what started your collection

what made u want to collect coins
for me i was looking through change counting and i found 1943 steel penny

 

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i grew up in the house of a coin dealer. i never really was too very interested in collecting coins. once i had a son and he got old enough to want to collect coins like grand dad, i just tagged along and really enjoyed it. it's strange how much i know just from growing up around coins.

-Steve

 

I've told this story here before, but here it is again: When I was about 9 my dad gave me two proof sets from my birth year-1983. I started showing a little interest in coins, so a few months later he gave me a beautiful 1899-O morgan, the reverse of which is my avatar, and I was HOOKED.

 

My grandmother got me started collecting Lincoln cents by series, shortly after that Kennedy halves and misc. foreign coins. Later when I had more of my own money started working on US coins by type, though still pick up quite a few foreign cons here and there.

 

I'm soon to turn 47 year old. I remember seeing mercury dimes as a child but thought of them as only 10 cent pieces. Those coins have fueled my love of collecting today. Now I am an addict to the love the artistic depictions of the coins of the early 20th century, far before my birth. The SLQ's, Walkers, Merc's, and yes even the Franklins, and Kennedy's and all that are 90% silver. These coins are living history even if they are not a hundred years old they are certainly "not" common.
I hope to pass this on to my grandchild one day. I hope that maybe one of them will appreciate the importance and history of them. That is one thing that drives me today as a collector...the history.

 

wow cool i wish somebody passed down coins for me

 

Well I think that collecting is inborn within all of us. I sway towards coins because I am attracted to gold, history, and art. The majority of my coins represent all of those qualities to a lesser degree.

 

Hello,
I bet I was born with a coin in hand...
Seriously, as a child, in the 60' in France, I was used to get a silver 5 Francs as a christmas or birthday present from my godfather or godmother. They were great coins with nice design, big as a Kennedy half. Then we had 10 francs with Hercules on them, after the French revolution 5F design, as big as a plate. With such a coin in your pocket, you felt you would sink if you fell down into the river, and they were circulation coins : you were able to buy things with them not looked at as an alien.
That's the begining of the story...

Cucumbor

 

my uncle jean passed away and my dad gave me his coin collection...the bag it was in said something funny..... 'poker money' lol....bless that man.......

 

my dad gave me a 1940-1958 lincoln wheat cent folder with the coins in that. after that, i bought some common wheats and things like that. i keep getting more interested in it every day!

 

My uncle Ray asked me to look for a 1914-D penny in 1959. He said if I found one that he would give me $25, a princely sum to an eight year old. In 1959 you could buy a grocery cart full of groceries for $20. I searched and searched and found one in a bank penny roll that was so beat up you could barely read the date. The coin was unacceptable to him but I kept searching and never found another one. Fast forward to 2001 when I received a letter from Monex about the USS Central America. I had a little mad money and bought a 1857-S Double Eagle PCGS MS63 Broken A. Once I saw that coin I was hopelessly lost in a collecting frenzy.

 

The Sears Wish Book!

This one makes me feel old but who remembers those old Sears Wish Books that came out before Christmas? They were huge back in the day and had everything including......
COIN COLLECTING KITS!
I was six and HAD to get one from Santa. Santa came through!
My parents figured it was a phase I'm sure. I'll be 45 in July - one hell of a long phase.

Dad would come home with a coin now and then. He'd buy them when he was away on business. He knew nothing about coins - just bought stuff that was weird to him. I guess that's why I love types and am a two cent junkie. I still have the coins he bought including my 1866 2 Cent Piece and 1865 3 Cent Nickel.
Dad's passed on but the coins are still with me.

My latest acquisition? An ANACS AU50 1883 3 Cent Nickel. Go figure.

 

I found a 1832 1/2 real, walking from school to my home, when i was 12 years old and i was hooked.now I am 35 and I think its fake. but i still love that coin more then all my other coins.

 

Two years ago, I was given a 1797 copper twopence by my grandfather ( coin in F condition about $70 value). Last year I decided to buy an 1826 sixpence, and my collection is now about 300 pieces large...

 

An ad from Littleton Coin Co. back in February of 2004. Come a long way since then!

 

Oh My Lord .. Littleton Coin Co. ....

At least it got you hooked. I also used them when i was growingup. I soon (very soon) realized their coins carried a very hefty premium over and above the actuall coin value. I had little to do with them after that. I continued to recieve their publications and stuff, as they are always nice to look through even if i have no intentions of buying. A couple years ago, i recived an email from them advertising the washington commemorative. It said, Get the RARE coin now, Not many were made for public collections, get it before its gone forever. I sent them an email 'informing' them that the washington commem had a combined mintage of 6 or 7 million coins (i cant remember exactly off hand now) and that i couldnt belive that a company with the historical integrity of Littleton would outright LIE to its customers just to sell some way over priced coins. I got a generic email back saying that they were sorry i was unhappy (yadda yadda) and that while littleton scoins may seem high, the customer service that accompanies such a coins is priceless. I sent them a reply to remove me from ALL future mailings.. and since then, i havenet heard a peep - and i think i prefer it that way!!

 

Different things. A few years ago my family had this trash can full of pennies, nickels, dimes, etc. And I had some neat coins I found in circ, and I don't know what made me do it, but I decided to look through the change. I think I foun about 27 wheat, (oldest being a 1909 and a 1910) and I guess that is what got me hooked. I think that was about 2 years ago. Earlier last year I for some reason got more interested, and here I am now, lol.

Phoenix

 

I know it. Believe it or not, those coins I bought from them were the only purchases I ever made from them. I kept getting their "coins on approval" and catalog for quite a while though...I stopped that as soon as they stopped enclosing a postage paid envelope, lol. I think their profit shares program is pretty cool, though. I haven't even seen a catalog from them for quite some time. I pretty much do everything on ebay now.

 

I started collecting when I had a paper route as a kid. Occasionally someone would pay me with some old coin and I would put it away.

I actually had someone pay me with a Pilgrim Tercentenary as a 50 cent piece. It obviously had been in circulation (it is probably about a Fine condition) before I received it. I also have my only Barber Quarter and Walking Liberty Half from that time as well. In addition to this, my grandfather had a collection of Indian Head cents that I believe he extracted from general circulation. Put that all together and it planted a seed that stayed deep and not active until the late 90s.

What caused me to get active? The State Quarters program and being older and actually having a little bit of free money to use for this addiction.

Now, I'm hopelessly addicted to this hobby. And I do NOT want to be cured. :thumb: hya:

 

It was a lot of little things. I used to be able to find a lot of canadian cents in change as a child. My grandfather collected morgans. My uncle collected a little bit of everything. My parents bought me blue Whitman folders to collect cents. A local coin dealer badly ripped me off on some small purchases, which turned me away from the hobby for a few decades. I picked it up again several years ago related to some ideas about investing in silver and remembering that many coins contained silver.