An old cent isn't what I thought.

Like many of us, I collected coins as a kid, and stopped when it was time to go to college. Early in my second decade I spent a lot of time at a local bank searching for wheaties in rolls. Among those I found were a couple 1954-D examples that looked a little funny.

One looked like it had a repunched mint mark. The other looked like it had a stray 5 punched high and rotated from the final placement. These days, I'm not a Lincoln Cent collector, but I remembered that I had these coins tucked away in an album at the house, and decided to look at them with the Dino-Lite microscope I bought at the Pittsburgh ANA a couple weeks ago.

I first looked online for some resources. It quickly became apparent that the first of the two coins is a known variety, with (new) Fivaz Stanton designation FS-01-1954D-501, and number 45 in the top 50 Lincoln Cent varieties at lincolncentresource.com.

The other cent had fascinated me more all those decades ago. But none of the online resources I checked listed anything like it. So I fired up the Dino-Lite to about 30x and was no longer convinced that there was a stray 5. Cranking it up to maximum magnification, 230x, what I have became more clear. It appears to be nothing more than a lamination above the date.

So my dream of having some really cool variety, perhaps a valuable one, is gone.

Most of my hobby time is spent considering the next potential acquisition. After that, it's enjoying the more expensive coins when I have them home for a spell. But this episode reminded me of some of the fun I had as a kid. I think I'm going to start using the microscope to examine my coins more closely, not just take a nice consistent set of pictures. I have been starting to feel like I'm not enjoying collecting as much, and getting back to a more youthful approach (with some better technology) might help.

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