What was your very first coin? The one that you hooked on collecting?

When I was young my dad would bring home 3 penny rolls every friday for my 2 brothers and I to search through and fill our albums. I remember taking an eraser to them to make them all bright and shiny. This was in the mid to late 50's.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I can't tell you how jealous I am that you could do that in your lifetime. I wonder what collectors will say about my generation on what coins were available to us??

 

A 1923 Peace Dollar my grandmother gave me for doing a weekend of chores. I was 12, I'm 60 now and still have it.

 

I just gave 2 of my grandkids a Morgan Dollar. I explained the significance and history and told them to hold on to them. We shall see. BTW I gave them both the same year and mm and about the same condition.

 

Coin Star rejects?

Chris

 

Very cool. I still enjoy finding wheat pennies in circulation and keep them all even though they're only worth a few cents.
For some reason I don't think the same thing could happen today. I can't imagine a kid getting excited about finding a penny from 1990.

 

My grandfather gave me a holed 1866 shield nickel in XF. I absolutely loved it.

 

I found this coin metal detecting with my father when I was probably around 7 years old. I had found plenty of other coins up until that point, but this one stood out. It was the oldest coin I had ever found and really got me interested in starting to collect.

 

Awesome find!

 

I was very fortunate to start in 1966. There were still lots of Merc's, Roosies and silver Wash. in circulation and lots of wheaties, and I think only because I lived in a very rural area where money tended to stay in local circulation. Even Buffalo nickels were common for a few years. I was able to fill in a lot of holes in my folders early on. My paper route (Grit) and selling seeds door to door also yielded a lot of older folks stash to me also. A little old lady, Peg, used to pay me in old postage stamps for cleaning her yard. Her husband was a collector and had lots of old mint stamps he never used but had died years earlier. On summer vacation, I worked with my Dad on his boss's farm scraping manure from under the cows all day and his boss paid me fifty cents a day with a silver Franklin half dollar until he ran out of them eventually.

 

As a paper boy in the 1959 a customer paid me with a 1861 Indian head still have it. I'd figure it's au55. Still enjoy collecting after all these years

 

BTW my collection encompasses more than 3000 US coins and growing

 

I try not to tell anyone how large or small my collection is out of worry/paranoia of others attempting to rob me. I recommend a little bit of discretion when mentioning a collection.

 

Thanks for the heads up

 

It's interesting that even in the early 80's there were very few wheat cents in circulation, probably not any more than there are now. The fact that they were taken out of circulation relatively quickly shows that there was a lot of interest in coin collecting, whereas now even a 50 year old coin doesn't get a second glance.

However, since inflation has eroded so much of the value of our coins, small change has become more of a nuisance and tends to sit around longer. That makes for a lot of well preserved older coins.

 

Agreed; they just don't make them like they used to...

 

That is true. Other than the ATB quarters, I think all of the US's circulating coinage is hideous.

 

When I was a small English schoolboy you'd often get Victorian pennies in change, and also Victorian silver occasionally. It would be unusual but not impossible to get a well worn George IV or William IV silver coin such as a sixpence.

The farthing ( 1/4 penny) was still just about in circulation but seldom used in the mid 50's, so it was possible to tour the shops asking if they had any farthings in the till and paying for them in pennies. 48 farthings for a shilling was schoolboy pocket money sized collecting, and of course, the culls could be recycled, so for a few shillings you could complete a set from mid to late Victorian times to the latest issue.

Since the coins saw little general circulation compared with the half penny and the penny, EF or better was not unknown for quite early dates. Even if you had the year, there was always the chance of improving the grade.
This has the useful side effect of learning grading almost in the cradle.

As a bonus some shopkeepers would simply give you the coins if there were just a few, occasionally adding any odd foreign coins they had in the odds and sods compartment of the till. In those days being kind to strange children was not considered potentially 'dangerous' and society did not crumble into anarchy.

Slightly increased funding, say an extra shilling a week pocket money or earnings allowed an expansion to threepenny bit collecting, the tiny silver coins that were just about no longer minted but still plentiful and could be accumulated and upgraded in the same manner as the farthings. This was years before the Bunker Hunt silver spike caused all the old silver to be filtered out of the system and cashed in for a profit at several times face.

I came late to that party but the high graders seeking the biggest nuggets had pretty well cleaned up all the larger denominations. It was still possible to find a reasonable number in bags of sixpences that the pickier pickers had not bothered with, because of the poorer search effort/profit ratio, so I'd cycle round all the banks in ten miles or so getting a few £5 bags of sixpences (240 coins per bag) and find maybe 10% silver.

I feel sorry for modern folk who have nothing but trivial errors and the occasional modernish silver coin to look out for.

None of my early collections survived various financial crises in the ensuing years, although much later I have accumulated big piles of farthings and silver 3d as some sort of nostalgia.

 

I started pulling wheaties out of circulation was still a fair amount in the early 80s but the 2 coins I really remember was buying a 1817 15 stars large cent was my first early coin and about the same time my father got a 1865 2 cent from a friend which I traded doing some chores around the house for

 

I've told the story before, but...

Summer 1963...an 11 year old boy is playing in a city park across the street from his house. He sees something in the grass and picks it up. It has a lady with a shield on it and--wait a minute--NAKED BOOB!!!. I was forever infected.

This is what an XF 1917 SLQ looks like after 50+ years as a pocket piece.