Howdy Howdy! My Life Story, Highly Condensed.

Greetings, howdies and salutations, esteemed forum members. This seems like a friendly place to hang out. Also expect it's quite educational.

As I mentioned in the "Where Y'all From?" thread, I live behind the Redwood Curtain in northern California, roughly 300 miles north of San Francisco. I was born and raised in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and have lived in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London England, Fort Worth Texas, and Clearwater Florida. I've lived in semi-rural northern California for close to 20 years, but hate the Giants and still root for the Pirates and the Dodgers.

I'm turning 70 in about 3 months, and just bought my first ancient coin two weeks ago. It's a Mark Antony legionary denarius, Legio XIII. (Uploaded image should appear with this post somewhere.) Oh, here it is:



I guess that marks the beginning of me as coin collector, although I've been buying coins for regularly for a decade -- 1964 and earlier silver US coins with no particular numismatic value -- for their silver content as an investment. When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I read an article about silver coins. The writer encouraged people to hang onto all their silver change because inflation and the demand for silver were going to drive the price of silver up to where there would be more than 10¢ worth of silver in a dime, and then the government would stop using silver in US coins. I remember being unconvinced. I was a sophomore then, and very wise. That would have been around 1961, when silver was going for 91¢ an ounce, and there was about 6 1/2 ¢ worth of silver in a dime. Then a few years later it happened, just as the writer predicted, but by then I was way too cool to pay attention to anything as prosaic as the commodities market.

I became a silversmith a few years later, and kept at it for about 30 years. During that period of time I became very aware of the movement of silver's spot price, because I used to have to buy silver regularly. Eventually I changed careers, and then at some point started buying dimes and quarters and halves and silver dollars in small batches from time to time. Of course they were mostly pretty worn, and all the key dates had been high graded out before the coins were offered for sale, but I found myself looking up dates of coins I had, just in case. I found a few with a Blue Book value that were a few cents over melt value, or would have been if they'd been in better condition, but that was it. Still, I was gradually succumbing to the call of coin collecting. A couple of years ago I found a very worn Indian Head penny in my pocket change, and became inordinately excited. I promptly went out and bought a half dozen more in better condition, so maybe my coin collecting started then.

Anyway, I'm now finally starting to read about numismatics, and seem to have gotten the bug. I bought the denarius after watching the old Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton version of Cleopatra on DVD a few weeks ago, and have begun learning about Ancient Rome and Greece. I'm also interested in English medieval silver pennies (I'm keeping an eye out for an affordable Richard I in decent condition), Papal coins, and have become curious about Biblical coins.