Lincoln Wheat Cent Bonanza Story

thats great that you involve your child in your hobby :)

Don't try to carry more than one bag of cents in a front bicycle basket.

Reading through threads like this, everyone applauds how neat it is for a kid to find something like this.

Then I see where people are pulling out every pre-82 cent and all the nickels to make some pittance selling them for scrap.

Where are the future collectors going to come from? Let me rephrase that to make it a little more personal: When you want to sell your collection, or pass a collection of value to your heirs, who is going to buy it unless we promote collecting today?

It's 3 ayem, and the little meter tells me that there are 1960 users on the website. Let's see, what if each user spent a two rolls of wheat cents a week? That's over ten million wheat cents a year, getting into the hands of people who may be sparked into becoming collectors.

To me, that makes a lot more sense than these gimmicks where a major show puts a dozen 1914ds in circulation, and one actually is found.

biggfred,

I know what you're saying about the quarters ... but that's life as they say. I would have more enjoyed seeing what the elderly lady had squirreled away over the years.

I am a collector first and really don't worry about the pluses and minuses at the end of the day.

Despite having come up through a pretty rough childhood, I've been blessed with having never been hungry or without someplace to sleep during my adult life. As the saying goes on the t-shirts with the little stick figure guy ... "life is good" and continues to be.

In this day and age of get what you can, while you can ... I live by an old honor code adage I learned when a cadet at the Air Force Academy - "I shall not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate among us anyone who does". I'm still the kind of guy who returns the dollar when given too much change and wouldn't think of taking advantage of someone in any business dealing. I guess buying change from a bank wouldn't constitute taking advantage of someone but it just seems to be lacking in fairness when some individual profits off a little old lady's lack of education. Given she had kept these coins over the years and probably needed the money, she ought to have been the one to realize the windfall.

All that proselytizing done, the treat of this whole experience has been the fun my son has had and his experience with collecting. I can't speak for everybody on this site, but I'm guessing many began collecting as youngsters and have gleaned many years of enjoyment which started on a day long ago when they first found some unique coin in their pocket change.