What got you hooked into Coin Collecting????

CoinKing1969

Mine was an old fruit jar of quarters and halves from the 30's,40's and 50's. My grandad left them to me after he passed away in 1972 and still have them all today. I have been hooked since.

GoldenEyeNumismatics

A bag of 100 wheat cents purchased from a local shop for $5.

ILikeMercs

The sound of silver.

sparky64

Spending time with my Grandmother when I was quite young and she was gravely ill.
We would inventory her jar of wheaties and she would let me look Jefferson and Mercury Whitman albums.
It seemed to bring her some measure of comfort and that stuck with me.
I somehow ended up with them and it all remains as it was.
-Mark

tightbudget

The first state quarter.

Meltdown

I was buying silver bullion as an investment. A long time friend of mine who was a coin collector suggested buying 90% currency instead. I got to reading up on it's value and long term potential (particularly rare dates) and the rest is history. I got the fever pretty quickly.

HonoluluDude

I got in it for the groupies and hard drugs.

Quarternut

Coins given to me by my grandfather when I spent summers riding around rural Missouri helping him deliver water.

mrpaseo

I come from a poor family... I in turned developed the "Hoarders bug", I like to call it collecting bug, but hoarder is probably better. My first collection was coins, my biological father gave me a set of coins once that got me interested in coins most were albums full of CLEANED cents... I still have them in the condition I received them in. As they say, the rest is history. I then found the local coin shop and started adding to the collection. I am happy to report I only hoard...er.... collect that which has potential for a return in the future, or the ability to become a family heirloom. That said, I have collections of Coins, Baseball cards, magic cards, beanie Babies (I have a daughter and that is what she liked at the time), I had a collection of stamps but traded all of them off, and my wife has some precious moments figurines. As of right now, all the collections are on hold packaged up in storage but someday when I can spend more than a few months on your side of the planet I plan on picking up the coins again.

I do need to refocus the collection so I really don't know what I am going to do at this point. I have always been interested in the type set and the box of 20 so I might try to consolidate into those two collections and then pass them along to my daughter when I pass.

Who knows what the future holds, at this point I live one day at a time.

Good question,
Ray

droopyd

Learning that some coins plucked from circulation could be worth more than face value.

curly

In the military in 1964 and I was waiting on a bus. To kill time I bought a penny board and started to fill it with pocket change. The rest is history. It's been a great ride.

TavernTreasures

When I was a little boy in the early 1960's my father and I went to the bank. He cashed his paycheck and asked for silver dollars. He got about 9 or 10 circulated silver dollars. Once I saw them I was hooked.

Gemini

I found a discarded beat up 1954 Blue Book and I saw old coins in there that I never ever saw before and I thought they were so neat looking. The listed prices seemed very fair (Ha Ha) and my interest in coins just kept growing from there.

lcoopie

My Dad

lasvegasteddy

my granny

TwoSides2aCoin

My dad steered me that way, but "lagniappe" sure had a profound effect and I didn't even realize it until today.

cinman14

I work with Richard Nachbars son-in-law. They were going to visit him in NY during the Christmas break
I joked with Jack to have daddy send home a 10 dollar coin...We both laughed it off..When he came back
he gave me a BU 1878 Morgan...Up until that time I had bought a little junk 90% and some proof sets.

But seeing the beauty of that morgan changed my thoughts on collecting..I can't seem to pay the big money
for key dates as of yet. But every morgan or peace dollar bought have been a strong AU to BU...

Except the ones bought as pocket pieces or junk 90% I even plunged off the deep end and bought my first
U.S gold half eagle from Hyperion off the BST...And now the Gold fever has struck..

Mesquite

I'm a relative newbi to the hobby. My first dip into the pool came with the purchase of a year 2000 ASE proof.

ricko

My paper route, as a kid. I would often receive IHC's and even 'V' nickels in payment.... I started looking at all coins, and, voila', I became a collector. Cheers, RickO

mercurynut

I have always liked antiques and one day I came across some barber dimes in an antique shop and it brought me back to my younger days collecting via penny boards and have been hooked ever since.

smokincoin

<< <i>I got in it for the groupies and hard drugs. >>



The 1976 bicentennial coins did it for me. I was 9 at the time and thought it was so cool that our coins "changed". It didn't last too long for me, but the changes that began occurring once again in 1999 refueled the interest. Prolly a bunch of folks like me!

WaterSport

An antique dealer named Zita Lindsey who opened a antique/coin shop near where I lived. I stop by one day, and she later offered me a job cleaning antiques. I could be paid in cash, or save my hourly wage for equal value of coins I needed. I just could not comprehend having to work at $1.50 an hour to save up for the $100 to get my 1909 SVDB. Thats right, 66 hours, barely two weeks of work. What can I say, I was stupid.

WS

Tvac897

Honestly...this forum lol, i started reading it for a research project and got sucked in.

PerryHall

My dealer gave me a few free samples and before I knew it I was buying from him on a regular basis. I know I can stop whenever I want but so far I just don't want to stop.

JRocco

The 55 DDO when I was a kid.
I decided I was going to find one in change (I never did) and looked at coins differently ever since.

Mercury10c

Drugs

MidLifeCrisis

My grandparents gave me an 1878-CC Morgan Dollar and a 1926-S Peace Dollar when I was about ten years old...really wish I still had those coins.

Barndog

the chicks dig it

CoinKing1969

I would have to say another thing that got me was back in the 70's I would go to Woolworth and they had a dispaly with rotating trays of coins in 2x2 cardboard. Sometime I see these 2x2's on Ebay and brings back old times.

Unknown

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lonelyp

My older brother.

I went for a visit, and he pulled out a few Morgans. I can't remember ever seeing one before that. I had allways had a hoard of pocket change. With quarters dimes and halfs seperated from the nickles and cents.

But he started me acctually collecting.

Coxe

I forget precisely, oddly as that is. I know, though never being in Scouts, I was a subscriber to Boy's Life and got into getting foreign postage stamps from an advertiser (Mystic Stamp Company). In those days, a lot of brick and mortar dealers sold both stamps and coins as the hobbyists were pretty similar and avid buyers. So between mail fixes (all mail was snail mail and no FedEx), stopping by all the dealers within a healthy bike ride radius was in order....on a regular basis. I took more to coins in the systematic ways they could be collected, because I could filter regular change for some, and they just were more substantial.

My enabler was a blend of money from deliverying newpapers (The Philadelphia Bulletin) and a knowledgeable dealer at the Downingtown Farmer's Market where I spent hours every Sunday. Funny thing, thinking of it, my collecting approach has changed very little in its basis. Instead of rifling through local merchants' cent and nickel cash register bins for old dates, I go through dealers' junk bins for rare VAMs. Instead of visiting B&Ms between monthly mail order shipments, I hit Teletrade, eBay, etc between major coin shows. Still trying ultimately to squeeze informed value for common money. The disease remains with me.

carzzy

I got "hooked" in 1992 when my then girlfriend gave me 3 Civil War era coins as a stocking gift for Christmas. She knew I had a fasination with the Civil War and thought these coins would make a great gift. The three coins were an 1863 cent in VF, 1862 two cent piece in VG and an 1862 dime in VG. It didn't take long after that, that I started to look for other demoninations to add to those 3 coins. I now have all the Civil War Era coin demominations from the one cent Indian to the twenty dollar gold Double Eagle in EF- AU grades.

ambro51

There was a little corner market, Reichs Store, back in the late 50's, early 60's. I still remember the slapping black screen door....

Anyway, in the register drawer, sat two large cents. I dont know if he got them in change...or what, but one of my early memories is having my mom pick me up and set me on the counter so I could look at the large cents.

wow. that and seeing sputnik fly over while held in dads arms...age 3

GFourDriver

Who's hooked?
Just because I bought a Nikon camera with a 105mm macro lens just so I can take coin pics, spend every spare dollar on coins and drool over new additions to my 7070 album doesn't mean i'm hooked does it?

rainbowroosie

Trying to find a 55 DDO to get the $10 offered in the add in the Boston Globe --- it was 1955....

conradical

From the Coins my Uncle gave me.