My 55 Year Journey of Coin Collecting part 3 of 20 posted by danny0603

[CSJournals-migration]

The SECRET Collection

 

As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, we moved to a small town in 1967 because my father had purchased a small grocery and variety store. This was the summer before beginning high school and only three years after the advent of clad coins.

 

My Dad and I came up with a SECRET collection. We were not to tell anyone else in the family, employees or friends about it for fear they would start doing the same thing. Every day during the summer and after school, I would go to my dad's store and go through all of the coins that had come from the cash register drawers the day before and pull out all of the silver dimes, quarters and halves. The "real" silver coins were placed in canvas bank bags and placed in the store safe.

 

It was amazing that in 1967 more than half were pre-clad coins. By the time I graduated from high school in 1971 we could only find about 10% silver coins in the drawers.

 

After graduation, I moved away to go to college and eventually got married and over time basically forgot about our SECRET collection.

 

A few days after my Dad passed away in 1997 (thirty years later), my Mom called me to help her with something. She said my Dad wanted me to have something and presented me with the four large bags of our SECRET collection that were long forgotten by me. I was so touched that he had kept HIS secret so well.

 

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[VPhillips]

What a nice surprise!!!

[coinsbygary]

That's a neat story. Those bags of silver coins will always be worth more to you than their numismatic value. They are something you shared with your Dad and that's pretty special.

Gary