Why Did Baby Boomers Collect Coins Compared To Later Generations?

I totally agree Winesteven! Reminds me of a line from Meet Joe Black when Death played by Brad Pitt asked a Jamaican woman who was dying if she had enough pretty pictures. Those pretty pictures or memories play a very important role in ones life IMHO.

My dad was born in 1948 in Germany and moved here with his family in the mid 1950s where he grew up on the family chicken farm in New Mexico. (Grandma was a German war bride.)

Other than trying (and failing) to keep his two younger brothers out of trouble, there wasn't much else to do on a chicken farm, except picking okra, which was much worse, or trying with Grandpa to keep one of the family rustbuckets running, whether that was the big green Poppin' Johnny Deere or the '50 GMC pickup or his mom's '57 Ford station wagon.

So he joined the Explorers (Scouts) and started saving Wheat cents and the odd Barber or Mercury dime or Buffalo nickel from change. He was working at a gas station and making something much less than a dollar per hour.

That apparently stuck as he collected interesting coins from change off and on for the next 30 years until I took up the torch in 1985 at age 7, helping to fill those blue Whitman holes. He had a roll of unc. Kennedy halves for each year 1971-1974, several 1971 Ikes, a few pre-war silver coins, a handful of 50s dated Roosies and Washingtons, 4 1921 Morgans, 2 1923 Peace dollars, and quite a bit of Wheat cents and dateless or worn Buffalo nickels. Later on my other Grandma gave him a roll of Morgan and Peace dollars that she and her husband had collected throughout the years at the family body shop business and at Vegas casinos, and a roll of Mercury dimes my mom won in a contest in the late 80s.

When he came back from Vietnam in 1968 he brought some Vietnamese paper money, which I still have, and a couple of Taiwanese knockoff Beatles and Doors records on funky cheap clear-orange vinyl, which I also still have.

But if you think about it, in the 1950s there wasn't that much to collect if you were a young man who wanted a collecting hobby. Bottle caps, baseball cards, stamps, coins, Lionel toy train cars, cap guns, secret decoder rings or mail-offer selections like Littleton had for world coins and currency. (And perhaps, in a carefully stashed box, torn out pages of pin-up girls "liberated" from Dad's "book collection".)

It's a very similar story in the UK. Back in 1967 you could find Victorian halfpennies and pennies going back to 1860 in change plus loads of pre-1947 silver and classic rarities like the 1949 threepence or 1951 penny.

Sorry June 1st

You reminded me that I think I got the Coin Collecting merit badge way back when. A few other Scouts were into it (briefly, until we discovered girls), and my brother and I were in the coin collecting club in early high school. The latter helped inspire my interest, because the math teacher who ran it had an amazing collection. And he had a give away at every meeting. This guy had a first edition of Newton's Principia, which if each year's calculus students bugged him enough about it, he would bring in to class at the end of the year and display. In the mid 70s I think it was worth $100000 and the kids all drooled. I have no idea how he managed to have all this on a teacher's salary, but we guessed it was mostly inherited.

I'm going off topic, but remembering the big influences in my coin collecting interest. I also collected stamps - this was more of a thing for my one grandfather and he had lots of unused stamps from the early 1900s, many plate blocks, but unfortunately all with very little value. Let's not forget Matchbox cars, lots of us boomers had them as kids and it's interesting how much value some of the originals have now.

Wow that was a thing? I don't want to derail the thread but that is really interesting. In my scouting days (late 70s - early 80s) you had to complete a checklist to advance to the next rank, but it was all stuff like folding the flag, attending historical sites, tying knots, that kind of thing. Was that the case here?

Edit: yes it was a thing, and still is. Guess my troop didn't have it.

Baby boomers are "generally" born between 1946 and 1964. They are identified as the children of the "greatest generation" - those who lived through the Depression and WWII, and are responsible for the population explosion that resulted from economic prosperity after the War (perhaps one reason for the popularity of coin / stamp collecting among that generation.) Generation X is defined as the children of Baby Boomers. My parents were both born during WWII, married young and I came along a couple of years into their marriage. So, by definition I am neither Baby Boomer nor Gen X. It's all about when and how your parents were raised and how you were raised. My grandparents experienced the Great Depression - they learned to be very frugal and passed this along to their children. I inherited that to some extent, but not as much as my parents. I grew up in a middle-income family that enabled me to pursue higher education.

People started having more time for hobbies and interests after WWII. They were better educated and paid. That could that be part of the equation.

I've been blessed economically throughout my life, but I can't bring myself to spend more than a couple hundred dollars on any given metallic disc, and then rarely. To this day, $235 is the most I've ever paid for a coin. That does limit the type and quality of what I acquire, but I've also learned to be somewhat patient and to take advantage of cherry-picking opportunities. I got into coins for the historic interest they have for me. I've stayed in it for that reason. It began as identification with history in general and evolved to an interest in the history of the coining process itself. I used obsess as a "hole filler," but no longer. I focus on specific areas (that are narrowing year by year) and remain diligent to those boundaries. Sure, now and then a deal comes along on something that I might not otherwise look for, but as a rule I remain focused on my preferred areas. This year, I've decided to scale back even more and am in process of deciding how to liquidate some of the items I no longer have an interest in. I'm not a silver stacker, but I appreciate silver and have accumulated quite a bit by inheritance, job lots and circulation finds. Gold remains outside my area of interest, but I do have 3-4 items that I've either inherited or gotten at a great deal.

Not precisely an answer to the OP's original query but my particular ramblings on the grand pursuit.