Doug Winter Numismatics - In all of my years of being a professional numismatist, I have met few collectors who "get it" the way Steve Duckor does. Steve is a generous, gracious individual who is easy to deal with and who has a great eye. When he decides to tackle a project he does it deliberately but aggressively, and I have seen him make very, very few mistakes in the years in which we have been friendly.
A few years ago, Steve was given the opportunity to acquire a group of superb gold dollars from his mentor David Akers. When he made the decision to purchase these coins, his newest collecting path was set: he would assemble a world-class collection of these small, historic issues. But Steve, being Steve, wasn't going to assemble his set in the traditional way. Instead of worrying about completeness, he was going to focus on coins which had superb eye appeal, were well-made and cosmetically appealing, had important pedigrees, and which represented intelligent value within the parameters of the series. This meant that he would likely never finish the set as there were numerous issues (especially those from Charlotte and Dahlonega) which wouldn't/didn't exist with all these boxes checked. If, say, he wasn't able to find a "Duckor-esque" 1851-D, he wasn't merely going to fill a hole just to be complete.
Steve's set is nothing short of incredible. The lowest graded coins in the set are four which are "only" MS64, while the majority of the cons range from MS66 to MS68 (and there are even five which grade MS68+!).
As someone who helped Steve build this set, I thought I'd provide an overview of these coins which are going to be sold in a few weeks at the 2015 Heritage
ANA auction.
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Posted 07/29/2015 07:03 am
