How Did You Get Hooked On Coin Collecting?

I guess you can say I started when I was in the military. Every time we would stop in a new port of call I would collect the local coins for a keepsake. I don't know if you would call the "collecting". But all these years later I am into it, and have greatly expanded my collection.

When I was probably 5 or 6 my mom gave me her coin collection, which consisted of a small glass jar filled with random world coins the family brought back from abroad, and the wheat pennies and bicentennial coins she had found in change (she kept them all). I was never terribly interested, but collected the State Quarters as they came out, at least until about 2003. Eventually, coins took a back seat to video games, and I stopped digging them out to look through them.

When I was working as a cashier in college, I started noticing old coins in my till, and started bringing cash to swap them out. My manager was cool with it, as long as the till balanced. I was in a financially comfortable situation during the great '08 crash, and had lots of expendable income to sink into coins--till hunting turned to me going to banks multiple times a week for boxes.

That came to an end again when I got a desk job in 2011 and married my wife a few months later--it no longer seemed like a good use of my nights and weekends to spend hours upon hours sifting through rolls for a small pile of 1940s nickels that I could have bought for 6 cents each.

I caught another bout of the fever in 2013 when a member of my father in law's church passed away, and his family discovered an ammo crate stuffed to the brim with hundreds and hundreds of coins, mostly Morgan and Peace dollars, and Mercury dimes. I helped them liquidate the collection, and got to cherrypick the best coins as my compensation. That obsession turned me to buying some coins on ebay; after over-spending on US classics, I turned to cheaper world coins, then discovered ancients, my true passion.

My buddy, Larry Root, told me wheat back Lincolns were worth Two Cents back in 1966 which led to the thousands that I've kept and got me started collecting. My great grandmother sealed the deal when she gifted me a Morgan dollar from her birth year 1884 and a 1921 Peace dollar around the same time.

I think I was about 8 when my mom took me to a coin store in a larger city (those trips were very rare ... like once or twice a year). It was a common date Morgan dollar and I polished it until it looked like a mirror.

Then, a couple of years later when I showed more interest, she would take me to the local watch repair / jewelry repair / coin store ... and she would buy me a coin each time. Eventually, I started working odd jobs and riding my bike to that coin store. This was in the early 80s and the old man that owned it was probably in his mid-70s. Silver coins were expensive then ... so I couldn't buy much. Most of the time I would just go there to spend time with the old man and look at his coins. It was good for both of us. This was a town with maybe 1,000 residents at the time. Hard to find that kind of thing now...

I love that!

We'd visit grandma and she'd give me a couple Mercury dimes found from her job up town at the rural post office.
I was eight or nine. This was right around 1970. Grandma also gave my brother and I Ike dollars for our birthdays a few years.

The common theme here seems to be age. Looks like most of us got hooked at a young age. I can still remember that feeling of excitement (scraping my penny's together), going to the bank on my bike when I was 12. It was just to get a Kennedy dollar when they were first released. I would go every week. It wasn't about the silver content back then, people wanted them just because it was President Kennedy. I actually still have each one of them today.