Morgan Dollar “Roll Fresh Blazer”
Cougar1978
Posts: 8,636 ✭✭✭✭✭
What are the criteria for these? Any particular diagnostic? Usually these coins look brilliant mainly untoned with nice luster or could be very brilliant with very light russet rim toning and of course priced at a slightly higher premium.
I have seen a number of sellers using this description of slabbed Morgan Dollars MS coins usually 65’s. Many priced at around 35% premium vs CDN CPG. Feel free post yours.
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As for the roll sales:
Dealer takes 20 Morgans and rolls them up. Then dealer sells roll as "original" on ebay. Dealer makes sure at least one end of roll has a nice common MS or CC dollar. Ebay sale ends up about 100% of retail value. Buyer gets roll and opens. Buyer finds one nice coin. Buyer stews and finally admits he spent his money foolishly.
I say this because Silver Dollars were delivered in bags of 1,000 coins. The were never rolled by the Mint. Rolling of dollars was done for the public by some banks but mostly Casinos and gambling establishments. Easier for the "change" girl to deal with $10, $20 or such rolls than individually counting out the coins.
Most of us just call "fresh roll blazer" literary license, or raw hype.
I do have some personal knowledge on the casino end as I worked in a hard count room of a Casino in Carson City back in the early and mid 1960's. We got bags of coin and rolled them for the casino floor. We also cleaned many coins that were just plain dirty and customers did not like the black hands they got from grimy coins.
As for the individual coin sales: just nicely graded coins that the seller is hyping as coming from an original roll (whatever that means).
bob
Wow would love go back in time and get roll at casino....
15 years ago or so we were visiting some family in Carson City and stopped off in a Casino. They had a dollar 777 machine if you hit the right combo, it would spit out a peace dollar - I put $20 bucks in it just for fun and won one after about $18 pulls.
At the time I was a little miffed paying $18 bucks for a plain old Peace dollar when I could buy one for half that.
Click on this link to see my ebay listings.
Like a number of other terms in this industry, it can be used as hype, is somewhat ambiguous, subjective and doesn’t necessarily mean much. On the other hand, it can be accurately used to describe coins from rolls, which are lustrous and uncirculated.
Even then, however, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the coins are of particularly nice quality. A great many dollars from rolls and bags are only MS62 and MS63 quality.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
"Roll fresh blazer" IMO means nothing. Someone is just trying to market a coin and somehow insinuating it was just taken out of a roll, where the buyer is supposed to assume it's spent the last several decades, means they can charge more for it.
Collector, occasional seller
@MFeld said: "Even then, however, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the coins are of particularly nice quality. A great many dollars from rolls and bags are only MS62 and MS63 quality."
I had a fling with Morgan dollars about 25 years ago. At that time, it was not uncommon for auction companies to have 50 or more listings for lots of 20 BU Morgans of the same date, clearly from bags. Stack's in particular would usually list them in descending order by grade "Very choice", "Choice", "Choice or nearly so", etc. I think a typical grade might be "MS62+" -- coins that were not quite choice, but were original and actually quite desirable.
One of my most memorable buying experiences in this era was a "roll" where the bag toned coins had been collected into a single lot. The best was only MS64 or so, but it was still a very cool lot!
My avatar is a coin taken from a Treasury bag 56 years ago. My dad worked at a National Bank and he arranged for the delivery of a couple of hundred Morgan bags for a big collector to his bank. One Saturday I helped count about 1/2 dozen bags to make sure they were all Morgans and 1,000. Of the bags opened, some were mixed but a couple were all UNC. The dealer gave my Dad about 10 Morgans for my help. Believe you would call this is a blazer. Never dipped as long as it has been in our family.
Avatar is too small to see, 1882-s? Can you post a nice pic? Love to see it. I do remember solid date bags and mixed bags but most were the mixed dates.
bob
Yes 82-S. Need to check all my camera SDHC cards for larger pic or might have to take a new photo. Give me a day to post
Sometimes you never forget a name when you're impressed. Even though I was only 7, I remember the dealers name that my father arranged the Morgan delivery - Charlie Ross. Did a search in PCGS articles on Silver Dollars and this was from an article by David Bowers. Wonder if this was the bank vault that I was in?
_I also remember that Charlie Ross was a major dealer in silver dollars in the 1960s. He was from Long Island, New York. He made a lot of money. He was a very smart person, and everything he did, he did right. He had many bags of silver dollars. He put investors into bags of silver dollars and made them sign contracts that when they sold he would get 20% of the profits. I remember that we shared a bank vault once, and he had something like 150 bags of Uncirculated dollars there. _
Here is a better pic. Wish the slight abrasion across Liberty wasn't there.
Here's a true story on the bag move. After they loaded all the bags in Charlie's vault, the metal door wouldn't shut. The vault was a room, a vault within the bank's vault. The bags were stacked up several rows. I guess the ones on the bottom moved a little with all the weight on top. The 2 guys moving all the bags had to take them all out and restack. They moved about 12,000 lbs of Morgans from my Dad's bank and loaded into an armored car to drive to Charlie's bank, removed and placed in the vault and then had to take them all out and put them back. Figured they lifted close to 50,000 lbs that day.
@coastaljerseyguy .... Nice Morgan.... How does the reverse look?? Cheers, RickO
The reverse is clean, just not prooflike. Guess the mint changed the obverse die before striking this one. Nice example of the Vam16a, die chips around the eye and elsewhere.
In the mid-60's, silver dollars were still very cheap, with common dates available for less than $2. A local dealer had mint sealed bags that he broke open, and sold them by the roll. I bought a roll of 1881-S dollars in 1970 for $52; they were going up! The quality by today's standards was mostly 62-63, with a couple that might go 64. They were all blast white and fully lustrous, as you'd expect for '81-S - "roll-fresh blazers".
I can remember going across town, to a bank, around 1964 to look at a bag of 1887-O. The guy wanted $1100. My dad and I passed. Those were the days.
mainly marketing hype.
Certain mints and years have the look your describing with the luster effects.
Interesting stories. Always like to hear about the mint bags of Morgans
Roll end coins. One sided blazers.
As pictured, none of those are what I think of as “blazers”. That term is typically used to describe bright, highly lustrous untoned (or delicately toned) coins. Such luster appears to be lacking on those coins.
Also, while they might be end-roll toners, it’s not readily apparent from their toning pattern.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.