What got you into collecting?

TheGoonies1985

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.

TheGoonies1985

@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.

TheGoonies1985

@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........

TheRaven

50 state quarter program for me.

MrEureka

I collected everything as a kid. Coins, stamps, baseball cards, comics, rocks, fossils, shells, books, etc. But it was the coin dealers who sent me all the mail. And the coin publications like Coin World and CoinAge magazines were far better than anything I encountered with my other hobbies. Also, it was the coin dealers who actually sent me the stuff when I ordered something by mail. Granted, I only tried ordering comic books once, but I got turned off when they never delivered. Anyway, by the time I was about 12, I had it narrowed down to just coins.

Today, of course, numismatics doesn't have those same competitive edges over other collectables. If I had been born 50 years later, I could easily be collecting something else.

TwoKopeiki

@AZDAVY said:
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.

Well, dang! Thanks for making my day

WillieBoyd2

My grandparents lived in Chicago in the 1950's and sometimes took trips to Europe.

I was eight years old then and my grandmother gave me the French coins she brought back.

I was fascinated by the "foreign" coins.

One of the coins:

France 100 francs 1956
Copper-nickel, 24 mm, 6.0 gm

SimonW

My mom had a ceramic jar full of old wheaties and a few silver coins, I always gaped at them. My first coin that I purchased as a collectable was a 1936-S Walker in XF, I purchased for $5 in about 1992. That officially started it. Got worse when I lived in Spain a few years later and they had all the cool old Roman coins!

markelman1125

I liked to buy old indian head cents penny at the 4th of July flee markets as a kid. Eventually I when from Indian head cents to Athenian and Roman heads coins.

Sapyx

The year was 1980. I was about eight years old, and collecting stamps - just copying what my big brother was doing. Our parents took us to a stamp and coin show, and I was more interested in the scratchtrays of coins than in the stamps we went there to look at. The foreign coins, particularly, with strange languages and odd alloys. And some of them in the scratchtray were even older than the oldest stamp I owned! The gold-coloured (brass) ones in particular seem to have intrigued me; Australia didn't have any gold-coloured circulating coins at the time.

I parents saw the interest, and encouraged it. They dug out the family coin jar, which had some predecimal Australian coins, and some Canadian coins from the time the family was living in Canada (I was born there).

sellitstore

Dad commuted to NY City everyday and brought some 10 for a dollar foreign coins back during the 1960s when I was just seven years old. I was fascinated and wanted more. I did chores and set up lemonade stands to finance my new addiction and made mom take me to Theodore Gold's antique store in Dobbs Ferry where I purchased circulated Barber Quarters and Half Dollars. And it's been a lifetime of buying, selling and collecting ever since.

Working with great material for Christies for twelve years was certainly a highlight. I got to work on several treasures including the Atocha, Central America and Feversham and well as the paper money in the American Bank Note Archives. It was a wonderful and unique experience. Those 10/$1 foreign coins led to much bigger things.

bidask

Working with great material for Christies for twelve years was certainly a highlight. I got to work on several treasures including the Atocha, Central America and Feversham and well as the paper money in the American Bank Note Archives. It was a wonderful and unique experience.

Bet that was a lot of fun 😄

WCC

My late aunt's foreign currency pocket change at age 10 when I was in Bolivia.

LogPotato

About thirteen years ago I found a 64 silver Rosie in my change. A little bit of research and I was hooked.