What got you into collecting?

PillarDollarCollector

For me the movie The Goonies:

Clio

I got a State Quarter album in 1999.

harasha

Followed the lead of my older brother. Periodically paid visits to a store on the Bronx' Grand Concourse and one of my aunts used to give me pennies.

Maxfli

When I was but a wee lad, there was a small decorative plastic box on my parents’ bedroom dresser. Probably no more than 4 ½ inches square by 2 inches tall. Inside this box were coins and currency my dad had brought home from the South Pacific after WW2, along with some an uncle had brought home from the war in Europe.

I was allowed supervised access to that box, and its contents were responsible for some of the first words I learned how to spell (“Daddy, what does y-e-n mean?”). It probably explains my lifelong fondness for world coins.

Later, around age eight, a much older cousin showed me his Whitman folders of cents, nickels and dimes. Between that and the box of WW2 treasure, I was hooked.

P.S. That small plastic box long ago became brittle and cracked into pieces, but I still have all of its contents.

Euclid

I met a few advanced collectors through another collectible hobby and they slowly exposed me to coins and began to mentor me as my interest grew.

Barberian

My parents bought my older brother and I some Whitman folders when I was 7 years old (he was 12).

Orlena

A home robbery that cleaned out everything shiny. Started to rebuild and it took off - now into Brit coins, American silver eagles, and Morgan/Peace dollars

coinkat

Art... History...Design

Art Medals... the wave of the past that adds so much to the search.

PillarDollarCollector

@Orlena said:
A home robbery that cleaned out everything shiny. Started to rebuild and it took off - now into Brit coins, American silver eagles, and Morgan/Peace dollars

That has to be one of the most unique ways to get into coins.

1984worldcoins

No idea...but my grand-grand father might have been a goblin, so that would explain a lot.

PillarDollarCollector

@1984worldcoins said:
No idea...but my grand-grand father might have been a goblin, so that would explain a lot.

Maybe the book 1984!!!

1984worldcoins

Although I knew about the book, I read it only recently, so no, not the book! But that book is brutal...

Freedom04941

When I was about 10 years old, my father would bring a Boston Sunday Globe home from the store where he worked from 7 AM until noon on Sunday. 

This was for the old lady across the street, who had been in "society" before WWII. She gave me 45 cents for the paper.

 My father got 35 cents for the paper, and I was allowed to keep 10 cents for the errand. One day there was a steel 1943 cent, which I kept. This was 1961, and they were getting scarce than.

My father got me the Whitman Lincoln folders (he sold them in the store).

This was my first "collected" coin, as well as my first job.

BillJones

My uncle gave me the 13th edition of “The Red Book” and the two Lincoln Cent folders for Christmas in 1959. Things developed from there.

Piano1

My brother and I needed lunch money for school and my dad only had a $1 bill. He asked me to walk to the gas station and get 4 quarters. 1 was a badly worn Barber quarter so I asked my dad if I could keep it and skip lunch. I got the quarter and brought lunch from home. I was given a nickel though for an extra carton of milk. The year 1958. That was the start. Maybe 6 months later my mom and I were walking the "Miracle Mile" in Coral Gables, Florida and I saw a tray of maybe 20 foreign coins in the window of a travel store. My mom told me to go to the toy store next door, she went in and bought the coins and surprised me with them soon thereafter. I was hooked...BIGTIME! When I was older...maybe 12 or so, I started babysitting (75 cents an hour) and all my earnings went to Littleton Coin Company to buy approvals. I don't think I ever sent a single one back and somewhere I still have a stack of those little gray envelopes from LCC. 65 years later...still collecting!
Piano1

AZDAVY

For me getting into Mexican early 8 reales was reading the posts from two kopeki. I enjoyed his pictures and commentary and that probably is why I started my collection.

lordmarcovan

How many of you can remember the exact date you began collecting coins? I can.

It was November 25, 1976. Thanksgiving Day. At my step-grandmother's house in Atlanta.

I had just found an old 1971 Black Book of US Coins on the shelf upstairs and read it with great fascination during the parentally enforced “nap” they made me go take. (No doubt to get me out from underfoot in the kitchen.)

An hour later, back downstairs, I found this 1936 dime in the drawer when I was getting the silverware out of Grandmomma’s sideboard to set the table for the feast. She let me keep it. I was also thrilled to find a 1943 steel cent, and was instantly hooked.

Wow! 1936! That dime was forty years old then. I was not quite eleven myself. It seemed like quite the historical relic to me at the time.

I still have it… somewhere.

Some time not much later, when I got an 1806 British halfpenny, and realized that World coins are often older and even more affordable than US coins, I was seduced by “The Dark Side”.

harasha

I cannot identify the first coin I ever collected, but this Chinese cash was one of the first. This and one other were the only cash coins I possessed for about 50 years. The I discovered how cool they actually were and now I have at least 275 pieces from various dynasties!

DBSTrader2

Laying on the living room floor of my Grandparents' Center City Philly rowhome as a youngster filling Whitman blue tri-fold penny & nickel folders from their pocket change. I'd actually been hooked earlier by an Aussie large penny from the WW2 era. I still have all those folders & the "Roo" penny! Great memories for someone to whom memories and the fun of collecting trumps any thoughts of turning any of them around for a profit........