I had fun at the Keelboat Nickel exchange at Fort Atkinson, NE this morning

notlogical · August 3, 2004 5:46AM

I'm kind of new to the forums. I usually look at them with my Dad but he let me start writing some on my own sort of. This is kind of my first post.

My dad and I drove out to Fort Atkinson, NE this morning for the keelboat nickel exhange the USmint and one of our banks was doing as part of the Lewis and Clark thing that is going on there. We got there about 9:30 and the exchange didn't start until 10:30. It was so hot! They have a replica of the keelboat there and that is where they did the exchange. A lady who they said was the associate Mint director gave a speech but no one really seemed to listen because we were all getting so hot and wanted to get our new nickels. I took 10 rolls of nickels and got 10 rolls of keelboat nickels. But you could buy as many or few as you wanted at face value. The ones i got look really nice. Some people were buying 4 or 5 $100 boxes of nickels. My Dad thought there were about 700 to 1,000 people waiting in line for the nickels.

They also gave away one free keelboat nickel to evryone under 12 so I got one of those too. I think I'll give it to my little sister.

It was lots of fun though and all the booths about lewis and clark and the people dressed like the people did 200 years ago was really neat to see.

Here is a link to an article about it from the Omaha paper (thanks BillF). Mint rolls out its shiny new keelboat nickel

Cladiator · August 3, 2004 5:49AM

earlwbollinger · August 3, 2004 6:24AM

4 or 5 boxes of nickels.
Sounds like one of the guys in the forum was there.

notlogical · August 3, 2004 7:17AM

In the paper it said about 2,00 people came for the nickel exchange and there were 1.2 million nickels in an armor truck to be exchanged. It's a neat article but i can't link it. It's at Omaha.com the article is called Keelboat nickel unveiled