Since it has been over a year since I started doing some research on Dads collection, I have found that there is a huge amount of knowledge and experience among collectors. I make a distinction between knowledge and experience, they are not the same things. It is often said that experience is the best teacher, its lessons stick with us more than the knowledge we glean from books, it is a hard teacher, its lessons can cost us money, time and can be frustrating. Personally, I think experience is a poor teacher, it can teach one collector that good deals can be had on ebay, it can teach another collector that ebay is a haven for scam artists, it teaches one collector that you cannot trust anybody, it teaches another that people are trustworthy and will try to be fair with you. I was talking to a contractor the other day, who had done some work on the house we are getting ready to sell, I mentioned how dad had collected thousands of state quarters, and how I could find no dealer willing to pay more than face, and they did not really want to do that. He informed me that he was something of a collector, so I asked him some questions, making conversation, I showed him a pocket piece, a 1971 kennedy half, he remarked that the piece was pretty bright and shiny, I told him it used to have some green spots on it but a week travelling around in my pocket took those marks off it. I asked him how much it was worth, he told me that it was not worth much because after 1964 all the kennedy halves were not made of silver, that silver was now worth 15 dollars an ounce. I told him that one sister had taken dads penny collection, yes I used the word penny. He told me that the pennies from 1943 were made of steel, and that if you wanted to preserve them you would clean them with a cloth and then apply pledge spray wax to preserve the moisture, I told him that many of dads steel cents were a little rusty, he told me that san francisco made the rustiest steel cents and that they were melted down, but now they are worth the most. I told him that I had heard that cents were now not made of copper, he affirmed that they quit making them of copper in 1964. It was a pleasent conversation and I was pleased that he considered himself a collector, maybe next time I hire him I will show him some of dads currency collection and see where that will take the conversation. I had another coin conversation the next day, a fellow worker showed me a 1942 nickel and asked me if it was made of silver, I looked at the back and told him no, that the silver nickels had a big mintmark over monticellos dome, he told me the best way to tell if a coin is silver is to drop it on a hard surface and listen for the silver ring. I do not know if this test for silver content is confined to mexican collectors, but a dealer I talked to told me that he has a few mexican customers who regularly do the "drop on the rim and listen" test for silver. I have another friend at work who tells me that he saves coins, he gave me a two ounce zapata medal, I thought that was very friendly so I gave him as a return gift a cull morgan, a silver eagle, and a scales mexican bullion piece, I have no idea of the medals value beyond silver weight, it does weigh slightly over two troy ounces, but I knew he treasured the coin so I did not want to have him lose the treasure, the same guy also had a circulated 500 dollar bill, that he used at face value. Another coworker told me when we were talking of settling the estate how his grandfather had a lot of old gold dollars that were stolen. I hear quite a few of those stories about stolen collections, and stolen pieces, enough that I consider a yearly safe deposit fee cheap. Most guys who I have talked to will set aside any coin that they percieve as being rare, their experience tells them what is rare or common, so most guys will have old worn wheat cents, silver certificates, 2 dollar bills, some old silver they found in change, or steel cents that they sometimes think is silver. Again it is experience that is the teacher, I get the impression sometimes when I tell them that a steel cent circulated might be worth a dime, that they think I am trying to talk the value of what they have down, either from envious cussedness or to possibly get it from them for a fraction of its value. Again this could be experience teaching them, I went to one local dealer once who I saw offer a customer ten cents a piece for buffalo nickels, these were obviously part of someones collection, they were in 2X2's and were marked with a grade, the same dealer had a bargain box filled with dateless buffalo nickels for a dollar each. I have some dealers who I have visited who make me good offers when I have little money, and others whose business manner leaves much to be desired, One dealer talked to me for about an hour, very helpful and solicitous and eager to help a new collector, the next time I saw him he was brusque and bordering on rude. I have found from experience that sometimes the best deals are offered to me when I profess ignorance, and sometimes if a dealer suspects I am knowledgable about coins he starts to suspect that I am cherry picking his pockets. One dealer who I personally respect, and even like, who is an example of integrity to me asked me once if I had cherry picked all his bust half dollars, He had sold them to me for about greysheet bid. I was a little surprised by the question so I told him that every half I had bought from him was an r-1 or 2, that the only semi rare one I have, an r-5 had come from an antique store that was having a 20% off sale, that even tho I had the overton book I was not studied enough in it to recognize by sight some of the rarer varieties, I promised him that if I ever picked up one that was a rarity I would let him know and we could renegotiate the deal. I feel that he did not receive this in the way I intended, he did tell me that he had been seeing a new customer who was pulling scams on him, and I think it was a case of experiences bad teaching happening before my eyes. So my rant is this, experience is a terrible teacher, a good teacher will impart knowledge impartially, two plus two will always equal four, but experience teaches some people that you can lie cheat or steal and get away with it, it teaches other people that being fair will get you nowhere. So, I try to temper experiences teachings with the experiences of others and also with the knowledge of what is right according to my conscience before God. So far my experience has been trying to teach me to not be patient, one dealer the first time I met him and before I knew a proof from a polish, offered me a mint state Isabella quarter for 425. I passed on it, remembering the admonitions to know the series, know the grading, and buyer beware, I did my study, saved the money and went to pick it up only to find it had sold a little bit before I got there. Along the same lines, at the last coin show I went to I wanted to find an attractive type one slq, the first one I looked at was a graded fh au-58 for 290, I looked at a bunch more, when I went to return to the first one to buy it, the dealer had packed up, lesson being buy the first one you see that you like. Now if that is not a poor lesson that experience is trying to teach me what is? Another in the same line was a different dealer, the guy is very smart, he offered me a high graded woodchopper for about 25% back of greysheet, again, not knowing the value and not wanting to violate the lessons that much more experienced collectors have taught me I turned it down. There is an old russian proverb that I picked up reading Solzhenitsyn, A man mauled by a bear in the forest is afterwards afraid of a tree stump. That is the baleful effect of experience, we take our experiences and try to apply them as good students do. Where that fails is that while you might do well to weigh experience you can make too much of it. The dealer who offered you a low price for your buffalo nickels might have been buying a ton of them and was low on cash to buy more, the dealer who suspected you of cherry picking his pockets might have had a customer do that and was learning from experience. The collector who told you that you could only get 6 times face for your old silver might have had only that amount offered to him. Experience is like the luggage we pick up as we travel thru life, sometimes it is best to let it lay and not carry it with you. A few years back I knew one old gentleman who has since passed on, he had lived thru the day when all the money he had in the bank had been lost, his experience taught him not to trust banks, his experience taught him it was better to keep his money around, the argument that he might lose interest by not putting it into an account or that he might lose value thru inflation did not trump his experience, that putting it into a bank would cause its total loss. Now I know that this whole blogisode has been one sided, and that experience does have value, thank God that there was enough experience around that the schemes to transfer social security money into the stock market were thwarted. Experience can have enormous value but it should also be applied with knowledge, check out the experiences of others to temper your own, no person has all the experience of every person, it just might be that your experiences are rarer than you think, and that most people have different experiences and draw different lessons than you do. In any case it does not cost you a cent to listen and many people will count you as a friend if you listen to them with a sympathetic ear.
