Remember when - coin related stories when you were young.

Barney1955 · June 30, 2011 3:25AM

I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of coin related stories when we were kids.

I'll start with a story of me and my sisters (there were 5 of us) heading off to Sunday School when I was about 5 or 6 (my oldest sister was 11 and we only had about 4 blocks to walk) mom gave us each a dime to put in the collection plate. On the way we used to compare dimes to see who had the man dimes and who had the lady dimes. This was about 1961.

jmski52 · June 30, 2011 3:29AM

Welcome, Barney!

My first "complete" collection was the Book II of Jefferson Nickels, which I finished off on our family trip to St. Louis in 1962 to see a Cardinals game. Of course, the book started with 1962, so all I needed was a "P" and a "D".

Barney1955 · June 30, 2011 3:35AM

My first "complete" collection was the Book II of Jefferson Nickels, which I finished off on our family trip to St. Louis in 1962 to see a Cardinals game. Of course, the book started with 1962, so all I needed was a "P" and a "D".

Now that is funny!

yellowkid · June 30, 2011 3:42AM

I found an Indian Head cent in my Grandfathers work shed, it was so worn you couldn't tell the date. But I, in my six or seven year old wisdom thought if I just shined it enough the date would come up! Shortly after, I think, was about the time I started filling my Whitman Lincoln album.

garrynot · June 30, 2011 3:53AM

One story sticks out in my mind. My dad was always yelling at me anytime he suspected I was taking change out of his change dish. At the grocery store one day, probably 1964 - 1966, my dad got a Walking Liberty half in change, typical well worn coin. I asked him if I could have it and he yelled at me right in the store. Ah the good old days...

JamesMurray · June 30, 2011 4:00AM

Recently i handed a few of the new Sac dollars to a friends 3 year old , she took them gladly and looked at them keenly asking " Is there chocolate inside them?"

Barney1955 · June 30, 2011 4:01AM

I had that habit also, going thru change looking for any coins that would fill a hole in my blue whitman coin folders.

johnny9434 · June 30, 2011 4:04AM

us kids had to throw what milk or lunch money we didnt use into the bowl at the end of the day. my dad used to let me go thru it at the end of the day. my sister started after i did and i helped her out when i could. that was the mid 60s when we started

stevereecy · June 30, 2011 4:34AM

My earliest memories are from when my Dad would pull out a felt-line wooden box on very rare occasions. He's show us all the stuff he had ACCUMULATED...mostly peace dollars and morgans from the casinos and the obsolete 20th century stuff...wierd looking dimes with ladies on them and nickels with indians and buffalos. I loved how they took on the wild colors from toning in that box and how Dad would carefully pass them around for us kids to look at. Man...I miss that.

fiveNdime · June 30, 2011 4:54AM

this is my dads story:
as a 15yo kid working in his dads liquor store, mid 50's, a guy came into buy a pack of smokes, ~$0.41, the penny he got was an 1909S vdb.
he was so excited, that he left the cash drawer open and ran home home with it.

still has it raw today, MS63 RB (i am still trying to convince him to send to PCGS)
it was red until it left the coastal area to hibernate in big bear for a few years, when it came back the color had changed slightly.

Jobessi · June 30, 2011 5:31AM

There was always "Two Face"'s coin he always flipped in Batman, and also the story of leaving silver dollars for the undertaker.

RCDB · June 30, 2011 6:40AM

My dad was collector. As far back as I can remember, he would bring home rolls of coins from banks and from subway token booths. One day we were searching through many rolls of pennies. It was a bad day, neither one of us found anything. He looked at me and said, "nothing", and I said ,'no." Then I told him that there had been a coin whose date I could not read because it had a big black blob of something over the date. He asked me to show it to him. I found it and gave it to him. He turned it over and noticed a VDB. I had not done that. He picked at the goop that covered the date and to our astonishment, 1909 s. That was some 50 years ago. The coin resides in a NCS VF details holder today; great memory.

kimber45ACP · June 30, 2011 7:05AM

I stole my sister's collection of worn out mercs and bought candy with them when I was 8 or 9.
I recently bought about 20 uncirculated ones at a local auction and shipped them to her with
a note saying that I was sorry for stealing hers when we were kids.

SanctionII · June 30, 2011 8:06AM

I have many such stories.

Here is one.

I collected as a kid in commencing in 1963. I was 7 years old at the time. Some of my classmates also collected. We talked about what our newest coins were [mostly circulation finds from our parents pocket change] and we debated what coins were "better". Well I had accumulated a number of Walkers (maybe a dozen) and I do not remember the dates of these half dollars. For some reason, my collecting friends and I got excited about nickels, especially buffalo nickles. So nickels were what we all wanted [for a while at least].

I wanted nickels so badly that I decided to get my Walkers and take them to the local Dairy Queen and exchange them for nickels [ten nickels per each half dollar]. The teenaged kid who was working the cash register at Dairy Queen thought I was very weird asking him to exhange half dollars for nickels. He obliged me though and I walked away with many, many nickels.

I went through each nickel. I do not remember what the dates and mint marks were. Nor do I remember if I found any really good nickels [I assume I did not since if I found anything good as a YN I kept it and still have it today].

So I look back on my trip to the Dairy Queen with amusement and a tinge of regret. I am amused that I decided I had to have nickels and parted with Walkers to get some. I regret that I no longer have the Walkers [they probably were all from the 1940's, but who knows maybe a 1921 or a 1919 dated half were in the group].

curly · June 30, 2011 8:24AM

When ol' curly was a young pup, I would take a Standing Liberty Quarter and ask someone if they could find the "cowboy".

Any of you brothers think you can find him?

Mission16 · June 30, 2011 1:41PM

When I was a kid, we lived in rural Central New York. Once every couple months we would go to the "big city" (Syracuse) to go to Shoppingtown Mall then downtown to Fred Scholls (?) coin shop. Great place for a kid interested in coins. Had those neat display cases where you'd push the buttons and make the trays go around.

Another:
In the winter Dad would get bags of wheat cents and set us kids up separating by date and mintmark. I have no doubt we sorted thru a million cents over the years and can honestly say we found every date and mintmark including a dozen or so 1909-S VDB's.

ColonialCoinUnion · June 30, 2011 1:45PM

<< <i>Once every couple months we would go to the "big city" (Syracuse) to go to Shoppingtown Mall >>

I remember that place!

Coinosaurus · June 30, 2011 2:24PM

Jeff Reichenberger had a very funny article in CW this week about plugging coins into a Whitman folder with his kid, and how to had to use a hammer to get one coin to fit in the album hole. Brought back a lot of memories.....

barbershopper · June 30, 2011 4:14PM

I started collecting in 1943, age 7. (I'll let you figure my age now!)

I've had these memories forever and will relate the best ones. Hope you don't mind.

My first find was about age 10 when my mom gave me 15 cents to go next door to buy a quart of milk. The milk was 12 cents so the woman shook 3 cents from her son's piggy bank and gave them to me. As I was walking up the road, I looked at the coins and one was a 1914-D! I ran the rest of the way home and looked in B. Max Mehl's book and he was offering 25 cents for that date!
I thought I was rich.

My first job after HS was at the local paper 1n 1953 as assistant circulation manager. I collected the money from the carriers every Saturday, about $500. I got permission to look at the dates and buy them at face value. I completed a set of walking Liberty halves in SIX WEEKS! I still have them as my only WLH collection. I also took the money and unsold papers from a man who got them for the drug store where he worked. Every day. One Saturday, I found a 3 leg buffalo in the carrier's change. The following Wednesday, I found a second one in the 67 cents from the drug store!!

After that, I moved to Peoria and enrolled in the toolmaker apprenticeship. August, 1955. 3 of us on 2nd shift ate our meal together and took turns buying Cokes from a machine which rarely had change. When it did have change, a green light went out. We always took 3 nickles and a quarter just in case the 1st or 2nd nickle turned off the light. If so, we put the quarter in and got 4 nickels.
One time it was my turn and the 2nd nickel turned out the light. The quarter went in and I got the 4 nickels. One was a buffalo. I looked at it and saw it was a 1913-D type II in AU condition.
I still have that collection adding only 3 varieties, 1916/1916, 1914/3 and 1918/7-D. I still had the 3 leg buffalos so one was already in it.

Finally, in 1958, I talked my bank into selling me either 1 bag of dimes or 2 bags of nickles each week day paying for what I had kept from each bag. These coins were from parking meters and the bus company. Working full time at CAT and searching the coins daily kept me busy and put an end to my social life for 3 months. After that, the bank started telling me they had no more coins I hadn't seen. I finally gave up. That's how I completed my buffalo collection. No 3 legs were found.
There was exactly one roll of 1950-D nickles and 3-5 rolls each of 1938 and 1939 with MM which I sold to two brothers who were going into the coin selling business. Unfortunately, the 1960 price drop occured about 6 months after selling them and I'm sure they still were working on accumulating stock and losing big money on what they had paid for what they had bought.
The 1950-D roll sold for $1100 and it also took a licking pricewise. I got out just in time, which I foresaw. I told my mom to sell her coins and for the first time, she believed me and did so.
She was a part-time dealer, not a collector.My feelings about the price drop were due to the hoarding of rolls of coins the years they were released by the mint. They read the myth about there being 2 million coin collectors in the USA but the people buying the rolls were speculators, not collectors. I reasoned that a true collector only wanted one of each date and MM and knew there were way more BU coins than collectors. My estimate were 50,000-100,000 true coin collectors at that time.

One more. I had a sheet of mint Virginia Dare stamps I had bought at face value and knew a stamp collector who had coin collections he wanted to get rid of. I offered him the sheet of stamps at face value on a 2 for 1 basis. He misunderstood and thought I wanted one dollar face in coins for 50 cents in stamps but he agreed to trade that way and I only picked his quarters, Barber and Washington. I felt like a thief but he seemed really happy with the trade so I didn't tell him I meant the other way around.

That should give you youngsters an idea of what it was like in the 40s and 50s. There are many others I could've included but it's one AM here and I'm feeling sleepy. Good night.

JT

OldEastside · June 30, 2011 6:53PM

<< <i>When ol' curly was a young pup, I would take a Standing Liberty Quarter and ask someone if they could find the "cowboy".

Any of you brothers think you can find him? >>

OK Curly, I'm gonna say in the right panel under TRVST
Just a guess

Steve

ricko · June 30, 2011 11:28PM

In my early coin collecting days I was a paperboy...at that time SLQ's, Walkers, Buffs circulated commonly.... often got IHC's in payment. I was not a sophisticated collector then and only saved the coins that 'stood out'. They all disappeared when I joined the Navy.... either my brother spent them or my Mom did... they did not see anything special about them.. just change laying around the room.

That is the way my three '55 DDO's disappeared. Cheers, RickO

OldEastside · July 1, 2011 7:08AM

Living in Santa Barbara in the summer of 73' and being a seasoned coin wheeler and dealer at 14 years old (in my mind at least)
my cousin and I would frequent the three coin shops downtown, one was located on a side street across from the Santa Barbara
Courthouse, they had a 10 cent junk box that I constantly would search through and constantly find ag semi key date V Nickels in
and would always buy them and sell them to Bob Barnes at New Horizens Coin about 3 or 4 blockes away and two doors down
from Ron Gillos Shop, Now I remember Bob Barnes as the coolest most nurturioning and fair coin dealer I have ever encountered
(especially to a couple of snot nosed kids).

Anyhow things were going great that summer of 73' because my cousin and I always had a little money from all our BIG TIME
coin tranactions and too top it off we would occationally haunt Ron Gillos shop and pretty much just smudge up the coin cases
in there since we could'nt afford anything in there anyways, He always sold high end stuff and GOLD, but the two guys he had
working the counter had to eat, and we would always show up around lunch time and they would alway buy if we'd fly, Get us
outa there hair so to speak.

Things came to and end one day as we were searching the 10 cent junkbox when my cousin said outloud that Bob will give us
2 bucks for this 1888 ag V nickel, Boy the lady that ran that shop went irate and 86'd our butts outa there, oh well it's all good.

Good memories

Steve

slipgate · July 1, 2011 7:15AM

We resurfaced our pool-table and the slate had been leveled by a mercury dime. Not sure of the date, but as a kid, I was SO excited to have this after we discovered it! I am pretty sure I cleaned it with an eraser. That was common for us back then.

Remember when - coin related stories when you were young.

Comments

Leave a Comment