Having a bout of insomnia, so thought I'd ask 'What is the worst thing you saw happen to a coin?' Here's mine: When I was a YN in the wilds of Canada, I went over a mutual friend's house for the afternoon. At some point we started talking about hobbies and after discussion of baseball cards & comic books (both of which I collected), I mentioned I also like collecting coins. My new friend said, 'Oh, my Dad does too, do you want to see some?' to which I of course said yes. He brought a couple seriously beautiful Victoria Canadian Cents out to the garage where my friends and I were sitting & showed them to me, where I commented how nice they looked; much better than anything I could afford...but some day hoped I would own. My new "friend" fired up the belt sander and filed down the reverses. After he was happy with his sanding, he fired up his Dad's grinder and polished up the reverse side of the coins so they'd be nice & shiny. He then turned to me with a big smile and asked what I thought. I thought a lot of things..... but said, 'Why would you do that?' Apparently, it was a normal thing for him, every-time he & his Dad argued, he'd pick a coin or two out of his Dad's collection and do some 'altering'. Then he'd place the coins back in his Dad's albums.....obverse up apparently. So.....I stopped hanging out with coin killer. Years later when his father passed away, I ran into him; after passing along my condolences and asking how he was doing I heard his hard luck story......blah, blah,; apparently all his wealthy father left him his prized coin collection. Karma......such fun if you're around long enough to witness it.
That's so awesome that the only thing he got was the coin collection. Somehow it brings to mind the parable of the talents.
I actually collect coins that have had things happen to them. I just got a Knights of Pythias coin that has a bunch of cool stuff written on it, and I have a lot of coins that have been countermarked, holed and used as tools. As long as it doesn't completely ruin the coin I think it's cool to think what might have happened to the coin in it's long history.
I think the worst was as a young collector meeting someone else who said they used toothpaste to clean all their silver coins they showed mt their album of mercury dimes all circulated all blast white and horribly cleaned I was. Not impressed I remember them asking me but why would you leave your coins dirty?
There is a thread on here where a YN decided to "experiment" on a coin by doing all sorts of things from polishing to baking it to blow torching it. In the end he gave away the crispy and pockmarked coin away on the contest forum here.
Years back a few of us guy had nothing to do on a hot Memphis night in front of the hotel we were staying looking a the trolly tracks. We took some pennies placed them on the Track and waited for the next trolly to go by. It did and flattened out a bunch of coins. The someone said that the trolly could get derailed. It didn't our luck.
http://www.cointalk.com/threads/how-to-torture-a-coin.49000/ Scroll down a bit to see the final results.
At a local coin club meeting, I was talking about ancients, passing them around. A nice old guy dropped my Ptolemy Tetradrachm on the linoleum floor and it broke in half.
