What Are Your Earliest Memories/Experiences With Coins?

I thought this topic might make for an interesting thread.

I was born in 1959. My earliest memory of coins (and money) is making the association between having money and then being able to exchange it for something at the store; as I grew up, that would have been penny candy, gum and comic books.

As a young tyke, I wrestled with the fact that although a nickel was larger than a dime, it was worth half as much. When my parents began giving me and my sisters allowances, receiving a dime was really exciting—so much money in such a small coin! Then, as our allowance amount increased, we actually began getting--a quarter. That blew my mind--a coin so large and worth more than twice as much as a dime. And so heavy!

One night after work, my dad came home and showed me and my little sister an unbelievable coin--a Franklin half dollar. It was so huge, we gazed at it with wonderment. We knew how long it took us to earn a dollar of allowance money, so then to see half of that represented by a single coin--truly incredible. I loved its size and heft.

Then came the magic day when my dad showed me his Lincoln Penny collection. His blue Whitman folder began with 1909-VDB and finished with 1942-D; he wrote dates under the remaining nine empty holes, ending in 1945-D. (Back in those days, the template was to list coins in the order P-S-D, as opposed to today's P-D-S.) I pored over these old coins for a long time. He was born in 1927 and had been able to assemble an almost complete collection from pocket change, needing only the S-VDB, 11-S, 14-S, 15-S, 22 Plain (the folder calls it "Broken D") and 31-S.

(About this time, me and my friends started looking at our change, and we noted the two different penny reverses: wheat back and memorial. We didn't know what a wheat stalk was, however; we referred to them as "feathers.")

My dad also showed me a small box of coins that had been handed down from (I think) his grandmother. Mid-to-late 19th-century type coins, very worn common dates. But for a youngster, they were fascinating to look at.

At about that time, the comic books I was reading had this ad:




I thought for sure that our little box contained at least one 1804; alas, it didn't. But this ad, coupled by my dad showing me a Red Book, taught me a new and incredible truth: a coin could be worth more than face value. Get rich quick? Yes!

I then began collecting in earnest around 1971/72. So that's my early coin history. What's yours?

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