Bored one afternoon, I decided I'd drudge through my misc coins that I have scattered in multiple places, and to my surprise I found this 41 Merc that I had some years ago marked as a DDO and then for some reason scratched it out (I suppose I may have concluded it was machine doubling, maybe?). Anyway, I now believe it's an FS-101. Surprisingly, there's not a lot of examples of this DDO and only one known in MS. My conclusion, you never know when looking at a coin years later you'll find something you were not expecting to find!
I'm thinking it's the real deal. Even has the same die polish marks below the "dot" between "In God.." as well has having been labeled a "MDS" by James Wiles.
Also, the example on Vista is an EDS, according to James, my example is the first example he's seen of a MDS. The coin is currently at NGC for attribution which will be interesting since they've never attributed an FS-101 in MS yet. PCGS has only one MS65 example and 5 AU. There's currently an AU58 on Ebay with an asking price of $1500....ouch! http://www.ebay.com/itm/1941-Mercur...435899?hash=item58d12be13b:g:XNcAAOSwMTZWRnY9
Whelp, good news! I submitted this dime to NGC and the grade is in - MS62 w/ attribution making this the 2nd known mint state example of this variety. Not including this coin, PCGS has seen only 10 examples (1 MS65, 5 AU58, EF and lower) and NGC only 1(AU 58), even assuming that none of these numbers represent re-submissions, this DDO variety seems to be extremely rare. Now my question is whether to bother getting it crossed over to PCGS for the reg set crowd or leave it in an NGC slab and send her off into the world.
I'd leave her be , unless you want to put her in the PCGS registry . Congrats on the grade and find .