Crazy Things Non-Coin Collectors Say

What I find funny is that non numismatists never can pronounce the words "numismatic" or "numismatist." Often they will even correct my pronunciation and say something like "it is not 'numismatist' it is 'numisMATicyst.'"

Bit of background here, I work in the oil field... I'm a mud engineer for Ambar Lonestar. In general I'll go and stay at a location for a couple of weeks or so while the hole is being drilled, then take a couple of days to a week off before heading off to the new location... My job is kind of a 24/7 thing while I'm on location, but when certain things are going on I can safely steal away from the rig for a couple of hours.

Anyway, my job takes me to all sorts of little out of the way places generally around Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

Anyway, long story short... When I can get away from the rig for a few hours one of the things I like to do is go to the local antique shops and meander around. When I was growing up my mother used to drag me to these places and from that I gathered quite a bit of information about all sorts of things. Most antique shops don't have coins out and about on display, but after chatting up the owners for a while more often than not they'll start talking about coins they have sitting on a shelf somewhere. I get really excited when the owners are little bitty old grannies...

Anyway, I was on a job near Woodville Texas last week and stopped by a shop and chatted with the owner (who just happened to be 85 years old) for about an hour about depression glass. I noticed that she was selling silver spoons at about 1/3 of melt value and told her that she should bump the prices up on them or someone with less scruples than I might buy them just to melt... I also noticed that she had a late 19th century reproduction chair listed way to cheaply. One thing led to another and she asked me to come back by the store later in the week to look at some coins.

So a couple of days later I was able to get back into town and was greeted with
"Now these were kinda dingy so I polished them up..." and then she proceeded to pull out about 30 Morgans. Luckily there weren't any that would have had any real numismatic value, but I did have quite a scare on a 1899 that I initially didn't see a mint mark on (it was an O).