So, I'm helping my auctioneer friend sort coins before his auction yesterday. Since I didn't hear about the auction until about two hours prior to start time, I didn't have much time to go through everything he had as thoroughly as I like to do (I like to double-check his counts on items, get counts on bulk items, check for key dates.) Usually, I try to get everything as prepared as possible to make it easy to sell - silver contents on the foreign stuff, weights or counts on bags of coins, organize the items according to item numbers, etc. etc.... Well, I didn't have time to do all that tonight...and there was this coin sitting there with a commemorative date range. It looked silver, it looked like a US coin, but had no denomination or silver content stamped on it like a silver round. I'd never seen it before...and since I'm out in the middle of BFE, I have no WI-FI to look it up...plus, no time to do so either. I set it in a box with some German 5 Mark coins and the auction began. Well, bidding was lukewarm to say the least on these coins. A guy who normally buys all the silver dollars and ASE's won the first choice out of the box, and he took a silver-round-looking Kennedy coin. No date, no denomination, no silver content. $15. But he only took that one...so again we went for another round of choice. This time, I won with a bid of $3... Knowing that the German 5 mark coins had a silver content of .2250 per coin (about $6 each) I took all 6...and figured, "What the hey, I'll take a chance on that other coin." Auction closed (I won a 1979 proof set with a Type 2 SBA in it for $5.50, which I sold to one of the other auction attendees for $45 later on...score!) and I got home and decided to look up what I'd gotten for my $3...which is this coin: Turns out I now own my first "So-Called Dollar," a Philadelphia Mint medal made in 1961. The coin had a max mintage of 20,000, originally sold for $2.50, and is about 21 g of sterling silver. (This is all I can glean from Google/Heritage/eBay so far.) As far as value...there have been 3 completed listings on eBay for about $30/each and one still listed for $65. Not bad for a $3 flier! Anyone in here a SCD expert? I'd love to learn more about this medal!
