I posted this on the CU boards the other day,Just wanted to share it here also.......... I'm not a writer,as a matter of fact,I type with one finger, .........Just wanted to share some great things that happened a couple months ago to a couple of wannabe in the" coin business" guys......Im a jeweler(bench jeweler/setter) by trade for a little over 30 years now,age 52, About a year ago with the retail jewelry business slow in our area i told my wife that we have to do something in addition to jewelry to get us through the lull in business at the time,i'd always been interested in coins but like alot of folks never applied myself to to really learn the business, grading etc, So without having any background and little knowledge i decided to do the" modern crap route"which is not intended to be a hit against anyone, it was a way to get in and make a couple bucks while i was learning, and to be honest. ....buying a monster box and sending it across the street to get slabbed and then selling them on ebay is not rocket science...its business and luck( IE ms70) this was perfect for my purpose, it would give me additional income that i needed while allowing me to learn the coin business,so i did, In the meantime i got my dealer setup across the street because technically i had been in the coin business for several years selling shipwreck,1715 fleet and atocha coins, it worked great, especially with the 2006 w ase and the 2006 ase sets....we slayed um.....then came the Minnesota DDR,DDO and the extra leaf up/down and so on. .....During this time a good friend and fishing buddy of mine used to come in the store and see me sorting through hundreds and hundreds of at that time Minnesota quarters and selling them on ebay, he's a successful contractor,so he says to me one day i wanna get into this, i told him i'm new at this and even though it was working out so far that alot of it was just plain luck. ........He wants in so he buys a monster box even though it was about a month and a half to late to really make any money on it he got it and it and we had it slabbed across the street...............he only got (5) ms 70's out of 500 ase's, i figured he's history, he just got a hard lesson in the coin business,(a couple months earlier i had gotten (33) ms 70's from a box) no way he said no problem it'll take a while but i'll make $$ at this, and then said whats next! I told him that very soon the fed will be releasing the new 1$ presidential coins and we need to get our banks to order as many boxes as we can get our hands on,so my bank at the time said they would order us some.....so he works a deal with his bank to get some........for the first week or so after the release of the gw's we got several but not alot of boxes and then the news broke about the "no edge lettering""smoothie" errors in florida where we live,so we put heat on our banks to get as many of these boxes as possible, My bank was so,so about it and got us a couple boxes a week but my friend just would not take no for an answer and convinced his bank that he had to get alot of these coins no matter what.............so a week later we checked a couple boxes from my bank and found nothing,the he shows up with 5 boxes which had the correct "smoothie" date on them but not the correct insp. #. ...We searched the 5 boxes and found 24 "smoothies"we were ecstatic!......to make things better he had convinced the bank at the time he picked these up to get him 20 more boxes the next week, so were thinking we would get at least 20-25 out of every 5 boxes that we had coming, The day that we were to get the 20 boxes from the bank he went in to pick them up and by mistake the armoured truck had brought 20,000 in of sac dollars instead of the washington boxes,they said no problem we'll be back in a couple hours........a couple hours later we get the call that the boxes are in and he goes and picks them up and calls from his cell and tells me the date and insp #'s on the boxes, They were all the same and all the correct #'s..............I said don't stop anywhere come here now.we both knew at that point that we probably hit the mother load,when he got to the store we popped a couple beers and opened the first roll in the first box and 18 of the 25 coins in the roll were smoothies, the rest is history,in all we found over 11,000 smoothies as well as the only "missing edge lettering and missing reverse clad layer gw" I'd like to also tell the board about a very special member here who i had never met or spoke with until this very fortunate find we had, his board name is DENNIS H I was overwhelmed when we hit the mother load and knew that i needed some kind of help to try and make the right decisions on the best way to handle this knowing that it had to be kept secret for the time being, All of my early lurking on the board payed off ,i had read many posts about many subjects by many board members in the previous months and decided that i would confide in DENNIS and ask his opinions so i could try to make the right decisions as to how to handle this windfall, As i stated in another post i did'nt know Dennis,he did'nt know me, as far as i knew i thought he would write me off as some kind of looney tune,i approached him through a pm on the boards,introduced myself and told him i needed good sound advice and opinions on how to handle a find of a life time and offered to pay for his help, He refused the pay and said congratulations, how and what can i do to help.for the last couple months i've asked his opinion on alot of decisions i made, his opinions have helped me greatly ..this is what it's all about folks.....people like DENNIS are a blessing, this is one fine gentlemen..this board is very fortunate to have a man of his character....i owe you one DENNIS thank you......ERIC
Just in case anyone was wondering about what impact this news will have on current prices for these, We waited to tell our story until all but a few of the slabbed ones were keeping for a rainy day were gone, The bulk of these have been slabbed and are included in the census reports at the TPG's the best info i have on the population of these is 60,000-75,000 total,with ours being the last major find (hoard) which we found on 3/23/07, there were approx. 6,000 found from the same boxes in our area within a couple days of ours, these are also included in the TPG census! I'm posting what IMO is accurate info,I have been in the thick of this since our find, Other opinions I'm sure will vary, Thats why they call them opinions ! :thumb:
Great story. Now if that would only happen in Northern California I'd be buying up yhe D's we get from the Denver mint.
