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Message:: [QUOTE="chip, post: 1742992, member: 19122"]As I have posted before, my interest in coins has arisen out of settling my late dads estate. My father was 79 when he passed last february. He had lived in the same house for almost 60 years. Living in one place like that for all that time, things tend to accumulate, when people move often some of their stuff does not move with them, it is given away, it is sold off at a rummage sale, or it is just left behind. My dad was divorced from his second wife back in the early 80s, so it was not as accumulated as it could have been, his wife moved out and took what she wanted, including his large cent collection, which I was told she sold for a lot less than it was worth.  One of the things when I was researching how to be an executor was that you had to treat things as if they were your own, that means not that you can do anything you like with those things, but that you have to take as good of care with those things as if they were yours. So I had to go through all the things that dad had, and at least know what was there. Not only did dad save coins, he also saved papers, I found cards from christmas, fathers day, birthdays, check reciepts, mailings from his union, from social security, old loans that he had paid years before. But stuck in all the papers was something that I still do not have a good handle on, it is a reciept from the local police for 28.00 dollars in silver dollars that he turned over to them. It reads; I Fred W Horton of the (towns) Police Dept. Recieved from  (my dads name) of (my dads address), 28.00 in Silver Dollars he got from (name witheld), on sunday, april 4th 1965 at 12.00 pm. (my dads name) turned them over to me on april 6th at 610 pm at my house on west pearl avenue. It is then signed by the officer along with his badge number. At that date my father had divorced and remarried, so I have no recollection of the incident, I have asked my half bros and sisses about it, and they do not remember either. His exwife is estranged from the family so there is no help in figuring out what happened there and as he told me a short while before he passed, all his friends had already died. So I am left with some conjectures, knowing my father and how he lived his life, here is what I think happened. My dad had become interested in coins when they took the silver out of them in 65, that is when he bought his redbook and blue book, and I can remember him showing me the new kennedy half and trying to see if there was a hammer and sickle at the base of the bust on the coin. So at that time word had gone out that he would buy coins that people came to him with. The guy named in the reciept heard about that, and took 28 silver dollars, wether from a friend or stole them or from his parents but there must have been something not on the up and up because why else would my father have turned them into the police? It was about that same time, when I would visit my father on weekends that he took me up to a nearby village one sunday that served beer, our local town was dry on sunday. I did not like sitting in a dark tavern when the sun was shining so my father gave me some money to buy a comic and a treat and left the keys to the car with me so I could listen to the ballgame on the car radio. I went down the street to the drugstore as I was walking there a few people were walking out of the drugstore with sacks, one had one of those new instamatic cameras in it. the magazines and comic books were close by the window so I did not notice at first that the stores lights were out. I looked for a while, quite a while, as I recall and picked out some comics and a magazine, ( cracked? ), and then went to pay for my purchases, I waited at the counter for a few minutes and then saw there was a bell to ring, so I rang it, nothing happened. I called out to the back room, hello I want to check out, no answer. I started to wonder if the man who ran the drugstore was in the back room so I went back and peeked, nobody was there. I put back the stuff I was going to get and started to walk back out, when I got to the door I noticed that the store had closed at noon but that the pharmacists name and phone number was there on the door, probably for emergency prescriptions. I went back in and looked at the local phone book and found the address was only a few blocks away, so I walked over to the address and knocked on the door, the man who answered it went immediately with me back to the store. There he let me buy my stuff, and I went back to the car and listened to the game, my dad came out a bit later and I told him what had happened, I was a little bit chafing that here I had went to all that trouble to find the guy and he did not just give me the book and ice cream that I had bought as a reward for being so honest. My father told me that doing what was right was its own reward. Now I can see the truth in what he told me about doing what was right was a reward in itself, but at the time I would have preferred if the pharmacist had made a fuss about my being honest and had let me get all the funny books I could carry. I would not be surprised to learn someday after I go to where my father is, that he had been tempted to keep those silver dollars, evidently they must have been ill got or why would he have turned them over to the cops? One scenario I have imagined goes like this, It being pretty well known that my father bought old coins, that one guy being in need of money for something or other, there is always some need for money, (for either the wealthy or the poor), was doing some work for some old crank at his house and took those silver dollars, then sold them to my father. My dad might have taken the man at his word that they were his, or he might not have even asked since my dad generally was very good hearted and did not think evil of people. The theft was discovered and the man knew who had access to his home and went to the man who sold them to my dad and let him know that he was going to the police if they were not returned, the man who took them became alarmed and told them he sold them to my dad. While my dad was good hearted and trusting of people he also was considered something of a terror, in his younger days he liked to fight, so the man probably did not want to confront dad. He told me in later years how one time he asked a friend of his for a loan, the man was a part owner of a service station and he opened the register and said take what you need. My dads eyes were opened, he saw that his friend was afraid of him, he told me about that one time, how it changed his life, he had not til then been conscious of how other people felt, and he did not like that people were afraid of him.  So the word got out to him that there had been a theft, and he went to the house of the local cop and turned them over, but why the receipt? I think it might be that the man who had missed them might have went to my father and told him that they were his silver dollars, my dad probably told him I paid 28 dollars for them, so you can have them for what I paid for them, the man refused probably thinking why should I pay for what is rightfully mine? My dad was also right, why should I give this guy the coins I bought for the right price, remember back in 65 circulated silver dollars were sold for a dollar all the time. So thats what I think happened, the coins were returned, the man who took them I am not so sure ended up with the money, if I know my father he might have turned the man upside down and shook out the money. But it would have been nice if I had heard the story from my father, we talked quite a bit, but he never mentioned this incident, and it seems that everyone else is gone now, I know the cop who took the receipt has passed, it is over 40 years, the chances that in some little evidence locker at the police station there are 28 silver dollars is pretty slim. But sometimes it is fun to phantasize.[/QUOTE]

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