Greetings coin collecting pros, and shout out to all the relative rookies like myself!
I got started coin collecting back in the 1980s, mostly thanks to my grandfather. I'm a bicentennial kid, so people have been giving me drummer boy quarters for as long as I can remember. Pop-pop started me off with a few
Buffalo nickels, plus a worn down example or two of each type of common silver coins. My favorite pop-pop treasure is a bronze $1 London Bridge bicentennial token from Lake Havasu, AZ. There is so much story and crazy design crammed into that golden coin. I read a bunch of pocket grading books, and then I collected a little metal box full of random beat-up circulated coins, tokens, slugs, and a few decent pieces.
I also collected Marvel comics (G.I. Joe, Transformers, etc.), rocks and minerals, Star Wars figures, and Garbage Pail kids. I still have a giant bin of LEGOs, but alas I sold all my He-Man figures and Transformers at a garage sale to the neighbor kid for $1 apiece.
Most of that stuff got packed away when I was a teenager, got shuffled to my folks' attic in college, and then I moved out of state for many years. I did save a bunch of
State Quarters in the early years, and tuck away some rolls of
Sacagawea dollars when they first came out.
Now that I am approaching 50, many of those things have made a return for the next generation. I display the rock collection in an old glass cabinet. I gave away a bunch of old school 70s and 80s comics to kids who like superheroes, and kept the good stuff. (The star of that collection is a 12-cent Aquaman #5 in decent condition that I pulled out of the bargain bin at a local bookstore for $1 in the mid-1980s.) I have played LEGOs with my niece and nephew for years. My nephew and I currently build LEGO Battlebots using a framework that I designed around a $5 RC car chassis.
So I figured, why not get back into coin collecting a bit? It's a nice, quiet hobby that I could pursue into retirement. I have a few shorter-term objectives:
establish a quality collection of bicentennial pieces
enjoy hunting coin rolls, mostly
Jefferson nickelsexplore errors and varieties, and learn how to spot them in rolls
develop a solid understanding of grading and value
work through the accumulation of coins my grandfather left after he passed
My grandfather handed down a couple boxes of stuff to my mother. Neither she nor my sister has any interest in coins, and I have no kids. It has become my responsibility to steward and divide that collection for my niece and nephew. Pop-pop culled a lot of coins from circulation—wheat pennies, 90% silver coins,
Buffalo nickels. He also left coffee cans of
Eisenhower dollars,
Kennedy halves, and mint rolls of 1976 halves. As I began working through the collection, I realized that the finer points were all-important. For example, the stacks of 1972
Eisenhower dollars had multiple types, and type 2 was expensive. There are also some interesting cigar boxes with coins from his time in WWII (both the victors and the vanquished) which tell a cool little story.
Eventually I would like to separate and correctly preserve the jewels, liquidate the rest for college funds, hand out some starter pieces to extended family interested in coin collecting. That's a long road, but hopefully it's an enjoyable one!
Cheers, Brandmeister
Posted 05/21/2023 7:35 pm
