United States: 1944 silver Walking Liberty half dollar PCGS MS65. Cert. #09161178. Mintage: 28,206,000. Ex-Northeast Numismatics, 20 August 2026, as part of a 5-coin swap deal. This coin is the result of a deliberate downgrade. You see, I already had a Walking Liberty half type coin in PCGS MS65- and it was a semi-key date, too: the 1938-D. I swapped that coin, worth $1,500 at the time, for this coin, which PCGS values at $165 as I type this (9/2026). Now why would I accept a trade that resulted in a $1,335 downgrade, you ask? Well, since I am a only a type collector and not a date-and-mint collector of Walking Liberty halves, I didn't really need the better-date coin. So by "trading down" to this more common-date example, I ended up with another PCGS MS65 Walking Liberty half of the same grade and from the same grading service- this coin. And it is a nicely lustrous example with great eye appeal. Crucially, I also got four more very nice Mint State coins in the trade which filled gaps in my collection. So it was worth the downgrade from a scarcer date to this more common one. Essentially, it was a "their five for my one" swap. And this coin was struck in my mother's birthyear. I've got a little subset of 1944 coins going on. It is housed in an early OGH (old green holder) PCGS Generation 2.1 slab that was encapsulated between October and December of 1989, so the plastic is rather scarce. I don't collect rare slabs, either, but that's kind of fun. 016750
I don't think the pics are ideal. My next long project is gonna be to shoot short videos of all my lustrous (or colorfully-toned) pieces so I can make animated GIFs. Like I did for this token I got in the same swap deal. That'll help when the luster and/or color doesn't across in the static images.
Are you saying that they doctored the photos a bit? It's lusterous just not as much of a blazer as you thought?
No, no, nothing like that. Their pics (which I have used above, at least for now) just weren't as high-resolution as I'd like, and don't quite do the coin justice, in my opinion. NEN's standard image size for the inventory on their website is 500x500 pixels while I use an 800x800 standard for my collection. Their pics are adequate. Just not fantastic. And they didn't include slab images, so I had to shoot those myself, with my phone.
