Finding My 1909-S VDB

Irish and a few others have said they wanna hear the story.
I told Irish to keep in mind that sneezes seem to come in pairs.

How many of you have had a "dry spell" in your coin searches and then all of a sudden you get multiple good finds?

Late November, 1961. I had been collecting about a year and a half. There were two empty holes in my Lincoln album...1909-S and 1909-S VDB.

I was in the office of Dad's dime store searching rolls after school.
Business was picking up and I had more rolls than usual to search. People had begun shopping for Christmas.

Back then, Christmas Season started after Thanksgiving, not in the middle of August.

I was searching penny rolls.

My last really great find had been about three months earlier, when I found my 1931-S. Since then I had found some nice "keepers" (trading coins), but nothing to fill album holes.

My "method" for searching penny rolls was to open the end of the roll, and empty the roll onto the glass counter top.
Then I would "unstack" the pennies while turning them all obverse-up.
Then check dates and mints, sliding the checked pennies off to the right.
When I had a lot of penny rolls to search, I simply by-passed all the Memorial cents. The only Memorial cent worth keeping back then was a 1960 small date, and then they weren't worth much.


I had seached maybe seven or eight rolls, and found a couple of keepers and upgrades.

I opened the next roll, dumped it, and began unstacking and turning Abe-up.

Before I even completed unstacking, my heart stopped and my brain quit working.
There, face up, on top of two other coins, I was looking at 1909-S.

I looked at it again, and then again, just to make sure what I was seeing.
I guess I sat there and looked at it for a full minute or two. I was afraid to turn it over.
I WANTED to turn it over, but I was AFRAID to turn it over.

Finally I just took a deep breath and flipped it. There it was....VDB. I tilted the coin under the light. VDB.

I jumped up and yelled. I literally jumped up and yelled.
Scared my Mom half to death. She came running up the stairs to the office, thinking someone had come in the back and was robbing or killing me. She was happy when she found out what was going on, but she was mad, too, for scaring her like that.

My coin was a nice one...a solid G or G+ with full rim front and back and a little of Abe's ear showing.
No damage, and an even milk chocolate color all over.

EIGHT DAYS LATER...I found my 09-S. But this time I found it reverse-up, so I knew when I flipped it it wasn't a VDB.

Two great finds in just over a week.

WHAT'S IT LIKE? FINDING AN 09-S VDB?

Folks, it's the all-time adrenalin rush. There's nothing quite like it.

I can think of only two other comparable times in my life.

One, when I first discovered that girls were something more than just soft boys who couldn't throw a baseball worth a rip.

Two, when, as a paratrooper, I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.

But finding my S VDB is my memory of a lifetime.

Steve