Collector finds circulated Cheerios Dollar! Story from Coin World
CaptHenway
Posts: 32,504 ✭✭✭✭✭
As you know I have an interest in the Cheerios Dollars as I was the first person to report the different reverse design. Here is a fascinating story from Coin World Online about a guy that has found three of them, the third one circulated! So, kids did get them in the cereal boxes and spend them!
TD
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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I will get rolls from the bank and CU this week... and report on my 'finds' right here...
Cheers, RickO
I've looked through numerous rolls of circulated dollar coins looking for that very thing. No luck on that endeavor. But I like dollar coins more than dollar bills, so I will continue to use (and search) them.
I buy all the dollar coins that my bank gets in. They are happy to get rid of them. I check them and then spend them.
Sell one, find one
So cool.!.!
Amazing story and finds !!!
That is a great story.
I'd also be interested though in the details surrounding your first sighting and thus reporting of this coin.
peacockcoins
As I have written many times, I got invited to a press conference in Chicago in October of 1999 where the coins were being shown to representatives of the coin vending industry. James Benfield, the head of the Coin Coalition, was a customer of Harlan J. Berk, Ltd. where I worked, and he called that morning to ask if I would like to tag along. We happened to share the same birth date, as I noticed the first time he wrote us a check and I checked his I.D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_Coalition
After a live demonstration where a representative of the Mint dropped samples of the coins into various types of vending machines and coin rejectors, we were allowed to handle some of the coins. Of course I had my loupe, and I counted the tail feathers and came up with 12. I joked with the Mint Rep that when the Morgan Dollar came out in 1878 it first had 8 tail feathers but that this was soon changed to 7, allegedly because eagles always had an odd number of tail feathers. He had no idea what I was talking about.
(Note: In the Summer of 2000 my first wife Jean and I took a cruise to Alaska, where I verified through a raptor rescue center that the standard TF count is 12. Years later when I talked to designer Tom Rogers about this he said that he too had verified the count as 12, and designed the coin to reflect this.)
I wrote about the meeting for the January, 2000 issue of COINage. Then when the coins first came in late January through Walmarts, Jean and I went there and made a small purchase and requested our change in dollar coins. When I got home I looked at them closely and counted 13 tail feathers! I wrote a second, smaller piece for COINage where I mentioned the change in the design, and somewhat kiddingly wondered if my conversation with the Mint Rep at the Presser had caused them to change the design.
I contacted the Mint and asked them about the change in design and of course they denied that there had been any change, but I have been lied to by the Mint's press relations people so many times I could not believe them. I kept trying to find out more about it but could go nowhere with the Mint stonewalling me.
Then somewhere around 2005(?) Coin World published a story about some hitherto unknown 2000-W 22kt gold Sacagaweas that had been struck in May of 1999 and flown aboard a Space Shuttle flown by a female pilot. Mint Director Philip Diehl had had them struck and flown as part of an intended promotion for the new coins and novelty sales item, only to find out after the fact that the striking was illegal. The coins were hushed up until Coin World broke the story.
(Note: the law was subsequently change to allow the Mint to make some precious metal strikings of authorized designs, which is why we have gold Kennedy halves and gold Mercury Dimes, Standing Liberty Quarters and Walking Liberty Halves, and may finally have gold Sacagawea Dollars in 2019 or 2020.)
The pictures of the gold strikings showed the tail feather arrangement that I had seen in October of 1999! This got me thinking that maybe other Sagagawea dollars struck in 1999 might have had the same reverse. I remembered the Cheerios cent and/or dollar promotion because I still have up on my library shelf the box I bought on January 1 or 2 of 2000 (all I got was a cent), and I figured that those 2000-dated cents and those dollars must have been struck well before the end of 1999 to allow time for them to be packaged and distributed to the cereal-making facilities and placed in the boxes and the boxes distributed to grocery stores all over America with instructions to place them on sale no earlier than January 1, 2000.
I spread the word throughout the hobby as best I could for people to check their Cheerios dollars for pattern reverses, and as I recall you checked the piece you had previously had slabbed by ANACS(?) (with neither of you noticing the difference) and found what I had said.
About the difference: In that conversation with Tom Rogers that I had at an ANA convention, he said that late in the design process he was still fiddling with it and decided to try to make the tail feathers appear more white (as seen on an adult bald eagle). He did this by removing the detailing of the feathers, in accordance with standard heraldry practice wherein the white part of a coat of arms is left blank. The original pattern design had the most prominent feather showing a raised central shaft with raised downward-angled lines such as you would see on a real eagle feather.
He blanked this out to make the feather look white, but then decided that it needed some vestige of the central shaft to make it look more like a feather. He did this by making the central shaft incused, and had this revision copied for the mass production runs. He did not know about the pieces already made with the pattern reverse for the Cheerios promotion, and the Mint's promotion department did not know (or maybe care) about the late change in the design.
When I got those coins at Walmart I counted the areas above and below the incused central shaft as two separate feathers, which is how I came up with the count of 13. Rogers said he could see how I thought that was two feathers, but he meant it as one, with a total count of 12.
Tom DeLorey
This is the coin that brought me here to PCGS. I just posted in another thread why I think there are only 500 of these. It was a mathematical theory that led me to this.
I thought I read that it was about half of the Cheerios dollars were patterns, making it about 2,500 that were issued.
Optical scanners have progressed to the point that this error and others such as the wide/close AM versions will soon be mined from circulation using a scanner and a conveyor loaded with bags and bags of Sacs ........................
General Mills had the rules of the contest figured out well in advance, and they knew they needed 5,500 dollar coins. I will bet you a box of Cheerios that their original delivery of dollar coins was 5,500 pieces with the pattern reverse.
However, the early Sacagawea dollars released into circulation spotted horribly. It it likely that some of the 5,500 coins in the first batch were also spotted. It is probable that somebody at General Mills pulled out the problem coins and requested a second batch from the Mint.
From reports I have received over the years I would say that over two-thirds of the 5,500 coins released in Cheerios boxes had the pattern reverse, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 the pieces. That is my best guess as to the total population. Unfortunately, kids eating cereal either put them away where they remain out of numismatic hands, or spent them.
Unfortunately, kids eating cereal either put them away where they remain out of numismatic hands, or spent them.
But that is part of the fun of coin collecting, the search !!!
True!
Thanks @CaptHenway, it was good to read your history.
I doubt I will have such luck. Still working on a box of Pumpkin Spice Cheerios from last month. 🎃
What fun! I do recall that it was you who spotted the difference and tracked it down. Congratulations again!
The controversy about how many exist is interesting as well. I'd always assumed it was the full 5,500.
Here's a warning parable for coin collectors...
That was a neat feeling, checking that ANACS Cheerios dollar I had sent to ANACS in the original packing hoping they would note "Cheerios" on the label- and they did.
Sure enough the details and wing feathers were strikingly different.
It was fun to take this 'discovery' coin to Long Beach and have David Lange look at it at the NGC table. He wasn't aware exactly what this was yet was certainly more than willing to do further research.
NGC took a few months and the finished product was the return of this dollar with the Cheerios designation on the insert. NGC included a fold out laminated caption of the coin along with detailed photos of the variety. It made for a wonderful presentation.
If it wasn't for Tom I'd have never really looked that closely at this novelty ANACS "Cheerios" coin and I am certain, as these coins in the original packaging didn't offer up what the reverse looked like, it would have been a long time before it was discovered the difference.
peacockcoins
How boring would it be if coin collectors saved all of them so there was no challenge finding them?
And, if they were spent as in the case here, they are within reach of numismatic hands, just ones that do a lot of searching
So I have saved a bunch of Sacagawea's from 2000 and now feel I should take a closer look at those tail feathers. If kids spent them right away, there is a chance there are still some in circulation...
One of my customers found one in change in western Nc a couple years ago, it was circulated and a little scruffy but the real deal
Food Luck!
Anything is possible
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