What made you into a coin collector?

[RI AL]

I am curious as to how other collectors got bitten by the "coin bug". I can remember 2 incidents, in around 1958, that got me going.

 

1. Back in the prehistoric error when 25 cents got you a school lunch and 2 (count 'em...1, 2) milks, my dad sent me to the gas station to get change for a $1 so my brothers could have lunch money too. Anyway, one of the quarters I got was a Barber, worn to splat...probably an AG at best. Well, I had to BEG and plead and jump up and down but my dad let me keep it. (25 cents used to be worth something...if nothing else it would buy 5 big Snickers bars, a gallon of gas...SIlly Putty..stuff like that).

 

2. Shopping (yuck) with my mom a few months later in Coral Gables (The "Miracle Mile"...I used to call it the "Terrible Mile") we passed a travel store with a small display tray of foreign coins in the window. I was probably foaming at the mouth with my nose pressed to the glass. I don't know how my mom did it (she sent me to look in a toy store window...it was safe back then to stuff like that alone) but when I got back she had the coins in her hand. I still have them...family treasures.

 

OK, stop yawning....and share your stories, please.

 

Up to 44 today here in RI. I may have to break out my Speedo...or not...

 

RI AL

[jtryka]

Back in the late 1970s, can't remember the exact year, my parent brought me to visit my great aunt and uncle who still lived on my mother's family homestead purchased in the 1860s. As I was running around with the chickens and geese (I don't know why they kept geese and a billy goat) my great uncle brought out a coffee can of coins he had saved, it had some silver dollars, large cents, 2-cent pieces, seated half dime, other seated coins, lots of Indian cents and Buffalo nickels, and he gave them to me. Ever since then I've been hooked!

[Neko]

I got my first Whitman coin folder for Lincolns at age 6 or 7. That was around 1956. I started filling the holes with pennies from the local corner store. The store owner took a liking to me and saved pennies aside for me. In those days even Indian Head cents could be found in change.

A few years later my grandmother took me to see the owner of a large clothing store downtown. He was a coin collector and he showed me a complete uncirculated set of Indian Head Cents. All brilliant red!! I been hooked on coins ever since.

[MBA101]

OCD

[warriorbassman-migration]

My dad wanted me to stop collecting football cards and bought me an 1809 half cent in VF...I was hooked ever since.

[DC Dawg]

In 1970, I was delivering Newsday at a time it was an afternoon paper and did not produce a Sunday edition. Once per week, I would go door-to-door to collect for the paper. I remember that it was 10-cents a per paper and I had to pay 4-cents to Newsday. As I was paid, I noticed that some of the coins did not look or feel like others. Silver dimes, wheat cents, Indian Head cents and Buffalo Nickels. A few times I received Franklin Halves, but I spent those--50-cents was a lot of money to a youngster in the early 70s! I started keeping the pennies and the dimes. For some reason the nickels did not interest me.

 

After a while I would pick through my father's change. When he came home from work, I used to either ask for his change or reach my hand into his pocket to grab the change. I would sit at the table looking for coins to fill my Whitman Folders that he bought for me. After finding a complete clad collection and about half the silver Roosevelt dimes, my father purchased the rest of the set for me. The folder was updated to a Whitman Classic Album. I couldn't stop from there.

 

As I got older, learned about girls then how to drive, the collecting waned. In college, I would pick through change pulling the wheaties (pre copper-to-zinc change) or anything else that looked interesting. Then real life set in.

 

I returned in 1999 with the State Quarters. I purchased two Harris Folders that I thought were neat. I started to fill holes from change. I was getting back to it again. I bought a Washington Quarter folder and started searching change again. Then in 2001, my first wife died and I was sitting around with the "now what?" feeling. I went through my boxes (my wife and I moved into a new house six months before she died, just before being diagnosed with cancer) and found some old Red Books and folders. While I was looking for something to pick me up, I found the coins on eBay, suppliers on the net, a local coin store, and then I was spending a lot of money upgrading the collection.

 

Now I am a 1903-S Morgan, 1921-P&D Walker, and 1916-D Mercury, and several SLQs and Barbers away from a complete 20th century silver collection! I think I'm hooked again!

 

Scott

[RI AL]

Hello, All.

 

These are great stories. Somehow when you get a few years under your belt, things like "coin stories" take on more meaning. Amazing how the hobby has helped people through tough times, or have wonderful family memories associated. Just call me an old sentimentalist, but I love reading stuff like this. Thanks for sharing, and I hope there are more stories coming.

 

Carpal Tunnel, your story was especially moving. I am so sorry for that very difficult time in your life!

 

In my case, collecting helped me through a couple of rough patches too. My dad died when I was 12, and my mom died while I was in college. I collected what I could through these years and really believe that my "obsession" kept me on the straight and narrow. I wasn't going to waste a cent on booze or drugs (though they weren't so common back "then")...I had coins I wanted to buy. After I married in 1973, I remember my wife saying, "you spent WHAT on a penny?" Well it was $84 in maybe 1974, but it was a 1794 cent not long ago certified as a F-15.

 

MBA 101, as a retired high school teacher, I have run many times into students with ADD, and a rarer case of OCD. You have my admiration for working through it and obviously continuing to do so. That must have been a tough road!

 

All the best, guys.

 

RI AL

[rbrown4]

It is nice to hear these types of stories. For me as a young child my father got me started with whitman folders for lincolns, jeffersons and roosies because I would sit in his study and watch him with his coins. At that time and for several years it was just a "neat" thing for me. He also taught me how to look for silver coins in change as well as "wheat pennies". About 15 to 20 years ago he gave me his silver collection of mostly US and Canadian. Believe it or not the boxes sat in a cedar chest until two years ago and I never looked at them. About a year and a half ago with his health failing he gave me his entire collection of gold and asked me to begin helping him sell some of it if I wanted. That is when I found out about NGC, PCGS etc and joined this society. Once I began learning about our coins I was hooked. Needless to say I have not sold any of the coins other than a few miscellaneous items here and there. I am still learning and growing in this hobby and wish that I had become more involved earlier in my adult life. My father and I both learned so much after I joined here. When he collected he had no experience with varieties, errors etc. What a wonderful journey it has been and I am so happy that I was able to confirm and show him that what he had accomplished was amazing even by todays standards.

 

Rey

[astrostu]

An obsessive compulsion to collect things. And I like money.

[MunkyMan95]

I attibute my addiction to my Great-Grandparents. One day while I was visiting their house, as I did very frequently, I was plundering my Great-Grandmother's dresser drawers, which were filled with misc. junk. Everything from corn cob pipes to old leather wallets. I found a peculiar orange silk change purse, and I stuck it in my pocket, and started asking around for pennies. I got a few dozen pennies from my Great-Grandfather's pocket, and a little more from my Great-Grandmother's purse. My goal was to accumulate 100 cents. I had about 65 cents or so, and the neighbor from down the street, the late Melvin Johnson, reached into his pocket and pulled out exactly the 35 cents I needed to reach my goal.

 

That was years and years ago, I'm surprised I remember it so vividly. A few months after that, I lost a tooth! I found under my pillow a 1971 Ike Dollar, and a 1992 Kennedy half. I put them in my special orange change purse, and then in my hiding spot, on the bookshelf.

 

My 'collection' was more of an accumulation of coins from various places, I had different world coins from when relatives went on vacation, I had odd coins out of pocket change. I didn't start with Whitman Albums like most of you.

 

I visited my first coin shop when I was about ten years old, and I saw 1957 $1 silver certificates on sale for $2. I was curious as to why they were selling $1 bills for $2, I had no idea at the time what a silver certificate was, and what made it worth $2. The dealer pulled the bills out of the display case, and explained to me that they were old dollar bills, that were no longer issued. I picked one out, and it came home with me. I also picked out an off center error cent from a tray. The dealer told me that they would search through bank wrapped rolls of the cents, and using gloved hands, place them in 2X2 holders. I selected a bright shiny one, and it came home with me as well. I kept these two new treasures in a purple clamshell-type pencil box, and back on the bookshelf they went.

 

I didn't really start collecting until a few years ago. I discovered NGC and PCGS from watching Coin Vault on the Shop at Home Network. I visited several coin shows in the area, but I sticked to raw coins, thinking that slabs were way out of my league. I always saw the guys with large black briefcases pull out a wad of $100 bills and walk away with this one square of plastic. I was convinced that every coin in a slab was a thousand-dollar coin.

 

I purchased my first slab in January 2006, it was a 2005 Kennedy Half Dollar, NGC PF69UCAM. I won it on eBay for the opening bid of $0.99, and the total was about $6 with shipping. All of my notions about slabs went out the window with that purchase.

 

I joined the boards in February of 2006, and I have been growing ever since. I've learned SO SO SO much from joining the boards, and it has helped me a ton in my collecting.

 

So, that's about it! I know it was a little long winded, and congratulations if you managed to read it all.

[Dcoin]

One of my students had found a dateless Buffalo nickel in his change. I thought it was cool so i went to ebay to buy a few so we could look at them together.

 

Hook in mouth and havn't got free yet

[ant]

seeing these kinds of coins got/keeps me goin. the older ,the better

 

[DC Dawg]

That's a great looking coin... You da' Ant!!

[ant]

i also think that if i wasnt a collector the minute i found this site i would be! so much fun and history to be had and learned.

[Hoot]

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and a love of history.

 

Hoot

[CoinCurious]

My Grandfather was a collector and enjoyed to show us (his grandkids) his collection. He lived in Germany. Once while I was there I did something wrong and my mother beat me (cant remember what I did but im sure I deserved it). My grandfather who only saw me one month out of the year couldnt stand to see me cry so he walked over to me and handed me a box, it had American Money in it (40 Susan B. Anthony's) nothing special from his collection just some $1 coins he picked up from working with the military but I was excited. When I got back home I placed them in a box and eventually thought no more about them. 20 years past and I happened to be looking through some stuff and run across the box I purchased flips and a folder and placed them inside. And since then I have been collecting. Everytime I look at any of my coins or purchase new ones I think of him. I still have those SBAs and wouldnt part with them for nothing in the world.

 

 

 

[RI AL]

MunkyMan95...

 

Yup...read it all...and enjoyed it!!

 

I can't help but wonder if kids today have the same interest/motivation to become collectors. Not much worth saving in pocket change, and it all has gotten a bit too commercial for my taste (though I do admit to buying/selling a bit on E-Bay).

 

1 year when I was a high school teacher, I started an after school coin club. I didn't expect much response because...how can coins compete with TV, video games, boys, girls, after school jobs and all that stuff. We had a small group of about 10 kids, but it was so much fun watching them wheel and deal, sharing their favorite coin and stuff like that. I know many of the kids were just "curious" but got hooked when I started pelting them with freebies. It was great fun.

 

In my last 3 years of teaching there, on a whim I started an incentive program using foreign coins (I had rather a mass of them) as rewards/incentives in class. Lots of kids started collecting and I became the campus "coin guru"..."Hey, Mr. G....I have this old coin ...can you tell me what it is"...from students and staff alike. One of the many inquiries revealed a super nice draped bust cent (don't recall the date) but most were buffalos, foreign and small stuff. It was also great fun. I know that there are a bunch of great kid collectors out there because of my love of the hobby. I hope it lasts them a lifetime too.

 

Ramble...ramble......never ask a retired school teacher to gab!!!

 

RI AL

[MikeKing]

Coins were just something a whole bunch of people in my family seemed to focus on. My older sister...and I still don't know why...introduced me to stamps and coins that she used to get from the Littleton Coin Company, which she got on approval. I was hooked. The strange thing is, I couldn't stand U.S. coins back then (except for my Lincoln Cent collection), and collected only world coins. The stamps I was most interested in I couldn't afford back then...hell...I still can't afford them, but I am still working on a collection of those very stamps I used to dream of when I was a kid (it will be a collection of less than 20 stamps).

 

My Dad used to keep outdated coinage like Indian Head Cents, Barber dimes and Liberty nickels, which he later gave tome, when I was a little older. He had sold all the large sized notes he also collected (arrrghhh). Looking back, I would have begged him to keep them.

 

My Grandfather would always give a Morgan Dollar to whichever one of his Grandkids caught the biggest fish when we were on his fishing boat that sailed out of City Island (NYC). Of course, I kept some of them, the rest ended up deposited into a savings account we each had to have when we were kids. And of course, Palisades Amusment Park in NJ, required you to change your dollar bills into Peace Dollars, which were then dropped into the turnstile, in order to gain admission! I'd always keep a few of those.

 

As I got older, I developed OCD, like Dave, and became a spendthrift, and the rest is history...

 

 

[pendragon1998]

Thinking back, I've always had a penchant to collect stuff. Probably it's my male hunter-gatherer complex.

 

When I was a small child, I collected rocks, Care Bears, He-Man action figures, books and DinoRiders (boy, I'm dating myself).

 

In more recent years, I've collected other things:

Pine Cones (I've got 17 of the 18 species of pine tree cones native to South Carolina in a box in the attic that I keep meaning to mount and display)

 

Bird sightings (as a birder, my life list is well over 200 wild species seen alive, unrestrained and in their native habitat)

 

Books (you don't even want to know).

 

and of course coins (below from my web page):

 

I have been collecting coins since around 1990, when I was young. My mother got me into the hobby. She's always been a casual collector, and during the late 1970s she worked as a bank teller while she was in college. It was my mother's small collections of the random, older coins she came across over the years that got me interested in the hobby and started my own collection. During my teenage years, I continued to casually collect, but it was not until 2005 after I graduated college that I returned to coins seriously. My primary hobby (and job) involves birding, so I was looking for something else I could do for fun that didn't require nice weather or daylight to pursue. I came across a counterfeit 1776 continental dollar I've had forever and I thought I'd see if it might not be real. I came across the NGC forums and one thing led to another. As I said, I was looking for an indoor, nighttime hobby and coins fit the bill perfectly; since then, I've been actively collecting and learning more about the hobby. I find coin collecting every bit as interesting as I did when I was young - more so now that I have a slightly larger budget to buy nicer coins from time to time (although as a grad student, my coin budget is still minute). I also find that having a more mature perspective on my collection brings a new level of richness to my collecting that wasn't developed when I was young.

 

 

As Dave Barry once said, there's a fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness'.

 

[EZ_E]

I don't think that I'm OCD but I am most definitely a collector of....things. Coins are the biggy but I also have some stamps, beer cans, old barbed wire and arrowheads, fossils, license plates and some old bottles.

 

I'm not sure if I acquired this personality or if I were born with it. My grandmother used to have lots of stuff that I used to enjoy browsing through. It was very cool. So, maybe this started me collecting coins at 8 years old. I know that I had some junk coins given to me. My dad also helped some and he gave me a Good Seated Liberty half dime once. I collected seriously until my teenaged years and then sold most of my coins to buy my car.

 

I didn't start collecting again until August 2002. I had been an avid watcher of Coin Vault. That spurred my interest again and is also when I first heard of slabs. I spent my first year buying mostly problem classic coins or moderns until I got my education. Luckily, my learning curve wasn't too steep. Now, the NGC type registry is the frame for my core collection although I still buy the commems as the come from the Treasury mill. I'm still not sure if I will maintain this collection or sell them but I'm into my type collection for the long haul. I will be selling my proof sets and other misc. stuff pretty soon on ebay but my type set is untouchable unless I upgrade.

[BillJones]

My interest in coins is based on a couple of things.

 

I've always had a huge interest in history. And I like coins that have dates on them. That pretty well nails when the coin was struck even though I realize that in the early days of the U.S. mint the date could be off by a year or so in some cases.

[MikeInFL]

What made you into a coin collector?

 

I think genetics had a big role in it. Somewhere I caught the "hoard" gene.

[Revenant]

Hmmm.... lets see...

1) When I was very young I would help my mother count and roll her pocket change. She taught me a method for counting them out for rolling that I still use 16 years later. Every time a wheat penny or bicentennial quarter was found it was pulled to one side and saved. The Message: Some coins are special and worth saving.

2) When I was growing up I was periodically shown my grandfather's old silver dollars and foriegn coins from several different Europian countries. My grandfather died 2 years before I was born and I was named for him. This was a way of connecting with him.

3) At age 8 or 9 my Uncle gave me about $90 of change and had me sort them and roll them by year and mintmark. It was mostly pennies and it took a long time getting help from my grandmother and sister. He let me keep the change, instructing me to keep the coins that were about 45+ years old.

4) My mother was a history major. She taught me to love history. I took art classes and learned to draw and paint, and how to appriciate art. Coins are the perfect combination of art and history IMO.

5) When I was 18 my mother met a new man that she married 3 months ago. He collected coins and has the same taste in art that I do. This was the basis on which we built a strong friendship, largely independent of his relationship of my mother. It made it easier to accept him after growing up without a father.

 

I'd have to say those are some of the biggest reasons that at 19 I started collecting, but they aren't the only ones. I feel like my entire life has been nudging me in the direction of becoming a coin collector.

[cpm9ball]

In 1957, when I was 10, I won $5 from a 16 year-old named Joe Clement. We were playing 9-Ball at the local poolroom. He paid me with four dollar bills and a silver dollar. I had never seen one before. I went to the bank where I had an account, showed the teller the silver dollar and asked if she had any. She spread a bunch of them across the counter, and I picked out four more. After that, every time I won some money playing pool, I would go to the bank and get more silver dollars. I never lost at pool in that poolroom, but sometimes I just couldn't get anyone to play me.

 

Chris

[Oldtrader3]

O.C.D are me! Plus, a love of gold coins developed back when a roll of (10) BU Saints cost $450.00.

[bsshog40]

I really don't know what got me going. I know that I have always looked at my pocket change and always looked for something different. I never really have ever been more in depth in it than what I am now.

[World Colonial]

My Aunt in Bolivia had an assortment of world coins when I lived there temporarily in 1975. Then when I temporarily went to a missionary school, the people there gave me their change from the countries they had visited.

[jackson64]

I just collect stuff. As I've lived in different homes over the years there are always certain boxes that tag along..sometimes they haven't been opened since the prior address. I have a group of 10-12 cool looking rocks(obsidian, geodes etc), I have an antique mason jar filled with cool beer caps, I have my baseball cards from the 70's and haven't looked through them in 20 years, seashells from various world beaches,...and I had a small wooden box with a handfull of buffs, mercury dimes, oodles of wheats, any silver from change and 1 Morgan dollar...about 10 years ago I became enamored by the ASE bullion coin with the classic Walking Liberty design..I bought an album for them and began buying on line....and that was all she wrote...

[stinkycheese1]

I don't quite remember what got me into coin collecting. I do however remember what got me into collecting gold coins. It was a cartoon red robin where he got a gold coin for his birthday as a present. I saved my christmas money and bought my first gold coin, a 1/4 oz gold american eagle back in 1997. I do remember collecting coins before this, when I was around 5 or 6 my friend catherine went to greece and brought me back 2 greece coins. I still have them. My uncle gave me a mexican coin as a pong slammer. I've been interested in many things, obessions throughout my life ( I have aspergers disease). First it was rocks and geology, then beanie babies, then magic and illusions (I still am interested in this, but numismatics is more interested in), I was interested in pongs for awhile, and pokemon cards.

[realone]

I have a multitude of issues (personality flaws):

I love beautiful looking things, thusly wonderfully toned cartwheel luster like objects fits my bag.

I am obsessive, so collecting is my addiction.

I am principle oriented, so acquiring an honest straight forward genuine accurately anything is important to me.

I am numbers oriented, therefore price negotiated, grade, and years are all part of it.

Unfortunately I am on the organic side, hate plastic anything, so if someone can come up with a replacement for slabs it would be much appreciated, and sorry but i dislike raw in this case.

I am messy, so consequently you should see my desk, but it works.