasn't a good time for a lot of people.
A CWT story a little like yours. In the late 80s I bought a CWT issued by a merchant with my last name and got hooked. Steve Tanenbaum used to run small classified ads in Coin World for 10 diff CWTs for $49 or something similar. Money was tight but when I could scrape together some cash,I would mail in an order. All were nice XF-AU pieces and I got a nice start on my collection. I liked the distinctive way he labelled the 2x2s, so I kept them like that.
I also remember buying low grade early large cents from junk boxes for $2-3 bucks, pull out my copy of Sheldon 's book, and practice attributing them. Was able to sell some better varieties for a profit, which was always fun for a college student.
Look at topstuf's PCGS Index plot carefully. Average collectors frequently did not have a good feeling for what was common vs. scarce. Many of them, and most investors, viewed high-MS coins as 'rare', no matter what. The MS generics of many types (Morgans, late-date Walkers, etc.) have not recovered from the slide off the top, and probably won't during my lifetime.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
You don't want the 70's again. If you bought from one of the coin newspapers you didn't know the dealer, There was no "Feedback", nor could you check his "Reviews". It was a song and a prayer.
Plus they dressed like this.
There was a lot of excitement about the Susan B Anthony dollar. Finally, a dollar coin modern Americans would embrace.
In the 80's I would wait until the London gold fix (3:00AM) before going to sleep.
In 2020, I'm usually up at 3:00AM going to the bathroom.
In addition to collecting baseball cards, I remember avidly collecting beer cans with my son (correct decade?). Very decorative display or so it seemed at the time. Ended up selling them to an antique mall guy. He probably ended up recycling them. Silly but lots of fun. Also enjoyed collecting high-end Lincolns, breaking up original rolls, having them graded and then selling. About the only time in my life that I've accurately predicted a "market" - guessed that Lincoln cents would do well in high grades. They were hard to find as a collector, but cheap. I still have some nice partial 30's rolls... if ever.
The beer can craze was actually in the mid-1970s.
Thanks, just looked up Billy Beer, Introduced in 77, closed up shop in 78. Still collectors out there I noted but mine were the fad variety.
OK . . deep enough in the thread that few, if any, will ever see this . . .
Back from USAFA and the Air Force . . .was doing another degree at Utah . . . and determined to make it on my own although living expense were tight. Had put away $30-$40 face of silver back in 1964-5 with mom and dad and had it in a safety deposit box. I remember 3-4 times going there in the space of a few weeks and grabbing just $5-$7 face and taking it to "EG" coins here in SLC (5300 S???) and cashing it in. I could buy enough Ramen to live for another several weeks . . . . . . .
I still remember it . . . . . .
Drunner
I was kind of oblivious to the market. I graduated in 1980, enlisted in the Navy and went to boot camp January 1981.
The few coins I had were mostly wheaties and buffalos, some from circulation and some purchased from a friend of mine was trying to help me develop and interest in coins and bullion. That would have been around 1977-1978 when this started. His father was somehow involved in coins, but his parents were divorced so I never met his father. What I do remember is most people had very little confidence in bullion. I had a paper route, so purchased a few bars (not called antique bars) from him.
I told my father I was planning to buy gold and silver. He pretty much told me to not do this. You could buy constitutional and .999 gold for under $250 an ounce, silver bars and rounds were about $6. My plans were to buy an ounce of gold and whatever silver I could every month. I took my fathers advice for the most part, but did as I mentioned above a few silver rounds an bars. I remember a dealer set up in a parking lot with cases, at a local flea market in a grocery store parking lot. I purchased some toned rounds and bars for about $6 each. I remember my first visit to Gaithersburg Coin Exchange, and purchasing some there as well. Back then they were a coin shop, that had bullion but it was not well displayed. Now they are a major bullion dealer in the area, they have coins but their bullion activity seems to have taken prominence as far as over the counter. The owner developed a well known reputation for their coin knowledge and fair business practices.
I did not realize that prices shot up through 1979 into the early 80's. At the few coin shows I attended, I had very little focus. Coins were all raw, in those 2x2 cardboard coin flips. I trusted whatever a dealer/seller wrote on the flip. I also limited my purchased to a few dollars for coins. Eventually I purchased on vinyl pages and put things in an album. I also had a Whitman cent book, did not put many cents in it.
I was over seas through January of 1983, did not develop an interest again until the middle of 2010.
My closest competitor had just fled with the coins (and stamps) that belonged to his customers ...and... partner.
Then the partner committed suicide.
By .... drinking nitric acid ....
That seemed suspicious.
Interpol must have thought so, too. They were looking for him.
Golly!
I was too. You don't have flashbacks?
My 1866 Philly Mint Set
😮 oh my! Now that’s a story!
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
Wrong drug!
I think you meant 1911-D. I'm surprised no one caught this.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
I had a number of circulated Morgans I had picked out for a grading display I did and a partial set of BU Franklins. Silver was at around 15 X face as I remember and I had gotten most of these for 3 or 4 times face so decided to cash them in so I could concentrate on my type set. My local dealer, who probably smelled a rat and knew a big drop was coming, only offered me 9 X face (he probably wasn't to happy to buy them back since all of the Morgans I had purchased from him!). I then took them to a coin show and the dealers were all clamoring wondering what I had in the sack I was carrying. I sold them for 11 X face as I remember.
Louis Armstrong
At the start of the 80's I was 21 years old and buying bulk 90% at Midwest coin shows and shops every week/weekend. Trusted as already doing this for several years and had respected dealer support. Thankfully still had a check float period back then. Immediately sold and delivered/driven to Chicago with very small margin. But a margin.
When the rules were changed on the Hunt's it all collapsed. Got out a bit earlier and never received a bad check.
Amazing what you saw if you were the top buyer of 90% back then.
My 1866 Philly Mint Set
Ever met Boiler?
My 1866 Philly Mint Set
I went to the Jack Tar Coin Show in San Francisco, can’t I remember when in the mid 80’s There were bags of BU Morgans Dollars $1000 face on the floor. I found a bag of 1880-S proof like with some DMPL, a full bag! All 80-S. I had to carry that bag all the way home, we slipped a pillow case over it and went through the airport. It went as carry on baggage! Most were sold over the next year or so. To this day I still have several put away.
I was born in early 1980s, in a small suburb of a small New England state. My grandparents were immigrant factory workers, and me having a paper route at age 5 was a very regular thing. If you could tire yourself out by playing outside then you can tire yourself out working outside. :P
A year or two later I'd start working at a pet store and upgraded my paper route to a few hundred customers and started an afternoon one. The younger crowd were hip with the times and paid by mailing in a check. Otherwise I got to meet and love all of my neighbors.
"Old ladies" would still pay in plenty of copper, liberty, buffalos have been dateless far back as I remember, 3c pieces still showed up in change on accident. I really liked spending time with them, and not just the coins or silver, but it was nice having a positive adult in my life supporting my hobbies and help educate me.
Found a 2 cent outside a cigarette machine at the local pool in 91 or 92. I'd regularly come home with pockets full of wheats and honestly not-that-bad 90% and old nickels from the pet store. War nickels were around but not really as much, since the MM is the only glaring obvious pickup point you need. Silver certificates were a very regular and fairly common thing (I still have one!!)
Keys still showed up all the time I remember my dad being excited over a 1932 circulated WQ slicker deal in change. It was probably a bigger deal then than it is now. I think I still have a 3 cent and a liberty I got from the lady at #136 Flagler. I'm pretty sure I have that 32 still, too, with the Morgan from my 11th birthday I think.
My grandfathers were both WW2 veterans, immigrants, and survivors of the depression. So nobody trusted banks. Grandma had been ferrying away dimes out of the grocery store when she was a teen and again later when she returned to part time work. Everyone says grandpa was the collector.. she had the most points for her long game. Grandpa stacked enough gold on a sailors salary to SOMEHOW care for the entire extended family in 2008-10.
He had already been gone 20 years and his kind heart, critical thinking, and actions reverberated strongly even then.
A great deal of our family stopped coming over around 1935.. the stories about what happened to our people and "oh, we still have family, honey, they're just in heaven" made it very hard for me to enjoy international coins. I'm coming up on 40 and am just now buying gold from the motherland.. and some of the gold that was stolen from them but that's a whole other thing.
Anyway, coin shows were amazing. They were more packed than minor league baseball stadiums and that blew my mind. I remember being surprised there were so many people who were like family than cutthroat vendors. 20 years later I'd go to a show and wish I had left the memory alone.
It was like a memorial day BBQ with a huge family ad everyone played with coins not footballs.
The world was so much slower and simpler. I still have dreams of my paper route and the pet store. Sometimes when I get sad about my youth I think of some of those nice little old ladies who took time out of their day just to be kind.
Realistically, they were just paying their bill and it was just another Thursday. But to me, it was everything.
Disco man, disco. It sucked so hard that people got involved in coin collecting and drove the price of coins way the hell up.
I spent a week in the hospital in the early 60’s when I was around 7. My mother and father bought Whitman folders for me and I would pass the time of day going through rolls from the bank. I remember dateless Buffalos and Standing Liberty quarters and an occasional Indian head cent. I could never convince mom or dad to get half dollar rolls. I never did find a 1909-S VDB or 1916-D Mercury but I did find a 32-D and 32-S Washington.
Oh boy. Where do I start? I started (well Nana started me) collecting in the late 60's at the end of the circulation finds era.
Through the 70's I started learning some painful things.
I bought "some lovely coins " not, from Littleton.
In the early eights(my college years)I thought it would be cool to collect as much as possible. Another words, quantity over quality. Another wrong assumption.
Later on, I think it was 1985, I bought a "lovely " 09SVDB Lincoln. Wrong again . Glued on S MM!
Along came the certified coins era. I bouht my first certified coin in 1986ish. An MS 64 Morgan.
After that coins took a backseat. Marriage, family etc.
Sold everything in 2012 to pay for college.
Got back into it a couple of years ago.
Little more than what you were looking for but hope you enjoyed.
I was hired by ANACS in the Fall of 1978 to add a grading service to their existing, and very successful, authentication service. As I understood the mission, we expected to be grading coins that had already been sold where there was some dispute between buyer and seller. We expected to eventually be grading 100-200 coins per month.
By coincidence, at the same time the Hunt Brothers (oil tycoons) decided to try to corner the market in physical silver. Back then anybody could list a 1,000 ounce silver futures contract for sale even if you did not have the silver to back it up. Usually at the end of the contract the holder simply sold it back to the originator for current market value, and either made a few cents per ounce or lost a few cent per ounce. If the holder demanded delivery, as Kodak typically did back in the days when cameras used film that had a silver emulsion in them, the seller bought physical silver and delivered it, typically through a depository.
The Hunts bought up all the physical silver they could get AND they bought up a bunch of contracts and sat on them both.While they were buying and holding the price moved up somewhat, but not so much that they could not buy more contracts from people who thought that the rise could not last and they would make a nice profit when the market corrected.
Finally their oldest contracts matured, and they demanded physical delivery of ALL of it. There is an old investing maxim: "He what sells what isn't his'n, must buy it back or go to prison!" People scrambled to find physical silver to deliver or else go into default. Prices jumped and jumped again. No doubt some of the physical silver that people bought to avoid default was bought from the Hunt Brothers, and delivered right back to them. Prices continued to go up, and there were still more contracts to mature. Gold went up as well because of increased demand, even though the Hunts were not playing that market to the best of my knowledge.
Against this backdrop, coin shops began buying in more and more junk silver coins, Franklin Mint medals, sterling silver dinnerware and anything else that could yield .999 silver once refined. Refining took a while, and the shops found that they were selling the refined product at a much higher spot price than when they bought. Every shop was awash in profit, and much of it got plowed into collector coins at higher and higher prices.
In this bull market grading standards were completely ignored. Let us consider as a benchmark a common date Morgan dollar, say an 1881-S, in the literal textbook definition for an MS-65 coin. The Coin Dealer Newsletter, aka The Greysheet, listed a Bid and an Ask price for this coin. They kept going up.
Meanwhile, on the floors of coin shows and in coin shops across the land, grading standards deteriorated. A nice, shiny 1881-S with more bag marks than the textbook allowed, let's call it an MS-64 or even an MS-63, would still be sold as an MS-65, and even bought as such because the dealers knew that they could sell it as an MS-65 at a profit. The textbook perfect MS-65 coin would be called something higher, and sold at an exorbitant price.
Then in January of 1980 the U.S. government changed the rules in the commodities market, and the Hunts were forced to sell a significant portion of their physical silver. The silver and gold markets crashed big time. By then the refining pipelines were backed up so badly that some metals buyers had millions of dollars worth of precious metals out of their hands that they could not get paid for for months. When they did get paid, it was at a much lower spot price than the metal had been purchased for.
(End Part 1)
What no Spam ?
The Hunt Brothers trying to corner the silver market was madness.
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
The great stuff continues. A ton of historical context that has surely filled in some knowledge gaps that I had.
I also really appreciate the heartfelt stories of collecting and the good memories that went with. It’s easy to get caught up in all the numbers: prices, dates, quantities, etc... and forget about the good vibes.
"Today the crumbs, tomorrow the
loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." - fictional Jack Rackham
(Part 2)
The ANA Grading Guide had been published in 1977. It listed three Mint State grades, MS-60, MS-65 and MS-70. MS-70 was by definition a perfect coin, which as a rule does not exist outside of Proof coinage. We did not expect to be grading modern coinage, so when I was hired in late 1978 that left me with two Mint State grades I could use.
I had been cherrypicking and collecting, and occasionally selling to cover college tuition costs, Morgan Dollar die varieties ever since Ted Clark published a series of articles on the various 1880/79 Morgan Dollar overdates in Coin World's Collectors Clearinghouse page in 1970. This actually led to me working at Clearinghouse by 1974, but that is another story.
I looked through a lot of BU rolls of dollars while looking for overdates and varieties. While looking I could see that some coins were nicer than others. The actual grade was not important in cherrypicking, but I learned a lot about dollars while doing it.
During the four months while we were preparing to open the grading service on March 1, 1979, we asked every major dealer in the country to send us a package of ten or so coins in ungraded holders, with the dealers' grades sealed in an envelope that we did not look at until the other two Authenticators and I had graded each coin. Many dealers participated, while others declined. It was a great learning experience, but none of them sent a common Morgan dollar. They sent classic U.S. numismatic coins from the 1790's to the early 20th Century.
The main thing I learned was that we needed more grades, so I added AU-58, MS-63 and MS-67 before we started accepting coins for grading. I don't remember anybody complaining about these numbers when they got their coins back. Eventually other numbers were added as well.
This was the situation when we launched the grading service. Silver, which had crept from $5 to $6 during all of 1978, was between $7 and $8 in March and still under $10 by August. Then it started really jumping in September and the coin market exploded as well.
(End of Part 2)
Cherry picking was nowhere near as rampant back in the 80's. I was in my late teen early 20's, and in our local B&M shop, just about everything was in 2x2's, except a few Lucite encased pieces. Dark shop it was, except for the spot lights over the glass display cases and a huge safe in the back room. I often wonder how many varieties slipped past through my fingers.
BST transactions: dbldie55, jayPem, 78saen, UltraHighRelief, nibanny, liefgold, FallGuy, lkeigwin, mbogoman, Sandman70gt, keets, joeykoins, ianrussell (@GC), EagleEye, ThePennyLady, GRANDAM, Ilikecolor, Gluggo, okiedude, Voyageur, LJenkins11, fastfreddie, ms70, pursuitofliberty, ZoidMeister,Coin Finder, GotTheBug, edwardjulio, Coinnmore...
In the 70s, on kwhy channel 22 in la, Jonathan hefferlin of Jonathan’s coins at 525 w Manchester Inglewood had a daily show at 7:50, 11:50 and 5:50 about bullion prices and some coin talk. For my 14th birthday 2/23/80 I got a trip there and met him and Richard Schwary in person. Jonathan would say to try and buy the CC dollars from the GSA and I got 6 at $15 ( common toned) and 4 at $45 (80,81,85cc toned).
What a deal.
At his shop I got an 1878-cc raw unc choice (64 best) for $222....
He truly was an icon
Old
Grump
In Chicago, when you could get it to come in, there was a program on Ch. 26 called the "Stock Market Observer." Periodically, a numismatist named Walter "Bud" Perschke would come on and talk about coins. Pershcke would go on to own some pretty incredible coins including a Brasher Dubloon for which he paid a world record price for a coin at the time of $430,000. Thirty-five years later he sold it for $3.9 million ($4.5 million w/buyer's fee). He also owned a Nova Constellation Quint which for which he paid $50,000 and later sold for $1.2 million.
I was high school and then college age in that decade.
Unfortunately, I wasn't very active in numismatics.
I was into dating girls, deer hunting and drinking beer....
Didn't get back into coins until the mid 1990's.
“I may not believe in myself but I believe in what I’m doing” ~Jimmy Page~
My Full Walker Registry Set (1916-1947)
https://www.ngccoin.com/registry/competitive-sets/16292/
Mr. Perschke hand carried an Extremely HR $20 to the certification service in DC. It was valued at about 4K. His story was that a lady had four HR Saints and gave him his pick. He picked the one that didn't look like the others. He told us he believed it was either a special coin or a counterfeit. I took a cab out to a coin dealer in Virginia who said it was authentic. When I got back we took it to the Smithsonian the next day. Mr. Perschke gave a big donation to the ANA after we certified it.