Nickel Find Rates @ 250,000 Coins

@Nickelsearcher

Your conclusions can probably be further subdivided, yet I don't know if any of us can know how. Somewhere out there 8 million Buffalo nickels may lie dormant, BUT, I'm sure almost none of them are in rolls cobbled together by human hands, as I think we strive for uniformity and anything out of the ordinary would be hoarded as special. In order to best find those eight million buffalos we would have to find access to virgin rolls, probably rolls that have sat somehow unused for years. They do exist, but if they were easy to gain access to they would have circulated long ago.

Another interesting subdivision, and one that you guys would be able to compute is the distribution of finds by grade. This will provide a value for the estimated remaining special coins.

Finally, let me close with this anecdote drawn from my own experience.

In 1979 I was only a few years old at the time and my family had dinner at a Shoney's in Nashville. When it came time to pay, my mother paid the cashier and got back a very unusual nickel. It was a Buffalo nickel. She handed it to me and the entire ride home I got to hold and look at it and play with it in the back seat of the car. I remember thinking about how cool the surface of the coin felt, how the lines of its sculpture felt so smooth and rounded. The metal felt comfortable in my small hands. When we got home my attention became diverted and somehow I lost track of the coin. Over the next dozen years or so my mother would bring up this event and say, "you found a 3 legged Buffalo nickel when you were three years old."

As I started my own coin collection as an early teenager, this anecdote got me interested in learning about coins. I read up on the variety, saw that it was valuable (I think at the time it was a $300 or $400 variety) and I daydreamed about still having it. As I got older, I thought that the story had to be a myth. How is it possible that my mom who is not a collector would know that I had such a valuable thing? And if she did know it was valuable, why would she hand it over to a little kid? Made no sense.

The years went by and I stopped thinking about it. The story became a myth. The myth no longer held sway on my imagination. And generally speaking, I forgot about it. That is, until this was given to me by my grandmother.





My grandmother, unlike my mom, was an avid coin collector. She had two large safes filled with coins. She was given the coin to hold onto and decided to give it back to me when she felt I was ready for it.

It's not much to look at. It probably got back into circulation by accident. But this story should serve as some motivation for you guys. Everyday something wonderful slips through the cracks and finds its way back into the machines of commerce.

Those Liberty nickels have served this nation for over a hundred years. Some of them are still working. Go get 'em!