Hello everyone, So I recently shared this story with some friends of mine, and the more I think about it the funnier and more heartfelt it is to me; so I figured I'd share it here too. The year was 2016. It was Friday on the second week of my first year in high school. Back then I was a 9th grade freshman and had just recently started collecting coins; my entire collection was essentially a 1923 mercury dime and a few wheat pennies. So I got used to sitting with some of my old elementary/middle school friends at lunch every day. We just did the typical dumb stuff 9th graders do, I rarely talked about numismatics. So one day one of my long-time friends pulls out a 1952 Benjamin Franklin half out of his wallet, and asks to place a bet of whether or not the vending machines will take it. I recognized it from the pictures of Franklin halves in the 2016 Redbook; the one that my LCS dealer had given me two weeks earlier. Then I offered to double his money for it. He counter-offered to trade it to me for a slice of microwaved red baron Hawaiian pizza. I accepted the trade; and one of my other friends turned to us and said "You know as soon as he gets home he's gonna sell it online for 50 bucks." Well, here I am in May of 2021. Half a decade, a jamboree, a pandemic, a graduation later and I still have the darn coin. Supposedly the half dollar was taken from his older brother's (who was then in the military/college, forgot which) coin jar. Whenever I look at this coin I think of the innocence me and my friends had back then; and yet it feels like only yesterday. Even though I have moved on to bigger, prettier, and more expensive coins, I can still remember and appreciate a time when junk silver and beater wheats/indians captivated my imagination. That's just not something a PCGS MS-sixty whatever CAC $5000 coin can do. I guess it's like a window to the soul of sorts, a warm memory from a bygone era. Or maybe I'm just up too late. You decide. Anyways, here's a pic of the coin. I'm also including a YouTube video that I recorded about 3 months after said story took place. (That shows the half dollar, duh)
I actually have a coin with a similar story myself @YoloBagels. It was about 2015 or so when I was still active with the Boy Scouts. Anyway, a scout I knew quite well came to me asking if I had a particular patch available to trade. He wasn't the type that traded patches, so he didn't have anything I was looking for at the time. Come to find out; he had apparently lost a patch from his first camping trip as a Boy Scout. At the time, if you wanted to trade patches, I was one of the go-to patch traders in my OA Lodge, and I had a reputation for trading patches for items such as belt buckles, vintage red epaulets, neckerchiefs, and anything else really as long as it was scout-related. Regardless, he somehow found out that I collected coins and offered a 1933 New Zealand 1/2 Crown in exchange for that particular patch. He wasn't a coin collector by any means and was all too eager to trade for that patch. I even told him that he'd be getting the worst end of that deal, but to him, that patch meant something sentimental, so I accepted the trade since it was mutually beneficial to both our goals. Anyway, here's the coin in question.
Nice story and reminiscence similar to what us old goats do from time to time. I have to go lie down now because your video made me dizzy.
Very cool story. Very much like my first coin. It was the late 1960’s and my mother handed me a Franklin half to buy my school lunch with. I had never seen a coin that large and went hungry at lunch that day. I still have that Franklin too.
So wait, you mean he gave you a Franklin half, and he got rid of a pizza slice for you after it was contaminated with pineapple?
8th grade in my language arts class we were having some sort of contest where you got a penny for each error you found. I wound up with 7 cents and one of them was a 1921-S cent.
