That Coin...

Will post mine this evening.
Jim

This isn't the actual coin, but one like it. The summer of 1971, I had just turned twelve, and I grabbed my Birthday card money and hopped on a bus going downtown. There was a coin shop on the main road and I was there to buy my first coin with my own money. After careful thought the coin I chose was a 1917 C Newfoundland 50 cent piece. It was in much better condition than the coin I have shown here. During my absence from coin collecting during much of my high school days, my brother took my box of coins to his house for safe keeping, and when I got back into the hobby in 1997, the coin had gone missing. Much of my stuff got mixed in with his, but it all worked out in the end. The coins and silver hoards I got from his grocery store more than made up for it.

An old '20 Walker in G that my grandfather gave me a few years ago. Sometimes I'll just flip that coin around in my hand for a while.

Way, way back my Dad gave me a brand new, just came out, Lincoln Cent that was the color of a dime. He said it was Steel and you could lift it with a magnet. I liked that and he started to bring home more and more of them and since they just came out, every where you went they were common, of course that was 1943. I eventually ended up with 30 rolls of them and still have them all. In plastic rolls and still look brand new. Great way to remember my Dad.

A roll of 1959-D Lincoln Cents...still in the penny wrapper.

In the summer of '59 I was 13 and had not started collecting yet.
My Dad came home from his dime store one evening, came into the kitchen where I was doing homework, and tossed a roll of pennies into my lap.

"I thought you might like to have these." he said, "It's those pennies with the new back.".

"What new back?" I thought.
Then I remembered seeing a news spot on TV months earlier about a new reverse design on the pennies.

So, I opened the roll and looked.

"Oh, yeah!" I said, "I know what that is! The Lincoln Memorial! We learned about that in school!".

Dad is gone now, but I still have the roll. The pennies are not bright and shiney anymore, and the wrapper is tattered and worn, from many years of fondly holding them...and remembering.

Steve

My Uncle Alfred gave me an 1883-O Morgan dollar in 1965. I've still got it. My uncle James gave me a 1937 UNC Lincoln that same year, and I've got that, too. Those are very special coins.

Mine would be a steel cent also. My parents had a few coffee cans full of pennies and when I was a kid they told me I could have x amount for myself for every so many rolls I made for them. In the middle of one of the cans I came across a penny that looked funny hehe, my mother told me she thought they had to make them out of something else for a few years and I was facinated.

That initiated me looking for books about coins on our next trip to the library and my first visit to a coin shop, where the trays of common worn Indian head pennies and Buffalo nickels officially sealed my fate haha.