What got you into numismatics?

if you feel like sharing what got you started in this hobby, please do. i will start: earlier last year we literally found buried treasure. my wifes uncle passed away pretty much destitute after a career as a doctor. his wife(my wifes aunt) and himself spent money like it was going out of fashion while he had his practice, and continued to do so after he retired and sold his practice. his health got really bad in the last ten years, and he ended up senile and unable to really communicate. medical bills wiped out any savings, and right after he passed, his wife moved out of the house they had. while cleaning out the house, we found about $35,000 in silver and gold coins and raw nuggets, and another 6-7k worth of coins with numismatic value. no one knew hoard existed, not even his wife. it fell upon me to appraise, catalog, and sell the collection for his wife. she gave me a a large chunk of the collection for myself because she would have had her son(who refused to even take any time or effort into looking at the coins for her) take it to a pawn shop and lost it all anyway. well this was the site that i came to for help with what i had, and the passion people had for coins rubbed off on me. i started my own collection, and here i am today. and BTW, i was looking at my first posts on this site, and it breaks my heart at the thought of any varieties i may have let slip away in all the OGP boxes i sold.

 

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Cool story riff.

As a kid in the 70's I spent a lot of time alone in the library reading old books about old times. I was particularly fascinated by what they used to call the "Dark Ages."

School taught you the Greeks figured out everything, the Roman Empire ruined it then collapsed then nothing happened for hundreds of years. Suddenly Da Vinci and friends were enlightened. I didn't buy it. There had to have been a lot going on.

Well, I walked into an antique shop at age 16 and found this in a junk box:


Justinan 1 circa 550AD

I researched it and it blew my mind I could touch history. Who used that coin? What did it see? Was it in a battle? And it was from a time in history I was heavily into.

Went to college, found girls, lived overseas for a decade, got married and had kids and was "distracted" from the hobby many times but always came back to it.

 

I was a kid penny collector in the early 80's. That sort of fizzled out like it usually does for kids.

A year ago I started getting into bullion. While doing that I started enjoying the history and beauty of old coins. So I busted out the old penny collection and have started dabbling in it again.

I am currently in the "reading anything coin / mint related" phase. Still not sure what direction I want to take, so I'm planning on getting a few variations of everything to show how each coin has evolved.

Time will tell. I am enjoying my time on CoinTalk.

 

here are pictures of what i got to deal with as an entry into this hobby. it really was buried treasure. buried under collector plates: http://www.cointalk.com/t202430/
http://www.cointalk.com/t202641/
http://www.cointalk.com/t203152/
http://www.cointalk.com/t202801/

 

My dad and I would spend hours and hours pouring through cents to fill albums. We did this before I was old enough to properly handle baseball cards. Circulated cents were easier and even though he wasn't a coin collector, I think he understood and valued the time we spent together working on the hobby. We never finished a book together, and once I was old enough to be trusted with baseball cards the cents fell by the wayside.
After years of not collecting, I rediscovered our old albums and have been back actively collecting for the past 7 years. Just like it was back in the day filling the old wheat cent albums, it's the thrill of the hunt. Looking back on what my dad and I did, I will make certain to involve my newborn son in my hobby. I can't remember a lot of my childhood from the age when we worked on whitman albums, but I will never forget sitting in my bedroom floor with a large metal bowl of wheat cents and the great feeling I would get when we would fill a hole.
Then there is the story of my most prized coin, my Poppop's Peace Dollar:

Hope you enjoy the stories as much as I like retelling them

 

I was at my old next door neighbors house when I was 7 and he showed me a few coins he had collected and I thought they were really interesting since they were designs I had never seen before. His mom had noticed my interest in them so she gave me a newspaper clipping of an ad for either a Morgan dollar or a Buffalo, I can't remember which one it was, and told me to give it to my mom so I did. My mom bought the coin for me, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

I got my start gambling in the local poolroom in 1957 at age 10.

Chris

 

Hey, I remember your intro thread about that collection!

For me, it was my grandparents -- they had a small assortment of older coins that they'd collected long before, probably in the 1940s or earlier. I think what really got me hooked, though, was my brother's interest. Because, you know, when you're 6, and your 12-year-old brother is willing to sit down and look at something with you, that thing is automatically the coolest thing in the world.

 

This is the first sentence of a fascinating memoir. Tell us more.

 

It's been a slow burn. I must've been in 3rd grade when my grandfather noticed my love of comics. He tried to get me into stamp and coin collecting, but I was never really interested. Something about the coin shop he'd take me to scared me. Friends at school would share a few coins, but I still could never get into it. I sadly remember the pennies he gave me as a present. I buried them in the backyard and pretended they were treasure, and then I dug them up and spent them on junk food at the grocery store.

He willed me a part of his stamp collection and half of his coins. I sold the stamps for $250, which I now feel was a bad idea but there's nothing I can do about it, and while I was wavering back and forth about selling his coins, my son (3 at the time) jumped in and said he wanted to keep them. We've been slowly collecting coins ever since.

Everything my grandfather had was circulated and kept in an attic, so it's all probably considered junk bullion, but that's okay. My son and I are basically collecting circulated coins until I gain enough knowledge to collect something older--probably mercury dimes, wheat pennies, and walking liberties. I'm also waiting for the price of silver and gold to drop so I can buy a ton of bullion and hoard it away.

 

My grandmother found a bonanza of gold and silver coins in her house when she moved in. Ever since I looked, graded, and estimated the price of them, I have been into coins since. :soccer:

 

First, no one in my family ever played pool nor did any of them collect coins.

On a late summer day in 1956, one of the older neighborhood boys asked me if I wanted to go to the poolroom with him. I had never even seen a poolroom before, so I went along. The local poolroom was on the main street of town in a basement beneath a county newspaper. We walked down the concrete steps into the poolroom. Inside, the walls were cinderblock, and there were five tables from front to back with a wooden bench seat running the length of each side wall. The owner, who I later learned was Ray Weddell asked me how old I was, and when I told him that I was 9, he told me to get out. As I was leaving I couldn't help but hear the "click, click" of the balls as they were struck echoing off the walls.

I couldn't get that "click, click" out of my mind, and so the next day I went back to the poolroom alone. Seeing that Ray was there, I sat down on the end of the bench closest to the door just in case I happened to get run out again. Ray looked over at me, but this time, he didn't say a word. I was watching an older man shooting balls on the front table. His name was Billy Sipple, in his mid-30's and he worked at the poolroom part time for Ray. After a while, he asked me if I wanted to play some, and the first game that he taught me was straight pool. It turned out that I had a natural talent for pool, and by the time I was 13, I could run 100 balls in straight pool practically all of the time. I fell in love with pool, and I spent every possible moment I could at the poolroom.

Anyway, when I was 10, I was playing 9-ball with a 16-year old named Joe Clement, and we were gambling......a nickel on the 5-ball and a dime on the 9-ball. In those days, you didn't throw money on the table after each game. We kept score on the "wire" that was used for straight pool. It was a 125-point scorekeeper with wooden discs for each point, or in this case each disc represented 5c. After a couple of hours, Joe finally quit, and he had lost $5. He paid me with four $1 bills and a silver dollar, which I later learned was called a Morgan.

I had never seen a silver dollar before, and since the bank where I had my savings account was only a block away, I walked to the bank to see if they might have some more. I went to the only teller who wasn't busy and asked her if she had any more of these, showing her the silver dollar. She took some out of her drawer and spread them on the counter, and I had to jump up and support my weight with my forearms on the edge of the counter in order to see them. I remember that one caught my eye. It was an 1893 (turned out to be a CC), and I took it because that was the year my maternal grandmother was born along with three others in exchange for the $4 I had just won.

This pretty much turned out to be a ritual for me. Every time I won any money gambling at the poolroom, I would go to the bank and exchange a good part of the winnings for more silver dollars. I rarely lost at pool, and as I got older, it became harder and harder to find anyone who would want to gamble with me. It took me about 6 years to accumulate 800 Morgan dollars, but pool was taking up so much of my time, that I sold this first collection to a local dealer for $4000.

I played pool for 55 years and still have a love for the game, but I finally had to quit because I developed an intention tremor in my stroke hand. I guess it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you don't need a good stroke to collect coins.

By the way, to this day, I still hear that "click, click"!

Chris

 

Awesome story! Thanks for sharing Chris. I especially enjoyed the part about getting an 1893 cc Morgan for face. :yes:

 

Wow Chris, great story. I can only imagine what it's like to own 800 morgans.

 

I got my start when my dad would bring home 3 rolls of pennies every Friday, 1 each for me and my two brothers. Of course back then all of them were wheaties. It was not unusual to find pennies from the teens. Whatever happened to all of them I have no clue.

 

I used to love going into antique shops. There was only one dealer that sold coins. He treated me very well when I was a child. He has since retired. I will never forget that man.

On a side note, I was at a local coin shop run by a friend of mine and this mother and her her two sons walk in with $100 face of liberty halves. She said she found them in her closet of a new house she had just purchased. First off why would she ever say she found them!? I always hear about people finding coins in their new houses. I don't understand how somebody sells a home and doesn't at least consider spending them for face value. Your story is quite different though.

 

A 1956 wheat cent in my dad's change when I was in 6th grade.
That's been quite a few years ago now. I still have the cent.

 

As a kid, I really enjoyed collecting sports cards and memorabilia with my dad and brother. I knew my dad was a bullion collector, but he never really talked about it much. I knew even less about his father's coin collecting, but I've recently learned that he has a pretty impressive collection that's spanned 60 or 70 years. I'm not at all close to my grandfather, so I'll likely never know.

Anyway, fast-forward past youthful innocence, rebellious teenage years and a series of profound existential crises in my early to mid-20's that led me from drug experimentation to heavy heroin and cocaine addiction. It took three overdoses and waking up with a tube in my throat to finally get me off to rehab.

Drugs and the drug lifestyle is extremely time consuming. My first couple of weeks sober were powerfully boring. Skipping past the how's and why's, I decided that roll-hunting cents to hoard copper could be a good time killer. The turning point for me was finding a 1909 VDB in bank rolled cents. I found an Indian Head and some other early wheat cents, but I got excited like I hadn't been in a very long time finding that coin. Over the first few months, my dad got me some Whitman books and pulled out some coins he had saved for me for years. Moving on, I got my family back together, got working again, rebuilt relationships with my parents, etc., and I can honestly say that coins have been an integral part of filling a gaping hole in my life.

As of the 20th of this month, I have two and a half years clean. Thanks for letting me share. :smile

 

Basically what got me started collecting was when I won an 1896 Indian head cent from online a couple of months ago. Then, this past summer, my uncle started talking to me about CRHing, so I went to the bank and got $5 in pennies. It just progressed from there. Also, my Grandpa started handing me down his old coins that he used to save, and that's what got me really hooked.

 

When I was in 2nd grade in 2001 I found a bunch of coins from Mexico mid 70-80's stuff I developed a interest in them. I asked my teacher Ms.Dancer if she knew stuff about them she then reffered me to go to the library to go check out some books. I read them and discovered the whole complex story behind a coin, I immediately got hooked on them. My teacher Ms.Dancer would also tell me about the state hood quarter program. I would one day like to thank My 2nd grade teacher Ms.Dancer, my 3rd grade teacher Mr.Butler, and the librarian Ms.Townsend they were all coin hobbyist that inputed their 2 cents of coin collecting to me.