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What got you started?

Started by rrantique,

46 posts in this topic

Zoins

Zoins

Posted
Posted

That is very cool rrantique. I wonder if they ever attached any to boots.

 

I don't remember what got me started as a kid since I collected all kinds of stuff back then, stamps, baseball cards, comics, etc. Mostly recently I got restarted because of SHQs. I know a few people collecting SHQs out of circulation so I decided to get them something coin-related for X-mas.

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dooly

dooly

Posted
Posted

Hi there rrantique

 

We find a lot of coins like that in the UK and they were for Crimping pies hence the un cut edge as a hand hold 893scratchchin-thumb.gif

 

What got me started !!

 

Well i come from a collector family and it was normal to collect stuff i was give a mint set of coins when i was born in 1971 by my Grandad (he was 90 last week) and because i was born 14 days before decimialation people have always given me old £'s Shiilings and d's as i have grown up.. (i am selling 17kg of the Copper coins i have been given over the years next week on ebay screwy.gif)..

 

hi.gif

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rbrown4

rbrown4

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My father passed on his silver coins to me about 10 to 12 years ago. I never really looked through them until this last fall after he also passed on his gold coins to me. It was then that I started going through everything to develop a proper inventory. After a lot of reading, studying, asking questions, joining a coin club, going to shows I took the plunge and sent off two coins for grading to NGC. None of the coins had ever been graded by a TPG.

 

The anticipation and anxiety I experienced waiting on the results of those first two coins was unbelievable. Well I saw the grades online finally and immediately went to the books to see what it really all meant. Well I almost fell out of my chair.

 

1828 Capped Bust Quarter B-1 MS 63 (1/1 in NGC Pop. Report) and an 1835 Capped Bust Quarter B-2 MS 64 (1/0 in NGC Pop. Report).

 

Although I had coin albums as a kid, this experience is what I consider got me really started - this ignited the excitement and interest that I now have for coins and coin collecting. Along with the experiences in these forums.

 

Rey

 

1828CappedBustQuarterObvB-1MS63.jpg

 

1828CappedBustQuarterRevB-1MS63.jpg

 

IMG_1669.jpg

 

IMG_1671.jpg

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lkenefic

lkenefic

Posted
Posted

I got my start in 1968/69 from a coffee can full of Indian Head Cents that my grandfather let me go through...I was around 8. I still have a few of these left and as I upgrade IHCs' from my Dansco Album, I put these into a pile. Perhaps one day my son will make the same "discovery"...L

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dooly

dooly

Posted
Posted
My father passed on his silver coins to me about 10 to 12 years ago. I never really looked through them until this last fall after he also passed on his gold coins to me. It was then that I started going through everything to develop a proper inventory. After a lot of reading, studying, asking questions, joining a coin club, going to shows I took the plunge and sent off two coins for grading to NGC. None of the coins had ever been graded by a TPG.

 

The anticipation and anxiety I experienced waiting on the results of those first two coins was unbelievable. Well I saw the grades online finally and immediately went to the books to see what it really all meant. Well I almost fell out of my chair.

 

1828 Capped Bust Quarter B-1 MS 63 (1/1 in NGC Pop. Report) and an 1835 Capped Bust Quarter B-2 MS 64 (1/0 in NGC Pop. Report).

 

Although I had coin albums as a kid, this experience is what I consider got me really started - this ignited the excitement and interest that I now have for coins and coin collecting. Along with the experiences in these forums.

 

Rey

 

1828CappedBustQuarterObvB-1MS63.jpg

 

1828CappedBustQuarterRevB-1MS63.jpg

 

IMG_1669.jpg

 

IMG_1671.jpg

 

Whoof what a lovley pair of ladys rey i could always find a good home for them in the Uk 27_laughing.gif893applaud-thumb.gif27_laughing.gif893applaud-thumb.gif27_laughing.gifthumbsup2.gif

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SatTech

SatTech

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My grandmother and her friends would search loose change for wheat cents. She eventually started a Whitman Lincoln folder for my brother and I. I collected for a while when I was young, but got away from it for some reason. When I moved down here to Lousiana, I found a 1996 MS silver eagle my father had bought me and that started it back up again. I just recently finished (minus the 95w) proof silver eagle run and am working on the MS (about 70%). Also, I'm assembling a PR/MS 69 set of modern commems (love the constant design changes). Oh, just finished my 20th anniversary set also (gold/silver). I still have plans to eventually finish that lincoln set also!

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Dcoin

Dcoin

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Posted

I started when a student of mine asked what a IHP was. Like all good teachers I went right to Ebay for my answer. Hooked after the first bid!

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jtryka

jtryka

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Posted

I was about 9 or 10 in 1978 or 79 and when to my great uncle and great aunt's house in Indiana (the original homestead where my mom's side of the family settled in the 1850s). Uncle Ed gave me a coffee can full of random coins, large cents, 2-cents, seated coins, a couple of silver dollars, nothing too valuable, but it got me hooked! I took a small break in college, but not really as I still bought coins even then and saved wheaties and old nickels. I really got back in with the internet in 1999 and the rest is just a blur of money being poured down this hobby's gullet! And yes, I still have those original coins he gave me.

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dooly

dooly

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Posted
I started when a student of mine asked what a IHP was. Like all good teachers I went right to Ebay for my answer. Hooked after the first bid!

 

? whats IHP 893scratchchin-thumb.gif

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JKK

JKK

Posted
Posted

I started pulling wheatbacks and older nickels out of change in the early 1970s. My parents, who really couldn't afford to do it, bought me a few coins; my grandma gave me some Indian head pennies, and then my great grandma gave me four Morgans from her birth year (1884). Then I found an old black Barber dime outside the family ranchhouse in Kansas, and I realized that my now-ancient great grandma had probably dropped this when she was just a doe-eyed young rancher's wife riding side-saddle. All of a sudden coins connected me to history. I ended up majoring in that, and when possible I kept adding a coin here and there. With my first high school summer working wages I bought an 1809 half cent. The idea that I could actually afford and own this ancient thing pretty well slabbed me, you might say.

 

I have never sold one.

 

I'm not really a free-spending type of person, and I hate waste above and beyond all things. Spend, yes; waste, gods help you. As I become more able to afford things that interest me, coin collecting appeals to me because there is a very reasonable possibility that what I buy will preserve its value. And hopefully, someday there will be a great-great niece or nephew who will get that spark in young eyes, and then I'll know where the accumulated collection is going when I'm gone.

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SkyMan

SkyMan

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Posted

I got started in the late 1980's strictly as a financial diversification, not giving a rat's rear end about what coins looked like. It was a major bubble, but I was too new to recognize it. I'd look at the bluesheet and week after week the coins would increase 5-10%. So OF COURSE I bought more and more and more. Then the bubble popped. I got my @ss handed to me on a platter big time. I sold off most of the accumulation (not a collection at that point in time) over the next couple of years as necessary for tax purposes. Along the way I started looking at the coins to decide what to sell and what to keep, and it was at that point that I began to appreciate the coins for what they were... little pieces of history and art, and at that point I became a collector.

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Neko

Neko

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Posted

Around 1956 or '57 my parents gave me a blue Whitman folder for Lincoln Cents. I don't have any idea why because no one in my family ever collected coins. I began trying to fill the holes from my father's pocket change. One day I was at the local corner store checking the dates on my change when the store owner asked if I wanted to look at the pennies in his cash register. What a treat for a little kid! I found early Lincolns with mint marks and even several Indian Head pennies! I've been hooked ever since.

 

Rey, I love those bust quarters you posted. I've been looking for quality like that in that series for a long time. So far, no luck. Nothing I can afford anyway. laugh.gif

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John Martinez

John Martinez

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For a grade school age birthday present, my aunts gave me an album half full of Linc's. I soured through pocket change for years. I put it on the back burner until recently when I pulled out the album to look at it. I realized that the album did not cover back to 1909 so here I go again....

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jtryka

jtryka

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Posted

Just for fun, here are a couple pictures of some of the coins from that old coffee can that got me started:

1853p1cobv.JPG

1853p1crev.JPG

1856p10cobv.JPG

1856p10crev.JPG

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astrostu

astrostu

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Posted

When I was very young (primary school), the cashier at a local fruit and vegetable market gave me a wheat cent and told me to keep it, that it might be worth something some day. Being the packrat that I was, I kept it along with my other collections (rocks, shells, pens, pencils, etc.). Over the years I started to accumulate more wheat cents and just kept them (up to maybe a dozen). Then I got into stamps, but didn't like the idea that I couldn't pronounce the hobby and that if I sneezed then there goes my collection.

 

So coins was a natural progression, and I liked the idea that a coin was always worth face value or more, whereas a canceled stamp was worthless except to a collector. This switch was around 1994, 6th grade, and I would mainly do proof sets and modern circulating stuff, and go to the bank and get dollars and half dollars. I mostly stopped in college simply because my collection was home and I wasn't, and I didn't spend cash (used credit/checks) and so didn't have change to look through. Now at grad school, it's ballooned again and I tend to add several hundred coins a year now.

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