Hello (Hola)! How is everyone doing? I have a *New thread this morning. Inspired by @INDE1977, I give you "Sentimental Saturday!"! Post a coin with a story about how it is or has become sentimental to you. This is a coin that was one of my first coins as a collector at a very young age. It was given to me by my late uncle who brought it back from WW11 and just happens to be the one person to get me started in collecting coins. It's an English 2-shilling ,circa 1937. https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces3609.html
The coin that started me collecting. In 1948 my aunt gave me an 1883 WO Cents nickel and some other coins. I thought they were awesome and was hooked. This is that nickel she gave me.
This belonged to my Grandpa. Grandma gave it to me when he passed because she knew I had a coin problem. They're both gone now, making this coin worth more than face value.
My wife bought me this coin for my birthday. It is MS-64 with a CAC sticker. It was quite a surprise, and I don't think I could have picked better. I love it.
OK…. Coin with a story. I’ll submit this….. I was a fully coin addicted kid. Now saying that, my mom was a young single mother. She schooled all day and worked all night. I swear I never saw her sleep when I was a kid… Whole point is we were poor. We lived close to granddad and he would bring me Whitman’s with a few coins in them and coin magazines from time to time to keep my coin fires burning. I was a happy and satisfied collector of worn slick V-nickels and the like…. Well granddad surprised me and bought me these two GSA Morgans when the mint held the auction. Seems that was the early 70’s or so. When he gave me these I was sure I had reached coin collecting Utopia. I miss you granddad.
Actually I do have a sentimental piece. I bought this on Ebay and it turned out the seller was David Schenkman. I didn't know that until I saw the return address. David Schenkman has more writing awards for Exonumia than Carter's got liver pills. He's also a banjo connoisseur and a banjo dealer. You gotta love the researchers. We'd have nothing if not for their efforts.
Probably half of my coins are from my grandfather so those are all sentimental. I've probably posted all of the valuable Canadian George VI silver here already, so here's something new. The calculus teacher in high school ran the coin and stamp collecting club, and did a regular giveaway. At one meeting I won the group of Mexican coins below. Honestly I hadn't looked at them for decades until now. The large copper 20 centavos in particular is a lovely coin. Maybe I'll take better pictures tomorrow when the sun is up and thus my sophisticated photography studio is available. Sentimental I guess because the calculus teacher had a vast collection and inspired me to continue collecting later in life. He was such an interesting character. Clearly an alcoholic and we suspected he had a bottle in his desk. You could smell booze on his breath during class. Previous year students passed down his lore - bug him about showing you his books! Bug him about the books! He would use the hope of this and other stories of his to keep the students engaged until the end of semester, when he finally brought "the books" to class. There they were, sitting on his desk. It was the three volume first edition of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica aka Principia. At the time almost 50 years ago, they were worth $100,000. How did a high school calculus teacher have such a huge and incredibly valuable collection, and why on earth was he even there? No one knew.
This metal detecting find is one of several "sentimental" coins for me. All of my detector finds are sentimental, in a way, because I can look at each and remember the adventure from the day I dug them. (I have never sold any of my dug coins). This one, however, also had an indirect role in my meeting my wife (with whom I just celebrated our 25th anniversary). I posted that whole story here, along with the newspaper clipping about the find. This humble 1936 dime was the very first coin in my collection. I found it in my step-grandmother's silverware drawer while setting the table for Thanksgiving dinner on November 25, 1976. You might say it launched my numismatic journey. The only other coin that remains from my childhood collection is this 1827 Bust half. I received it for my 11th birthday on December 28, 1976. For me as a freshly-minted kid collector, this was a real treasure. I felt like it put me in another league. In fact, if it weren’t cleaned (I did that misdeed myself, back in ‘76), it would likely meet my standards for inclusion in my present-day collection. This is my maternal grandfather's WW2 deployment medal. It had somehow gone outside the family for decades, until a kind stranger in Savannah tracked my mother down online and sent it to her. It is Sterling silver and roughly dollar-sized in diameter. Granddaddy's father (my maternal great-grandfather, Reuben Buck Robertson), was the cofounder of Champion Paper Company. Here's Granddaddy during WW2. He's the tall man in the center. And here he is later, in the 1980s, as I best remember him. He was born in 1916 and died in 1987.
Here are two more "sentimentals" from my collection. Both are fairly low-value modern World coins, but they represent the two foreign countries I lived in overseas, as a child. And both are dated from the years we lived there. We lived in Tanzania in 1972, when I was 6-7 years old. Every week I used to receive one of these FAO-issue 5-shilingi pieces for my first allowance, if I had been a good boy. If I remember correctly, you could buy a model airplane kit with one of these. In 1974, we lived aboard a 40-foot trimaran sailboat, island-hopping in the Bahamas. One time Mom offered me ten cents if I'd jump overboard and swim back to the boat. We were anchored in a beautiful blue lagoon, not too deep- but though I could swim OK, I was still a little afraid. But I made the jump, swam back, and got one of these "bonefish" 10-cent pieces. I distinctly remember buying a Disney comic book about Scrooge McDuck with it. (That coin wasn't a proof, like the example below.) Neither one of these examples was actually saved during my childhood travels, but they are representative of the types I spent back then. I found both of these coins in bulk lots a few years ago, so they cost me just a few cents each. (Yes, even that proof coin was in a bulk bag!) So even though they're only $1-3-ish coins at best in the catalogs, I spent nearly $50 apiece getting them PCGS certified, to add them to my collection.
This is one of my first, or more accurately, my wife's. It's one of her father's medals. He was a Scottish paratrooper in WW2 and an all-around good guy. He lived into his nineties with a lot of stories to tell.
Many of mine are sentiemental. Sometimes I'm amazed what I can remember about some of them that I may have received as a kid. My earliest memory of actually having a strong feeling about a coin was surprisingly a 1987 Canadian Loon dollar with the straight edges. I dont know what ended up happening with it over the years but I bought another MS example of one to have. One I can share a photo of... this "priceless treasure"/ antique mall pickup, from 2008, from a place that has since closed. CBH half over-date. My first coin purchase as an adult after being away from the hobby for about 15 years. The moment the kid inside connected with the realization I have an adult salary now. Actually submitted this thing to NGC with another order, only wanting to get it into a details slab so I could use it in my type set registry. It came back in a plastic body bag with an altered surface label. Yeah, I didn't miss that but I guess it wasn't slab or registry worthy... Guessing somebody down there cursed the half second they had to look at it.
