Remembering my early fun days in the hobby.

Okay, mister. What do you mean, found? Like 5 finger discount or did the lovely lady let you have it?

 

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Okay, here is my numismatic memory......
I would often garden and help cut the grass among other things for my WW2 vet Uncle who was also disabled. After, I would go inside his house and grab something to drink. Then he would open his large safe and hand me some coins or currency. I didn't know much about collecting then. It was when I was about 12 or so. I just remember the smell of them in an old coin bag. They all were old to me, and I cherished them just the same as getting paid in the normal cash way. I also would find "wheaties" in the dirt when digging the garden. I'm pretty sure now that he was "seeding" the ground for me. I must have dug over 25 coins over the years and most were in decent shape.

 

Numismatic pursuits for me started in 1960 with a paper route. (is there still such a thing?) The collection consisted initially of Lincoln Cents and Jefferson Nickels, expanding to Roosevelt Dimes, all housed in the traditional Whitman Album. The Lincoln collection was not complete in that it lacked the 1909-s VDB, 1922 plain and 1955 double die, and the 1914-d had a bad case of road rash:

 

One more fun story.
About 35 years ago, I was going to a local coin shop every few days. The owner was a crusty old guy. He looked me in the face and told me that anyone that collected variety coins was a fool. I didn't say anything but I wanted to.

Over the years I cherry picked a great number of coins from the shop. Last year, many of them went to PCGS and on to auction at Great Collections. They sold for more than I ever dreamed.
One was a Flying Eagle Cent with a fun clash. I only paid a few dollars for the coin and it brought $3100 at auction.

 

Hey now, simmer down. I'm almost the exact age as Idhair.

 

Umm, don't you mean seashells? LOL.
Shell money - Wikipedia

 

We used salt for commerce when I was a kid.

 

In my early days I mainly just got silver eagles for holidays and worked on a buffalo nickel set in a whitman. There was a coin shop fairly local that's long since gone where my grandparents would take me to get nickels for the set. Sometimes there would happen to be a coin show at a mall when we were there to shop and I'd get to check it out. Still have a 1982 Washington commemorative half my dad got me from one of those in the 90s. Had never seen one before but was really special to me.

Before the internet the kids nowadays will never know how valuable a coin magazine or a Coin World in newspaper form was. It was all the information you could get at home. Used to chat with a nice old lady at an apartment who was like a grandma to me. She'd sit out front of the place on the porch. The neighborhood kids liked visiting with her. Was a guy that lived in another apartment there, I guess that's how I must have met him. He'd give me old issues of Coin World once in a while since he had a subscription. I often wonder where he is today if he's still around.
Was only a couple houses away from mine. I was probably 10 or 11 back then. Soon after I had a 15 year gap where I lost interest and stopped collecting but it came back to me.

 

I was earning $5 to mow one acre lawns around that same time (1970-ish). I don't think mowers were even self-propelled back then so it was a lot of work for $5. I spent some of it on coins. Still have a few in the original 2x2s.


My brother and I were in the coin club at school, 7-8th grade and maybe first year of high school. The high school calculus teacher ran it. The guy had some amazing stuff for a teacher (inherited it?), like a sequence of 3 1948 Canadian dollars where the aurora borealis disappeared on the reverse (die polishing or something, it was a long time ago, memory is vague). He also had a first edition of Newton's Principia, which he brought to class one day and stood the three volumes on his desk.

It all started when grandpa passed out his coins to his grandchildren.

 

Awww!! It takes the fun out of it if old Doug makes the old Doug comments befor we can

 

Around 1975 a guy came into the ice cream parlor and paid with this crisp unc 1934 $5 silver certificate (very old photo). Unfortunately I put it in my wallet to take it home and it has a fold now. Surprisingly little silver was still circulating then but I did get a few Franklin and 64 halves, some quarters and dimes including a Barber dime, and I grabbed many Ikes, which did circulate for a while.