I know the first coin I ever collected; a 1922 Liberty Head silver dollar I got when I was 5. My grandfather in Utah gave it to me. He only had one so he gave my younger brother a dollar bill. I was upset and asked my grandfather why my brother got a dollar but I only got a big nickel? From there my collection grew. I started with pennies because that’s what adults would give me. I didn’t care about the extrinsic value of the coins, in fact, the more the merrier; 10 dimes isn’t nearly as entertaining as 20 nickels, and the nickels are bigger & heavier too. Pennies changed after 1958, my birth year, so I felt a special attraction to “wheat stalks,” as they are called, and have thousands of them. I gave a big bag of wheat stalks to my youngest son for his twelfth birthday along with a safe to put them in. Now all the wheat stalks are in a glass jug prominently displayed in my living room.
The collection expanded and I met other kids that collected coins; my collection was always bigger so I know for a fact that bigger is better. I don’t know if kids collect coins anymore? Probably not, I would have noticed. I stopped collecting as an adult but I did buy “junk” silver because it served as an outlet for my coin fetish and made for a good investment even though I don’t ever plan on selling my coins, instead I framed them and hung them in the media room. All though childhood, I loved sorting my coins by date then mixing them up and doing it again. Now that would be considered a sign of autism but that kind of concentration and order was like a superpower for the rest of my life. Still today, I often look at the dates on well worn change I’m given, and sometimes find a wheat stalk.
Coin Collecting
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Martin Hash
- Posts: 18806
- Joined: Wed Jan 20, 2010 2:02 pm
Coin Collecting
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