USA Born & Bred. My Dad Got Me Started In Coin Collecting When I Was 5 Or 6

I grew up in Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois. Lived in Illinois my first 35 years, and worked in Chicago for 18 of those years. Then lived in Indiana 17 years, on the east coast for 6 years, and in California for 6 years until my wife retired in May and we began snowbirding -- living part of the year in California and part of the year in Ohio. Cancer survivor (2013).

My Dad and another man were partners in a filling station when I was a child. Back when I was six, people mostly paid in cash in my tiny town of Galva, IL, population 3100. At least once a week, I was able to go through all of the coins in the safe at his workplace to build up my collection. I kept very active through most of my teen years.

Then I got away from collecting for the most part until a month ago. There were times when I would get rolls of coins at the bank quite often, but those spurts were usually no longer than a couple months at a time. I did almost nothing on it for the last 20 years, until I started again in the last two months.

I had hoped to inherit my Dad's collection. He had collected nearly complete sets of pennies (Lincoln & Indian), nickels (buffalo & Jefferson), dimes (mercury -- except 1916D -- & Roosevelt) Washington quarters, liberty Walking halves, Franklin, & Kennedy, and had a lot of silver dollars. He had 20-cent pieces, 2-cent piece, both kinds of 3-cent pieces, and other earlier coins of several denominations.

But life is not always kind. He had to sell the whole collection to help with his cancer bills.

I am interested in building up all of those collections for myself, but cannot afford to buy everything from ebay or antique stores. I hope to begin frequenting estate sales and find places where I can buy rolls with a realistic chance of finding something useful, rather than rolls that have been bought & sold 100 times over on ebay.

I also have gotten the bug to build a Canadian coin collection that I started in childhood. For the most part, it is less expensive and I have a better chance of completing collections, except for the very rare coins. We visited friends in Quebec recently, and I was able to massively advance my collection in those 10 days. I have also gotten good deals on Etsy and ebay in the last week. I may collect some of the more exotic coins in Canada, such as Superman & Justice League, but they are proliferating so fast and with such cost (Coins face values from 25 cents to $100 to start with) that I may have to have a very narrow focus in that area.

Thanks for reading! Most of my posts will not be nearly this long!