How Long Have You Collected?

About a year.

I started in 1955 when my uncle gave me a bunch of (near) empty Whitman folders, and so I just jumped in. LWCs interested me the most because they were inexpensive to keep and you could get 10-20 rolls at the bank easily every few days with your dad's backing. By 1957 I was branching out and collecting most of the popular series back then (no one gave Two Cents about Roosevelts or Franklins, and any Washington after 1940 was quickly passed over).

At that time, with diligence sorting at our local bank on Saturday mornings (this was a very small town!), it was possible to put together the entire Walker set in 2-3 months, albeit with the early keys unsually in lower grades, and I did this several times. Problem was, the face value was so high that I couldn't afford to keep the set, so I (duh) just turned them back in and started over. All of the Mercs could be found except the 16-D. With dad's help, I eventually advertised in local papers and the two of us bought and sold many local collections during my high school years.

Picked it up again after the college/grad school years, and continue to buy and sell today with great enthusiasm.

Great thread, and thanks.

Since last December.

My first coin was an Aussie 2015 Kookaburra because I thought it had an awesome design, along with having the same surfaces as a proof ASE, while being 1/3 of the price

My dad collected foreign coins while serving in WW2, then later began collecting Canadian coins back to the year 1900. As a small child I remember travelling to the city to visit the coin shop and I recall him explaining some of the varieties - the 1947 maple leaf for example. In the 70s I was a bank teller and I was able to buy certain coins that I knew he'd be interested in. Then life quickly moved forward and in the early 90s one day he delivered his entire collection to me "here, you can have it". I was too polite to admit that coin collecting was the furthest thing from my mind - I had no interest whatsoever.

But I kept the collection and my dad passed away about 5 years later. Because I knew it was his passion I didn't feel right by selling it so another 20 years passed by. It wasn't until just before this past Christmas on a cold winters day that I decided to buy a new Charlton Price Guide and update the values in preparation of determining the best manner of finally liquidating it.

Oddly, as I was doing so, old memories came flooding back. How we looked and looked for the 1973 large bust 25c and never found one, the old paper sketch that the coin shop owner had drawn to demonstrate the difference between a curved and straight "7" of a 1947 50c, the 1936 25c with some toning but was that a dot or not? I knew some of the rarer years were missing and I started searching on ebay, curious how easy or difficult to find them 50 years later. Low and behold soon with a click here and there, using some money I had saved for nothing in particular, I was on my way to filling gaps and then onto upgrading. In the beginning I felt as though finishing this collection was a tribute to him. But whatever "bug" then took over, I couldn't have imagined that coin collecting is such an enjoyable pursuit! Even a year ago, if I could have gazed into the future I wouldn't have believed it.

My dad introduced me to collecting probably 4 or 5 years ago. I was never an extremely serious collector though. His collection has always been much more impressive than mine for obvious reasons, but now that I've inherited his and my grandpa's collections, I've been getting into more serious collecting and been coming here for quite a bit of learning.

I started collecting in 1972 when my grandfather split up his collection among his 5 grandchildren. He had been the librarian at the Chicago Tribune library in the 1940s (newspapers had extensive libraries back then), and his predecessor had friends/connections all over the world who sent him coins. When the predecessor died, the coins kept arriving for a few years. So my grandfather accumulated world coins, mostly from the late 1940s. Turns out the best of the bunch was Canadian silver. When we split them up somehow I ended up with the 1948 dollar and half, and the 1947ML dollar, quarter, dime, and nickel, all in pretty good MS condition, as well as a few other earlier Canadian coins. My collecting interest has since stayed with Canadian, and specifically George VI, although I accumulated whatever came to me in circulation in the US and during travels (like a 1947 florin I got in change in NZ in 1985), and I've gone through phases where I filled in some Canadian gaps. One thing that has bothered me over the years is wishing I could put my grandfather's collection back together if even for a short time just to see it, as I only got one-fifth of the Canadian coins, and I have no idea what my other siblings/cousins have. But their Canadian silver just sits in a box somewhere in their dead storage.

I started when I was 8 or 9 years old. I am 68 now. My favourite uncle, who was quite a collector, gave me Whitman one-cent and 5-cent albums. I completed the penny album as a kid but could not find a 1925 or 1926 nickel. My allowance at the time was 50 cents a week. I would go to the bank and buy a roll of pennies, pick through it and take a full roll back the next day. The tellers were very co-operative back then. My best find from that childhood coin hunt was a 1909 S one cent in very nice condition. I sold it to a dealer for $5 and thought it was a fortune!