How I Got Started Collecting And How I Got Started Into VAMs

Twenty five cents and 4 pieces of sugar cane! What a great story!

I don't remember how I got started collecting, but I was very young and had not been collecting long when we were robbed. It kind of took the wind out of my sail and I never started back up. I wish I had. Who knows what I could/would have now, but I'm more disappointed in the loss of all the knowledge I could have gained over those years.

It has always been in the back of my mind, though and last year decided I would start with my change jar and see what was in there. Wasn't long before I found a coin with MD and found CCF while looking for the answer.

I'm intrigued with Vamming, I just get frustrated after a few hours of not being able to ID it and I don't want to keep posting pics and have others attribute it for me.

Everytime I pick up a Morgan and bring it home, I try to identify it. Some I have successfully, others have been put into a "come back to" pile to try and ID again someday.

The house I lived in, growing up in the mid-Sixties, was on a fairly steep hill in a very small town in upstate New York. There were two flights of steps down to the sidewalk, with a flat layer in the middle. The middle layer was my world. My Mom (single parent) allowed me to pursue my Matchbox fixation (what a surprise - SuperDave had fixations as a child) on that layer. Of course, the hill was the main point - even then, I preferred twisty roads to superhighways - so I did the majority of my road construction on the hill.

One day, I was shoving my Matchbox bulldozer through some uncharted territory, when out popped this coin. "Oh, cool," I said, "I found a penny!"

"But wait. It's not the right color."

It was an 1861 Indian Head. Copper-Nickel, obviously too white to be a "normal" penny. To an 8-year-old, it was like hitting the lottery. It immediately became my most valuable possession, defensible with deadly force. It wasn't until I discovered women that I learned to love anything else with that desperation.

It was also my only "collected" coin until adulthood. When I made the abrupt transition from small-town America into the US Army, among the bazillion new experiences I pursued with my usual fruit-fly attention span was collecting Indian Heads. This was the late 70's, pre-TPG, so I'd wander into coin shops and buy raw coins with a typical soldier's monetary abandon and impulsive lack of knowledge. I accumulated a full date set. All of them, including 1877 and 1909-S. It surprised me, too. To an extent, I was cognizant of what I had but still too immature to truly grok the importance of such a grouping. So, in the turmoil of the breakup of my first marriage (you ever get married just because you could? I did), the collection got sold for what even I knew was stupid money. Including the 1861.

14 years later, I was casting about on ebay for interesting Christmas gifts (I'm kinda....um....eccentric in terms of gifting) for my then-wife. I saw it, I had to have it, I bought it.

1885 Philadelphia Morgan, graded 65DMPL in a PCI slab. I got it for a great price because of the slab. 65? No. DMPL? Oh, heck, yes. A headlight. I'd never seen a DMPL coin before, especially one more than a hundred years old; it was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds. Almost hated to give it to her then, regret it even more now.

That was only five years ago. I didn't dive into coins (and Morgans specifically) like jumping into a pool, I dove into them like jumping off a cliff and I've been at terminal velocity ever since. You can blame Rob Joyce for my interest in VAMming; I kinda gravitated towards 1921's because they got no respect, just like me, and in the research process found his pre-VAMworld personal site listing his Fun With 1921 stuff.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, she loved it. Understand, these are not "primary" gifts - I do have *some* vague concept of what a woman likes. She got matching DMPL '85/'85-O Morgans that year, and a pair of Liberty/Indian Quarter Eagles the next.

Thanks very much for adding twohawks' post here Dave....this is where it belongs for sure....I bring all of these stories to life through imagined images, and some of them actually bring tears to my eyes (I can't say for what reason though).

And thanks for the clarification on the gift giving ideas....My faith in you has been restored (sorta....I think....)

Terry, Russ, Dave, Scoob.....you are lions, and I respect you as such.

Motivation has many faces....Very neat Oz....This all puts things into a certain perspective for me.

Gene, where are YOU buddy? I want YOUR story.

My story is not very flamboyant, Though it truely mine........I was born in north eastern Montana, where wheat fields roam for miles and miles, or should I say for hundreds of square miles...An my family was one of 8 families in our rural community.....and with its 13 children(my folks aunt's and uncles) they out grew there surroundings and went as many do, in small towns....to where ever life would find them a new home where they could thrive....As I too know from my own experiences....It was the same for me..As a fish in a small bowl, I soon out grew my environment and have traveled across the The USA and globe..........But my child hood experiences of when my my UNCLE would come back home, have effected me the most...of all the experiences in my life...............
I found the gift of giving.......
it took me years to understand........for as a child....its just a coin.......It was a Morgan dollar.............
Who knows what it was worth then in the early sixties......I only know I could buy a crap load of candy! A year later we moved...by train.....my mom had "20" silver dollars to buy food as we road the train.......you should have seen there faces as SILVER was used to purchase anything.....Montana used silver until 1965 as casual money....Where other states had already locked it up....
5 years later, I found a friend who inherited(at 10 years old) gold coins, and I had never seen them before........GOLD COINS>>>>All my lawn mowing days, and I was alergic to grass, I missed buying $20 double eagles for 45 bucks.....#&%(#&*#.....or crap....thinking back now...
but the one thing I always remembered was the gift of the Morgan.....candy at first. and them I bought one for $3.50 in about 1964 in BU condition which I had no clue what that meant,, and I have it still....and passed upon a friend who had all the KEY DATES of the lincoln series for $6 bucks? I MEAN THE GOOD ONES. I think today he stole them......But I wanted the Morgans.........I missed out one a great buy on the pennies and opted to keep my resolve for the gift of giveing
I still kick my self for that, but I loved the Morgans

I have been on ebay for over 10 years, and I got sucked into one of the REDFIELD morgans...advertised as some great doubling!!mind you that was only 2 years ago, at best, about the same time as I met my bestest VAM buddy Zee.......buy the way, it was a VAM 4 common but beautiful coin

MY FIRST ENTRY TO ERROR COINS, from which I have heard so much about......just not from the morgan series..........was this 1878 8TF
yes it turned out to be VAM 4.....but such a beautiful coin........
WITH
ORIGINAL SKIN.........this is something most people do NOT KNOW ABOUT..... I didn't understand this POINT, until a talk from terry pointed this out and I have a coin such as this with all of the other coins I have....THIS POINT SHOULD
BE AN NOTHER THREAD.......I will stop here.........My family and my friends and the history are why am here, I enjoy all of your stories..

This one is mine..........and true....