Have PCGS MS-68 Cheerios Dollar for sale
CaptHenway
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Numismatist. 50 year member ANA. Winner of four ANA Heath Literary Awards; three Wayte and Olga Raymond Literary Awards; Numismatist of the Year Award 2009, and Lifetime Achievement Award 2020. Winner numerous NLG Literary Awards.
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Cheerios Pattern Sacagawea Dollars. By Tom DeLorey On October 20th of 1999, as the collecting world eagerly awaited the launch of the new Sacagawea dollar in January of 2000, I got a call from a friend asking if I would like to go see some that day. The caller was Chicagoan Jim Benfield, a regular customer at Harlan J. Berk, Ltd., and head of the Coin Coalition, a lobbying group that represents the vending machine industry. He told me that the U.S. Mint was holding a demonstration for vending machine makers and vendors of how well the new dollars worked in their machines, and promised that I would get a chance to handle one. Of course I said yes, and we met at the coin shop and cabbed over to the Hyatt. After the official demonstration, wherein the U.S. Mint’s Dollar Coin Program Manager, Greg. M. Weinman, made several purchases from a variety of vending machines up on a stage (without a single rejection!) and the photo ops were over, he introduced me to Weinman, who gave me a coin to play with for a while under the watchful eyes of a Mint Police officer. As I studied it, I counted the tail feathers and came up with 12. I specifically remember the number because I jokingly mentioned to Weinman that the Mint had had a problem with the 1878 dollars because somebody had allegedly complained (incorrectly) that all eagles have an odd number of tail feathers. He didn’t know anything about that. I returned the coin. In January the first 100 million coins were distributed through WalMart, which agreed to give them out thru their cash registers. Another 5,500 pieces were distributed in boxes of Cheerios cereal (various flavors), as part of a huge promotion in which 10 million boxes were distributed that contained a BU cent “of the new millennium.” The 5,500 dollars were in random, unmarked packages that contained both a cent and a dollar, sealed in plastic and attached to a cardboard “certificate of authenticity” that prevented you from seeing the backs of the coins. When I went to WalMart in January and got ten of the dollars, I looked at them and noticed that the coins now appeared to have 13 tail feathers, and knew that some change had been made. However, when I asked the Mint’s information office about the change, they denied that any change had been made. When I pointed out to them that the Mint’s official pre-release publicity photos showed different tail feathers than the coins I got in January, they said that those were only an artist’s conception of the design, and that no dies had been made in that design. I wrote a few times in COINage Magazine about the change in the design between October and January, but could not prove it because I had no picture of the October design. Then, in September of 2001, Paul Gilkes of Coin World succeeded in getting an image from the Mint of a 2000-W Proof Sacagawea struck on a 22kt gold half ounce American Eagle planchet in June of 1999. Twelve of these had been sent up in the space shuttle Columbia in July of that year, and the Mint tentatively announced plans to sell others to collectors in the year 2000, until they were reminded that Congress had never approved such a coin. The Mint then tried to disappear the coins, but Gilkes’ pictures showed a reverse design with the tail feathers I remembered seeing in October of 1999. In January of 2000 I had naturally bought a box of Cheerios, and of course got just the common cent. However, I kept the box on a shelf in my home office. My interest in the reverse revived by Gilkes’ pictures, it eventually occurred to me that for ten million boxes of cereal to be ready to be put on store shelves on January 1, 2000, the coins would have had to have been struck and shipped to General Mills some months in advance, to allow time for their packaging in the plastic and cardboard holders and their insertion into the cereal boxes. Perhaps the coins shipped to General Mills in late 1999 were from the same batch as the coins I saw in Chicago in October of 1999? I wrote about this possibility in COINage and in various numismatic forums, and collectors started looking for one of the holders with both a dollar and a cent in it. The single cent holders were quite common, because after all a kid getting a cent in a “fancy” holder was likely to keep it, while the “$1.01 holders” were more likely to get cut open and the coins spent at face value. After all, these were distributed at random to overwhelmingly non-numismatic households, and the people finding them had no reason to suspect that the dollar was worth anything more than a dollar. Eventually, in late 2004 or early 2005, a collector named Pat Braddick sent one of the two-coin packages to ANACS, which slabbed it so that now the reverse of the dollar could be seen. Once he received the coins back, Braddick noticed that the reverse of the dollar was different than other Sacagaweas and sent the coin to NGC, where one of their experts was aware of the reports I had made in COINage and Coin World. They sent me photographs of the dollar’s reverse, and I confirmed that it was the same reverse I had seen back in October of 1999. Later in 2005 I had a nice chat with U.S. Mint Sculptor Thomas D. Rogers, Sr. about the changes in the tail feathers on his design. He told me that while production of the coin was being held up due to problems perfecting the copper-zinc-manganese-nickel alloy, he made a last-minute change in the tail feathers to make them appear more “white,” as on the tail of a bald-headed eagle. To accomplish this he eliminated the detailing of the feathers, and replaced the raised central quill of the most prominent feather with a depressed line that appeared to divide it in two. This was why I had thought that the final version had 13 feathers, but Rogers assured me that he had researched the correct number and knew it was 12. He also said that nobody in the Mint’s marketing department had told the engraving department that they were making an early press run for General Mills, and that nobody in the engraving department had told anybody that they were still tweaking the design. That is how the Cheerios Pattern Dollar came to be struck. For more information, see www.smalldollars.com.
Dozens of BST deals completed, including: kalshacon, cucamongacoin, blu62vette, natetrook, JGNumismatics, Coinshowman, DollarAfterDollar, timbuk3, jimdimmick & many more
Great story!