New Contest with some really good prizes

No one in my family ever collected coins nor did any of my relatives. My introduction to collecting actually began in a poolroom. I started playing pool in 1956 when I was nine years young, and it happened that I had a natural talent for the game. In the summer of 1957, I was in the local poolroom playing 9-Ball and gambling with a 16-year old by the name of Joe Clement. In those days, you never put money on the table. Instead, you kept track of the tally on the "wire" and settled up at the end. When we finished playing, Joe owed me $5, and he gave me four dollar bills and a silver dollar. I had never seen one before. Since the bank where I had a savings account was only a block away, I went there and asked one of the tellers if she had any like the dollar coin I showed her. I could barely see over the top of the counter, so I lifted myself up and rested the full weight of my body on my forearms placed on the counter. The teller spread out a bunch of the coins on the counter, and I picked out four and gave her the remaining $4 I had just won. Subsequently, I went to the library, found a Red Book of US Coins and learned that they were Morgan silver dollars. This became a routine for me whenever I won money gambling at pool, and I rarely lost. I would go to the bank and use some of my winnings to buy Morgan dollars. Within a few years, I had accumulated more than 800 circulated silver dollars, and I sold this collection in the mid-60's for $4000 because pool was taking up too much of my time. I never lost the attraction for the big old cartwheels, and when I resumed collecting a couple decades later, Morgan silver dollars were the first coins I started buying.

Chris

 

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Bet you still wish you had those now, eh, Chris?

Must have been a nice age to grow up, before the saturation of the digital age.

 

[video=youtube;qam1fbQmA_s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qam1fbQmA_s[/video]

 

Now that's what I call a find, ratpack!

That is a very cool story cpm ... those were the days ... go the bank and get a Morgan for $1. :thumb:
Do you ever wish you could have your 800 circs back for $4k? Talk about memories in each one. So glad you picked up collecting Morgans again! Post your favorite Morgan in your collection (I want to see it!)
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Great idea for a contest flyers, thank you!

My Grandfather is the one who got me started in collecting when I was about 7 years old. Every weekend when my Mom and I would go visit him, he would let me look through his coin jar. It had coins from all over the world and I was always filled with awe every time I got to look through them. One day he said I could choose one coin to take home with me. It was a late 1700's Hungarian Thaler. I've been hooked ever since

 

Yeah, the nostalgic remembrances of those first coins make me wish I had kept them. By the way, the first Morgan that I chose from those at the bank that day in 1957 was the year that my maternal grandmother was born. It was an 1893-CC, and my recollection of its condition was that it was probably VF/XF.

Probably the dumbest decision I ever made came in the summer of 1964. A couple of months before I turned 17, I won $5200 playing straight pool one day. Since we lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, I considered the possibility of going to the Treasury Department and buying five bags of Morgans, but I decided to buy a brand new 1964 Corvette instead.

"Those were the days!"

Chris

 

It's interesting how many people started collecting because of their parents or grandparents ... it's nice when it's passed down like that.

 

My interest in coin collecting began when I was in middle school. One day, my dad and I were looking for something inside his large gun safe when I discovered a stack of old Whitman Coin Folders. I started flipping through them and my dad explained that when he was younger collected coins. I thought they were really interesting. Then, I picked up one of the folders and it was heavy. I opened it to find a nearly complete 1941-74 folder...and my eyes shot to the 1943 cents. I had never seen anything like them. My dad explained the story behind them and I was hooked. A few days later we visited a local small coin shop and I bought my first coins, a few 1943 cents and a BU 1881-S Morgan Dollar. I got to know the shop owner and soon was spending hours in his shop chatting, looking at coins and learning. I even remember one time my parents told him I had gotten a bad grade on a test and he refused to sell me any coins until my grades improved...and it motivated me to do better in school. It didn't take long, and I was hooked for life.

 

Excuse me while i go throw up ... Oh that's so SAD.

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i hope my kids (if i have any) will get into collecting. it's nice to think my dad's collection of lincoln cents could be passed down and not sold.

 

Nice

 

Oh, gosh! That would be hard to do. I love them all. I've started working on a Morgan album in "My Profile". You can view some of them there, but I still have a long way to go to finish it. Here is one of my favorite Carson City Morgans.

 

Like many of the people before me have answered, my father was the one to get me started collecting. I can remember him having a few morgan dollars in his jewelry box, and I would always like to see them whenever I could. Eventually he gave me a complete set of whitman coin folders and some wheat pennies to put into them. We had a huge glass water jug which was filled with all kinds of coins which I was also able to raid and use to fill my albums. Later in life before he passed away I received all of the coins and also bills that he had collected over the years. I took a break from collecting like most people do during their years of discovering the world, but now I'm back with more enthusiasm and also armed with more knowledge and bait (money) for luring in better coins

Great contest, really brings back some memories I haven't thought of in a while.

 

I was checking out an antique shop a couple of years ago and I came across a bin of foreign coins that stated ten cents each or eleven for a dollar. So I picked out eleven coins that I liked the designs of and returned home. I really had a lot of fun looking them up on the Internet and trying to figure out where they were from and the history behind them each. After that it became a bit of an addiction.

 

Boy Scout merit badge.
That got me started with the blue whitman folders then after high school I started up again with more expensive coins after visiting a coin store and meeting a great store owner. He really helped teach me the ropes and I learned tons.
So not a grand story but it's mine.

Thanks FLyers.

 

like many of the others i got started from my grandparents. It was mostly my grandma who got me into collecting. About 10 or so months ago my grandma gave me a bunch of old coins mercury dimes, seated dimes, morgans, peace dollars and you name it, i even found a 1910-s wheat cent in the bunch. Well from then on i was hooked. I quickly became addicted to this hobby and kept asking my grandma for more coins. She said she might have some in here cedar chest and was i surprised to find at least 15 morgan/peace dollars, a 2 cent piece, many silver dimes mercs seated and roosevelt, and some nice barber quarters, and even nicer walkers and ben franklin half dollars. She, like the great grandma she was gave them to me no questions or anything. I practically extracted every coin she had in her house lol. She was happy to look for coins in her house because she knew it made me happy. I know she has looked everywhere, she told me she searched even her kitchen drawers and i found some nice steelies. Anyway to wrap it up, because of how generous my grandma is I now visit coins sites regularly,roll search, search all the change in get back, buy coins, visit the coin store and even search my bills for star notes and errors ( and did i forget to mention the 100's of silver certificates my grandma gave me LOL !!!!). I love my grandma !!!

Thanks for the contest!

 

I like reading these stories too. Here is mine.
My granny would get some dimes when she would take me up north, so we could look through them on rainy days. I never really thought about the dimes after we came back, it was just another part of the summer break experience. Fast forward many years later I am taking care of my grandpa. I started looking through rolls in my down time. He would joke about how he was going to mess up my sorting whenever I had to go in the other room for something. I told my mom about his jokes. My mom then proceeds to give me the silver dimes I had sifted with my granny as a kid. They were still in the cigar tubes we put them in. She told me grandpa had coins as well so I asked him about them. He got the morgans for face when he was in his mid 20's at the bank and saved them.
Thanks for the contest.

 

It was simple for me. My mother worked at a bank, so she was always bringing home any wheats, silver, or odd coins that she found. As a kid I looked at these coins all the time. Let them go by the wayside for awhile, and then a few years ago, I had evey intent of selling them. I pulled them out of storage and guess what? I still have them and have a renewed interest in numismatics.

 

Thanks for the contest .


My collecting journey started back in January 2008. I didn't know a thing about coins, but I thought it would be cool to buy some silver and gold. I decided to find a few forums and narrow it down to whatever one I liked better, and basically learn all I could by the internet, books, and that forum (which turned out to be CoinTalk). I got A LOT of help from many different members.

Over the first few days, I was amazed by all these sorts of coins and really didn't know where to go, but since silver was my goal, I decided on morgans. Little did I know, there where different values, depending on what year and what mintmark. A lot to learn. Morgans quickly were off my collecting list, because I saw so many other coin that I liked.

Over this learning process, I was also interested in ancient coinage, which I was amazed that I would even be able to own some. The fact that I was already interested made me want to get some. But for the first year, I was all over the place. From ancients, to US, to world, back to US. But while I was collecting US and world coinage, I always collected and looked at ancients whenever I could.

In a nutshell, ancients won me over. I now have been collecting them for nearly four years, and my love for them will never stop. Now that I have seen so many coins and realize what is common and what isn't, my interest in even ancients have narrowed to the more irreplaceable stuff (errors, for instance).

It's funny how you can come in a hobby looking to "invest" and get addicted to not just collecting, but learning about your particular interest in numismatics. Granted, I still have that dealer-wannabe mentality, but I also have set aside that personal collection of coins that "speak" to me.

stainless

 

My story is perhaps stereotypical; my grandpa gave me some coins and over time I grew to appreciate them. They were my greatest bond with my uncle and grandfather. I remember always striking up conversation with my uncle on the subject of silver prices or error types; when he passed away last year from CF I began to treasure the coins he added to my collection more. He was always so generous, giving my sisters and I shiny mercuries and unique errors he had bought on eBay and at coin shows for us. My love of coins was initially for financial gain; over the years, I've come to treasure most of my items for less concrete, investment-driven motives. I'm glad to say I'm not just some silver bug refreshing the silver prices on 'silverprice.com' hoping to turn a marginal profit; I sincerely enjoy the story and symbolic meaning of money, and thus, consider myself more invested in the hobby personally than I am financially.