favorite collecting stories

[coin1960-migration]

What are some of you guys favorite stories about your collecting hobby. Here's mine. When I was 8 or 9 my mom gave me six cents to mail a letter for her. Hey, I got to leave home on the bike! Anyhow, I got to the post office and checked the coins. Hmmmmm, a 1938-s Jefferson and I didn't have one. Back home to tell Mom why her letter didn't get mailed!

[HaydenTubbs]

I have a feeling you weren't laughing then,perhaps your rear smarted a bit?

[thebeav]

Good story......and a good eye on that Jefferson......

My favorite stories are from my early years too. Basically friends of my parents, or family members, that would give me coins knowing that I had an interest. Little acts of kindness like that would keep a flame alive long enough to see me get into the business by 1979.....

 

Paul

[HaydenTubbs]

Good story......and a good eye on that Jefferson......

My favorite stories are from my early years too. Basically friends of my parents, or family members, that would give me coins knowing that I had an interest. Little acts of kindness like that would keep a flame alive long enough to see me get into the business by 1979.....

 

Paul

Same here,my mom always encouraged my collecting.I'd love to show her the new coins I got in the mail or from the occasional show.She especially liked looking at some of early type coins from my old set.Even though she wasn't a collector she was(and still is) always happy for me.

Her motivation was what kept me collecting.

[1946hamm-migration]

My favorite story is one that happened many years ago when I first started collecting coins. I grew up in a very small town and was in the 7th grade in school. I had a history teacher that got me started collecting coins. He collected coins and encouraged his students to enjoy the history of the coins. He was also the school treasurer and was very well respected in our small community.

 

Once he found out I was interested in coins, He asked me to meet him on a Saturday morning at our small town bank. I met him and we proceeded to walk into the bank and after he talked to the manager of the bank, we went into the vault. Once there, we sat on the floor and began looking thru bags of silver dollars. My teacher had a list of dates he was looking for and he and I searched thru 2 or 3 bags for the dates he needed for his collection. What fun I had. We spent about three hours searching those heavy bags of dollars. The coins we found that he needed were set aside and he would trade dollar for dollar to the teller. Needless to say I couldn't afford to get any of the dollars but my teacher had a fantastic collection of dollars.

 

This all happened around 1958 or 1959. The bank was a small town privately owned bank. I am sure that no bank today would allow something like that to go on. There would not be anything of interest anyway to search thru.

 

This is my favorite memory of the way things were.

[coin1960-migration]

My father actually got me started as a tadpole. Another fond memory is putting an x on my nickel roll and my 2 cent rolls and exchanging them every saturday. I once found a 32-d penny and boom my dad was off the couch to (help) He gave me a 1901 indian for it! . A few months later and a 23-s appeared and once again so did dad!

[coin1960-migration]

need any help? would love to work with coins every day! Especially since i'm now 44 and think it's time to give up my dream of being a major league baseball player!

[James_OldeTowne]

I'll give my earliest coin-collecting memory. This is honestly how I got started in coin collecting!

 

In the late 1970s, I overheard some people saying that coins minted before 1965 were made of 90% silver, and worth much more than face value, and some were still floating around in circulation. This was at the time when silver was on it's roller-coaster ride. I decided I was going to get rich, and with great zeal, started pulling out every pre-1965 coin I could find. My Dad worked as a taxi-cab driver at the time, and his tips were usually in small change, so I had mounds of coins to go through every night. After a couple of months, I had this huge jar FULL of pre-1965 coins! Boy, this was easy!

 

I asked Mom and Dad if they could take me to a coin store so I could sell my "silver" hoard and reap enormous profits for all my efforts. Heck, I had probably forty dollars in face, and silver at the time was something like 20x face value!

 

It was then that I learned an important lesson about collecting coins: pre-1965 nickels are not made of silver.

 

..... but I sure ended up with one whale of a Jefferson nickel collection!

 

James

[Wihlborg]

James,

 

I knew right where you were going with this as soon as you said you began pulling out any coin minted before 1965.

 

Never the less it was a good story!

 

John

[Elcontador]

I have two stories, one some of you have read before. In 1963, I was 12, my brother was 10. It was summer time. We went to the kids' Saturday matinee. I got what I thought was a really OLD quarter.

 

It was so old, that I thought it was worth keeping, even though that meant I couldn't get any candy or popcorn at the show. It was dated 1932, and it definitely had been around the block a few times. I was as excited about finding this really old quarter as I was hungry from not getting my junk food fix at the show.

 

My father thought it was good idea that I found a hobby other than getting into trouble, so he took me to a coin shop so I could ask some questions about my find. The kindly gentleman at the shop told me to flip the coin over and see if there was a letter under the eagle's perch on the back side of the coin. He said that if a letter was there, the coin might actually be rare. Sure enough, I saw an 'S.' He explained that it was a rare coin and it was worth $20, a lordly sum to a 12 year old at that time. He also suggested that I buy a redbook (I did), so I could learn about other U.S. coinage.

 

The coin is a borderline F 12, and I still have it.

 

Flash forward to 1968. I went to a coin auction; the auctioneer was the legendary George Bennett. The guy looked like a British WW I vet, and went through lots as quickly as a North Carolina tobacco auctioneer, but with an English accent (yes, it was as strange as it sounds). If you belched or scratched your nose, that was taken to be a bid.

 

At the end of the auction, there was a nearly complete set of silver Roosevelt Dimes in Unc. It was only missing a few common dates. There weren't any mail bidders at these auctions, and sometimes, you could "get lucky" if there weren't many people there at the end of the auction (I picked up 5 rolls of circ. IHCs for $9 each this way). When the lot came up, hardly anyone was there, and I picked it up for $15. I spend another $5 to complete the set. Thirty some years later, I had someone take a look at it. Most coins were MS 63 & MS 64, but maybe 25% were MS 65 or MS 66.