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A Find of a Lifetime

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Naked Angel

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Hello everyone, It's been a long time since I made a journal entry, but I'm back.  I didn't stop adding to my collection, I just got lazy and stopped writing about it.  I had to share this story though.  Earlier this year, my wife and I had been talking about going to our local flea market for a while, and we finally had the chance to go back in May.  We were looking for old stuff that we could use in the new house we are about to start building.  It was a perfect day to go picking, not too hot, and it wasn’t too crowded either.  

We were wandering around the outside vendors tents and had bought a few things, when we came to an old guy who had mostly pins and patches, silver jewelry, and a few other random things.  I was small talking him while he was cleaning his silver jewelry, and browsing his pin collection.  I didn’t see anything that I couldn’t live without, so I was about to leave.  Just then a bin of coins caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed before, so I started digging through it.  This was the kind of coin bin you find in the “value section” of a coin show...just a lot of random stuff in 2x2 plastic flips.  I saw a Chuck-E-Cheese coin, a couple of arcade tokens, a couple of old casino tokens, and a lot of world coins that weren’t worth much.  I picked a couple of decent coins out of the bin and then something caught my eye.  It was silver and had a ballerina on one side and the Soviet Union insignia on the other.  It was dated 1990, and when I looked closer I could just make out in the tiniest writing...Pd .999.  It didn’t register in my brain at first, because I’d only seen this coin in a book or online once or twice (If you've read my older journals you know I collect Libertads mostly, so I’m no expert on Russian/Soviet coins).  After a minute it sank in that I just found a Palladium coin!

I picked out 7 coins and tried to be as cool as possible, and asked what’s your price on all of these?  The guy looked at them and hemmed and hawed a minute and then was like, I can do $10 for all of them.  Just then my wife was walking back toward us and almost as soon as he said $10 I yelled DEAL!, and told my wife, give me some money!  As we walked away I still couldn’t believe it, and I think I whispered to her that I just stole from that guy, lol.  At the time of this writing, palladium is $2,767 an ounce, and this coin is a half ounce of Pd.  There were also only 15,000 of these coins minted in 1990, so what this coin was doing in a flea market bargain bin, the world may never know.  I was able to go to the FUN show over the weekend and submitted it to NCS, so now the wait begins.  When it comes back I'll make another journal entry. I had to share because this kind of thing never happens to me!

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I don't like communists, and I don't like it when someone takes advantage, BUT, you did give him the chance to name his price, AND it is a very beautiful coin.  I think this worked out perfectly.  Congrats, We all wish we could do this for a living.  ;-)

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