Childhood Coin Stories

keets

I had a few PM's with Don Heath and we were talking about some of our childhood beginnings in the hobby. You know, getting a worn VG dime for Christmas or searching through 3 lb. coffee cans of lincolns for a 1965-D penny because the new Red Book had the date listed and I didn't have one yet!!! Maybe your story is the first time you walked into an honest-to-goodness coin shop and your eyes almost bugged out of your head. Whatever it may be, why not tell it in this thread? God knows we can use a little comic relief here lately. I'm sure the membership has some quaint stories from when times were a bit slower and the joy was still pure and energized.

Let 'er rip!!!!

Al H.

DHeath

How about the date restoring acid for the mail order Buffalo coins? How about the coin cleaning paste that restored luster? How about your first Dansco? First magnifying glass flashlight?

fantasiize

How about Tarn-X, is that product still around ?? It was popular in the early 70's and worked like acid on coins.

My first and last lesson of why you should NEVER clean coins. Probably lost half of my collection of silver coins back then ...

FC57Coins

<< <i>How about the date restoring acid for the mail order Buffalo coins? How about the coin cleaning paste that restored luster? How about your first Dansco? First magnifying glass flashlight? >>



Hell guys - that's rookie stuff! I was spending my hard earned money on stuff that really worked! - Those X-Ray glasses they sold on comic books! I actually got a pair once! LOL - I was a perv even then! LOL

DHeath

Nah,

You weren't a perv unless you bought the peephole pen. LOL We were really shooting the breeze about how the hobby has changed. Back in the early 60's, there was one coin shop/jewelry store in my hometown, and I used to spend alot of time looking at coins in the display case. If I wanted to buy coins, it was either from my "dealer" at full retail, or mail order. Once a year, there was a tiny show. I even tried the unsearched bag of pennies from the dogtrack that was advertised in the back of the comic books. Ebery time we went on vacation, I always managed to go to the coin shop where we were staying. On my first trip to NY, I made it to Macy's. They had the first real selection I had seen. Too cool. There was actually a vending machine at the local Clarks dept store that sold dateless buffaloes for .25 in plastic eggs. I guess I was hooked even then. My grandfather started my collection in 1962 when he gave me an 1893-CC he had saved, along with a Columbian Expo half. I still have both coins.

LucyBop

My childhood story was putting Jeffies with the mint marks on the reverse in the jukebox!

Well the Doctor told me, man Lucy you don't need no pills...
Just a handfull of nickels and a jukebox to cure your ills!

Toningintheblood

As a kid, of about 9 or 10 yrs. old, I used to take the city bus from the corner by my house downtown every Sat. morning. My piggybank was always emptied of any dollar bills, and they were in my pocket. I got off the bus in front of the YMCA in downtown, and directly across the street from the YMCA was the First National Bank. I would pack a sack lunch, take my swimming towel, ping pong paddle, and my magnifying glass with me, and spend the day sitting at a checkboard table overlooking the Fox River in the lower level of the YMCA. Once I staked out my table with all my junk, I would run across the street to the bank and plunk down my bills from my piggybank and get 4 or 5 bucks worth of fresh penny rolls or nickel rolls from the bank and then run back to the YMCA and sit and search through the rolls looking for the treasured 09-S VDB or a 1950-D nickel. Once I searched that group, I would neatly roll them back in the rolls they came in, and in those days you had to write your name and address on a roll when you brought it back to the bank. That way if you short changed them, they would know who the cheat was! Each time I went back across to the bank, I would carefully check out the tellers and pick one, I had not yet visited that day, because I figured sooner or later they would get tired of seeing me. I knew about 4 hours into my repeated journies back and forth, that I had saturated the banks inventories of searched rolls, when I would begin getting back rolls with my own name and address on them! In between treasure hunts, I would drink ice cold bottles of Coca-Cola, play ping pong, and go swimming. It was like I was in a Norman Rockwell painting as I look back on it today.

keets

......we had one coin shop close by but it was hard to get anyone to take me there. but......there seemed to be an F.W.Woolworth store on every street corner and they all seemed to have one of those glass cases that had the revolving shelves. i think i personally wore out a few of the switches making them roll around and around!!!

and i still remember when the first K-Mart opened up. i was a teenager by then and they had the gumball typoe machines with the afore mentioned plastic eggs that held anything from a steel cent to a worn out buffalo.

al h.

Toningintheblood

Something else I chuckle about to this day! I used to take my Lincoln Pennies out of my Whitman album so many times and look at them, that the holes got all stretched out, and everytime I would open the tri-fold blue Whitman album, my pennies would all fall out! So I fixed that! I used Elmer's Glue, and glued all of them into my blue Whitman album and never had the problem again! About 15 years ago, my mother gave me a baggy full of worn Lincoln cents and each one had a reverse that had a stuck torn shred of paper attached firmly with a cracked white glue to the backs of the cents. I gave them to my son and said here let me show you how smart the old man was when he was a kid! He has them to this day and reminds me of them occasionally, when we want a good laugh!

mbbiker

ha ha ha i just hope there was 4 holes in your book that were never filled otherwise

FC57Coins

You guys are bringing back good memories. When I was growing up in Freeport, NY there was a hobby shop several blocks from our appartment and I used to go down to see the proprietor every saturday morning. He would sell me circulated Morgans and other coins that I could afford with my newspaper route money until one day I returned to the old hobby shop and saw that it had closed down. That was the end of an era for me - but I still think fondly of some of those first coins that I bought with my newspaper money. I think I may have some of the old lincolns somewhere

Frank

wingedliberty

My friends and I ,when I was about 9, looking through rolls of cents for wheaties and plugging
away at those Whitman folders. Such good memories.


Brian.

itsnotjustme

When I was in about 6th grade, my brother & I located a local barber (Hair Cut Variety) who bought and sold silver coins for scrap prices. We would go look through his selection, and come out with $1 or 2 face of mercs, washingtons, walkers, etc.

One time I came across an 1875 seated dime. Bought it for $1. That was easily the first coin in my collection worth more than $10. I still have it.

I also remember cutting my 61 & 62 proof sets into proof singles because the singles, added together, had a book value higher than the complete set.

ccr

When I was a teenager I had a paper route. There`s was this lady in her mid-90`s that I delivered to. She was almost deaf and blind and a really nice lady. When I went to collect the paper money for the first time she asked me for my name. I told her my name and was surprised by the fact that I was the son of her star Latin student back in the 1950`s. She was a Latin teacher from the 1920`s until her retirement in the 1960`s. So she would invite me in and show me her house of wonderful antique`s that she aquired during marriage. Including her Grandfather Clock she recieved as a wedding gift back in the 1920`s that still worked. She had a bunch of old Silver and Gold notes. Also a small hoard of Mercury Dimes ( a few hundred at least ) and Franklin Halfs. She died a few months after I started delivering the paper back in 1982. I still miss her very much after 20 years.

Mrpawn

Started collecting as far back as I can remember. One of my fondest memories was helping Grandma Joyce sort her change. She had a dress shop and would save all of the change that came in and have us kids sort out the silver. I dont recall ever getting any of the change but we got other goodies and occasionally we would find a Liberty quarter or half to let us know that "old" coins looked like. To this day I know it immediately when a silver piece hits my hand thanks to Grandma Joyce.

As a teenager I had to travel to High School by city bus. One of the layovers was in the vicinity of three pawn shops, all of which had coins that I could only dream about. Beautiful Morgan dollars in those revolving showcases and cranky old men behind the counter. I now have one of those revolving showcases with various stuff in it, including Morgans, but I try hard not to be one of those cranky old men.

As a young father, I moved my family into a new (to us) very old house. When we were shown the house there were quite a few very old items items left here and there. Medicine bottles, tins, old old apliances and smelly old furniture. When we moved in all of these had been removed. About a year or so later my young son crawled into an as yet unexplored cranny under the stairs and found an old box of Walking Liberty and Franklin Halves, over $200.00 face value but all common dates. He still has the best of them. The rest went to his college fund.

Cam40

My earliest recollection of coins is Lincoln cents....in my mouth and the taste of them.I was 2 or 3 years old I guess.
Then I guess to occupy our time Dad would bring home a bunch of penny rolls for us to sort through.We always flipped the heads to tails to look for wheaties.This is in about 1964.Then I remember at one or the other grandparents we had those blue Whitman books with Lincolns and Mercury dimes and the one spot in the holder that was impossible to fill.Now I know it was the `16D spot or the `09 S VDB spot.I wonder if I/we had a `21 S or D back then...hmmm anit got one now I know that!!!!lol

braddick

Saturday afternoon. It was either take my weekly allowance and ride my bike to the Seven/Eleven for a .15cent beef jerky and a cherry Slurpee (I wasn't allowed to buy the Coke flavored and there were only those two choices!). If I had some money left over I'd also buy a balsa wood glider.
My second option was to forego the treats and ride a little further to the local coin shop and maybe, if lucky, buy that worn Large Cent.

The coins won most of the time. But, not always.

IrishMike

I have several childhood stories about the 50's and I won't bore you with them, except this one. I grew up in a very small town, closet coin shop was 20 miles away. The one local bank in town would let me search through the cents on Saturday mornings. Afterwards I would walk down to the local Walgreens and buy a banana split for 25 cents or a green river for a nickel. One day the president of the bank called me over and showed me S mint coins. In the midwest you seldom if ever found an S mint in any denomination. I bought 3 1953 S mint washingtons from an original roll. I still own them. I also have 3 1948 D Franklins that my grandfather gave me for Christmas from an orignal roll along with two 1938 buffalos from a roll, one of them has a double D. The last one he gave me was a mercury dime brand spanking new. I started it circulating around this board thanks to TomB. I wonder who now owns it?

I find these stories more interesting than the posts about slabbed coins, it reminds us why many of us fell in love with this hobby, maybe we should all remember this when we get the urge to rip someone.

CharlieB

An old lady a few doors from where I grew up gave away real silver
dollars to us trick or treaters on one Halloween in the '50s.
Each kid got a dollar. It was later in the evening so she may have
run out of candy. I don't have the dollar unfortunately.

My good friend and I got a few rolls of pennies from the bank back
in the 1950's. He was just starting his lincoln collection like me.
As hard as it is to believe, the first coin or two that popped out
of his roll was a 1909-S-VDB. He still has the coin.

nwcs

I remember taking erasers to cents from the 60s and 70s when I first got started in the mid 80s as a kid. I thought I made them look much better. :-) I was also amazed at how an eraser could clean something like that. I remember my brother finding a 10 escudo gold coin mislabeled as a 10 centavo coin. he showed it to the dealer and asked him what he wanted. The dealer looked at it carefully and stated it was a 10 centavo worth something or other. So my brother, being the deal maker he is, found a few other coins and then paid for them and had the dealer throw in the 10 escudo coin for free. So he got a 1/4 oz. gold coin for free.

g097103

Dare I admit it.
<>
My uncle and I used to sight in our varmit rifles by shooting quarters off a fence. When you could pick off 2 for 3 it
was time to go remove some woodchucks from the orchard. 300 acres of orchards made for a lot of vermin to control.
</>

Next time I go home I'm taking the metal detector and looking for those quarters and see if I can give them an
honorable burial.

aunboy

Well, I grew up in O'ahu, Hawaii, and when i was around 10 to around 12 I'd always go to the local Safeway store and practically exchanged most of their change they had in stock...hehehe. I gave them 30 dollars in bills and I asked for pennies. I'd go home and just spend time opening them up. My best find doing that was a 1919-D Wheaty in Very Fine condition, along with a 1904 Indian Head Penny in Very Good.

I had a blast, and it gave me something to do. And then well.....that's when i figured out we had a coin shop nearby and a fellow friend and collector (we were classmates in elementary school) told me that they sold Wheat Pennies by the roll?!?!?!

So well, I finally bought one roll of Wheaties for $3.00. I was like WHOA!!! It was the first time I had seen that many wheaties come out from a single roll of pennies. I think that was the reason i stopped going to Safeway and well asking for their change.

I do, however, still look through my pocket change and recently have found several silver war time nickels, along with several silver dimes and quarters.

- Ilham



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Always lookin' out for PCGS MS66 Red Wheaties!!

Cameo CC

Once we were at a 3rd grade class talking about certified coins. During the talk, we passed out a sample PCGS certified coin. When we came to the Q&A period, one child asked, "How do you get the quarter out of the holder?"

I guess the child wanted to spend to coin.

Todd

danglen

As a kid I remember going to the First National Bank in Lincoln, NE just before Christmas one year and asking the teller for some silver dollars to give to each of my siblings as a Christmas present. I remember getting ten Morgan dollars in exchange for a ten dollar bill. About a block away from the bank was a coin shop next to the movie theater. While waiting to see the matinee, I walked into the shop and while talking to the owner, showed him my 10 Morgans. He offered me $50 for them. I thought I had hit the motherlode of all jackpots! I took the money, forgot about the movie, ran back to the bank. Unfortunately, the teller recognized me and wouldn't sell me any more Morgans. To this day I wonder what those Morgans were really worth

DoubleDime

I started collecting in 1969. When my Mom went to town to grocery shop, I got to go to a coin shop about 3 blocks away. For $5 I would get quite a haul. At the time I was collecting Lincoln Cents, Buffalo and Jefferson Nickels, "Mercury" and Roosevelt Dimes. I got to go maybe once a month if I was lucky. The shop is still there, owned by the same family but alot larger in size.
I also used to trade coins with an aunt who lived near by my home. She saved just about every silver coin she could when silver was removed in 1964. We spent many enjoyable hours together. She stopped collecting when I left home and joined the Marines in 1974. She said there was no one to collect coins with. Shes now 95 and I visit her everytime I'm home. I got her a folder for the State Quarters which she enjoys collecting. When I see her I make sure shes up todate if she hasn't already done so. And for a few moments we turn back the clock to our bygone trading days.

Trime

My first experience as a coin collector occured as a pre-teenager in a small town. My parents owned a retail shop with a cash register that was allowed after work to look through. My parents had dealt with the local bank for years and I was allowed in the summer to use the SD box room to check through rolls of coins bought and recycled from the bank cashier. At that time Barbers, Liberty nickels, and IHC were still available in circulation. Of course there were Morgans in abundance but that was above my budget. I have a carefully documented ledger cataloging these circulated coins. My best find was a 1901-S quarter. I used Whitman folders to store my coins. I don't recall that there was a coin shop in town but once I was driven to the big city where I bought a Bust quarter for what seemed like a lot of money. Later review showed that it was cleaned. I would occassionally buy from mail order dealers and always got my annual mint sets from US and Canada. I just looked in my old ledger book (cover torn, taped and now torn again) and note that my first trimes were a 1862 VF but "bent"; an 1858 and 1864 both bought from a long forgotten dealer by mail as BU but distant notes say "cleaned". I still have the original collection.

The memories of these early collecting days give me lots of pleasure. The excitement of a new find was genuine and the cost was usually limited to face value or close to it. As a matter of fact this thread is a lot closer to what real collecting is about than those with 100+ posts calling each other names. Maybe this is a good way to close out the year and wish you all a Happy 2003.
.

kranky

These are great stories! Good thread, keets.

Mine sounds like a combination of some that have already been told. I started with a paper route, pulling out Lincolns for my Whitman folder. My grandmother worked downtown and in the summer when I was about 12, I convinced my parents I was able to take the bus downtown and meet her for lunch sometimes. I'd go early and make the rounds of three places - two coin shops and the one big department store that had a coin department. Never bought a single coin! But they were nice enough to let me gaze into the cases at coins I had only read about in the Redbook.

There was one time when I was sorting through the paper route money that I picked up a Lincoln and nearly fell out of my chair - a 1914-D! I screamed to tell my parents what I found. We took it to a coin shop in the neighboring borough, only to be told it was an altered 1944-D. The owner wouldn't return it, saying it was against federal law to have such a counterfeit and he was required to turn it in. He explained why it was a fake to the satisfaction of my parents (and me), and they said OK. That was a long, sad ride home! On the upside, that experience made it possible for me to spot the same type of fake that a guy tried to sell to a dealer I was working with at a show last year.

To close with one of those "great circle of life" stories, at breakfast one day at last year's ANA Summer seminar I happened to share a table with a young guy who turned out to be the son of the owner of one of those shops I loitered in way back when!

kieferscoins

I started collecting about 8 years ago (around 1994) when I was 12 years old. I mainly worked on a Morgan dollar set and finished a BU franklin set. Getting involved in coin shows, I met many interesting people and made alot of new friends. A few introduced me to slabs and I was hooked. Now I am working on a CNS registry set and am really involved in the hobby. Mystory is short, but it hasn't been that long ago. No neat coin finds or special deals. Just normal collecting.

Cameron Kiefer

ms71

Grew up in a small town in western NY in the 60s, nearest coin shop was an hour away in Olean, NY. The coin teletype system must have started sometime around then, because I remember it clattering away in the rear of the shop and the dealer being preoccupied with it. All the rage was 1950D nickels BU rolls of Linolns. All your pocket change was silver, lots of Walkers & Mercs; not so many Standing Lib quarters & 75% of those with the dates gone. I remember being very proud when I got together the cash to buy my first & only 50D, it was a nice AU and I think it was on the high side of ten bucks. If I still had it today, it would easily be worth nearly half what I paid for it, probably less than 10% adjusting for inflation.

Another story I remember well was during the big gold & silver runup, when silver hit $50 and gold about $850. I was in a coin shop in Orchard Park NY selling whatever junk silver I had, it was right near the peak (I probably had $50 or so face). The dealer said that he had to work every night into the wee small hours, because he had to "lay off" the silver he bought on somebody, he couldn't aff ord to own it overnight and take the risk of a big loss. He was bemoaning the fact that he had missed a profit of $7,000 the previous night because he had stayed late as usual and sold all his silver, but if he had just gone home & still owned it in the morning he would have been $7,000 richer. Such was the mania.

PhillyJoe

Best memory: My Christmas "tip" each year from one of my paper route customers was a Morgan Dollar. Still have those.

First Eye-opener : Went to some kind of SesquiCentennial (150th) celebration in Lafayette, Indiana in 1966 (I was 12). Found a guy selling bronze "coins" with the outline of Indiana on one side with the date 1816. Spent the entire $5 I had for the day on this "150 year old" proof coin. Couldn't understand how this guy could have cornered the market on such a rare coin! He had dozen of them and they were all in proof condition!!!!!! Not sure if I still have it, But I do seem to see one now and then on ebay. And you can't beat the price - they're still around $5 !!!!! LOL Want to see one? I found this one on ebay just now- #3302372513. Can someone link? What a dumbazz I was!!!

Joe

Clankeye

When I was a boy... (yikes, the other day I noticed I qualified in the age brackets of a company trying to sell cemetary plots!) but... when I was a boy, we had a junior high teacher who would sell us coins before school every morning. A very good guy. Bought the only trade dollar I ever owned from him. A five dollar gold piece. But, mostly lunch money type stuff. I ran into him at a coin show recently. He is retired now, but told me they stopped letting him do that a long time before he retired. Too bad. He really was my one and only source for coins, except for the local hobby shop which sold proof sets. A tip of the hat to him. It's just never gotten out of my system.

Good thread, Keets. Interesting and fun to read.

Clankeye

TONEDDOLLARS

As a young boy I had a paper route that allowed me to check out the change for filling of the blue folders. I would then change all the coin to bills so that I could pay my bill to the paper office. while going to the bank every week I befriended the manager who was a young man himself and coin collector. we would get to talking coins and finally one day he offered the use of his office to me.
I would go to the bank on monday afternoon after school and exchange my coin for rolls of coins in the bank. He would let me sit in his office for hours going thru rolls of coins. He would mark the rolls I looked at so that I would know which ones that I had seen already.

Time went on I stopped collecting for a while. when I got married I bought a house in town and three doors down from me my new neighbor was no other than the bank manager.. We talked about those days back in the early 60's and how much fun I had .

csw

It's funny how aspects of some of these stories overlap so well. I grew up in small-town Indiana in the 1970s. Closest coin dealer was in a mall in Indianapolis, thirty miles away. Used to get the princely sum of five dollars (later ten!) every Wednesday as an allowance, and go straight to the local bank for rolls of pennies and nickels. I loved the nickels, boy. Found dozens of the Jefferson war ones.

Used to blow some of the allowance on balsa wood gliders, like Braddick. 'S' mintmarks were uncommon, as someone else mentioned. I always got a little thrill whenever one popped up.

The smartest thing I ever did was take all the old junk silver rolls my parents had saved and cash them in when silver hit $50/oz. I think I remember getting 30x face value back then, but now I think I must have been dreaming.

And how exciting it was to get proof sets directly from the mint! To this day, they're still worth exactly what I paid for them 25 years ago. I still get a kick out of getting that box from the mint.

Never found anything of particular value in all the thousands of rolls I must have searched. Not that I remember anyway. But a couple of months ago I found a misstruck Delaware quarter in my pocket change, and somebody happily gave me $42 for it on eBay. Funny how things work.

--csw

MrKelso

Ah the good old days early 60's i sent a silver dime in the mail for a wonder mouse to scare all the girls at school. I worked making deliveries for a deli. I had a giant basket on the front and 2 baskets on each side in the back and would bike my way through town delivering bread and milk and eggs to the customers. On saturdays i would get half my pay in paper and half in silver coins that were kept in an old construction workers lunch box. Saturdays were the best as i would go home and give all the paper money to my late mother. I gave her my pay for years to help out as we had no dad (he passed at 29 years old). Grandpa and i would go through the coins and he would tell me what was going on in the world when some of the coins were minted. When he passed i was left 2 full bags of Morgans that he cherished. He passed 10 years ago and i only opened the bags this year to have a look. Some i have shared here in pic's.

I still have the Bike (baskets are all rusted but can be restored it's a schwin) and i still have all the silver coins. And yes i still have the Wonder mouse........... Yes they were the best times of my life.

Geoman

My first exposure to collecting coins occurred when I was 9 years old. My Dad gave me a blue Whitman folder on my birthday for collecting Lincoln cents. I suppose a lot of us started with Lincoln cents when we were young. They were cheap, and you could pull them out of pocket change. So I was able to complete and fill up the Whitman folder of Lincoln Cents from 1959 - present. However, after a time this hobby fell by the wayside.

Fast forward 20 years...........

About 3 years ago my wife and I were cleaning our basement, and I happened to find that old, blue Whitman coin folder my Dad had given me on my birthday long ago. It was neat, but back into the box it went again. However, I was unable to keep it out of my head. And one day approximately 2 years ago, I went back downstairs and pulled out that Whitman folder. The coin collecting 'bug' had finally bitten me. I caught up the cents to present day, and then went out and bought all the Whitman folders from cents through halves, from Indian Heads to Eisenhower's.

I am still working on completing all those folders in low-grade circulated coins, but now have decided to work on some higher grade sets. Mainly Walking Liberty, Franklin, and Kennedy Halves. Unfortunently, my Dad is not really interested in coins still. We have gone through his stash, and compared, and have traded some for 6 months. But since then he hasn't really shown an interest, or done anything with his sets. But I enjoy it a lot, and will continue with this hobby.

barberlover

painfull memory. the conversation when i was a boy [don't remember the exact year whent like this; me; hey dad i just found out the banks are giving away bags of 1000 morgan silver dollars for face value, why don't we buy a bag. dad; why do you want to do that? me; so i could go thru them and pick out the rarer dates and the real pretty ones espesially the ones that have shiney mirror like surfaces or the ones that have the strongest luster or the fewest marks. then if you don't want to keep the ones i don't like there still legal tender so you won't loose any money and i'll pay you back out of my allowance for any i want to keep. dad; no. me; why not? 1000 silver dollars ARE TO HEAVEY!!!!! every few years i remind him of that conversation.

keets

............great stories one-and-all!!!!!! what got me and Don started on this topic was how different the hobby is today regarding access by PC and the seeming abundance of shows, not to mention grading services and all. what strikes me is the lenghts that we all went to once the fascination with coins had grabbed us. i think it's a bit ironic that we do some of the same things, like go to the bank for half dollars hoping to find a die variety, missing initials or even a 40%'er. i guess old habits are hard to break.

my grandparents used to give me and my sisters silver dollars at Christmas and i never knew that you could go to the bank and get them in the 50's and early 60's. i always figured they were rich and just had a whole bunch of them at home!!! i still have all mine but my sisters got rid of theirs.

i'll bet i'm not the only one who ended up with "old coins" whenever a close relative would pass. what's funny about that is the coins that were kept. i still have an odd assortment of 3 cent pieces, shield nickels, indian head cents and silver dollars that have too much value to part with. it makes me wonder what my heirs will get. i almost want to get an ACG slab just for the heck of it!!!

al h.

09sVDB

My Grandmother got me started in 1968 at the age of six. She had one of those old whitman penny boards on her dresser. It was a complete set of Lincolns taken from circulation less the 09SVDB. I used to look at it evey chance I could She would give me certain coins from time to time and I began aquiring them on my own years later. If she were alive today she would be amazed at the monster she created!

AbesNeighbor

I was 9 or 10 years old..about 1960 and we were visiting friends in Sioux Falls. This guy a couple of years younger than i was showed me his Indian Head Penny collection. I thought it was the neates thing I had ever seen because I'd never seen an Indian Head Penny period! Next day I'm up on Phillips Ave. at the drug store and get an Indian Head Penny in Change...Couldn't belive it! That got me started and my dad started with me...When my mom died my dad remarried... when he died, my step-mother sold all the proof sets (10 a year for 20 years) and the entire rest of the collection to the lawyer that handled his probate.

There is a lesson to be learned here!

Dan

paigowjohnny

My dad was a banker for 30+ years...I can remember as a kid in the late 60's and early 70s him bringing home rolls of about everything. He was culling for silver (made a killing back when the Hunts tried to corner the silver market ) but used to fill old Whitman folders with stuff out of circulation. Fast forward to this past Christmas. I went home to see my folks, remembering he gave me all those old folders some 25 odd years ago. Before I went home I picked up a Dansco for cents and transferred the coins to it. No rare dates or gems, but it was kinda neat to bring back a part of my childhood, and brought the album back home with me. Next time I go home, I'll do the same for the Jeff nickels. (Sadly for me, smart for him...he sold all his "good" stuff)

Tundertron

Thanks keets for a great idea for a thread. Barberlover's post brought back one of my earliest memories as a child with the mint bags of silver dollars. Our neighbor at the time owned a trucking company and apparently had a lot of disposable income. I remember him bringing a fresh bag from the bank and my father and him going through them at the kitchen table. If you can imagine the sight of all those coins being stacked by date and mint mark all over the place. Any mint state coin for face value! My first seated dollar I owned came from one of those bags.

Veep

Before I was old enough to care about coins, my dad and older brother were metal detecting addicts. Fortunately, we lived right up the street from a park that dated to the late 1800's.

Every day, I'd come in from playing baseball and on the kitchen table would be a paper plate with the day's treasures: Wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, the first V Nickels I ever saw, Indian pennies and silver. They found lots and lots of Mercury dimes, Washington quarters, silver nickels, occasional Barbers and even Seated dimes and quarters now and then. They must have pulled a couple of buckets of coins out of that park. But the neat thing was seeing the pile of them every day; all summer long.

DHeath

I remember vividly when "rare" meant you wouldn't find it in change, and everybody knew if you found a silver coin you should put it up, because it was "valuable". It's all perspective. Maybe the perspective was more about collecting then, and less about value.