How did you get started with coin collecting?

Today I'm offering a poll question: How did you get started with coin collecting?

There is a comment section below each article, feel free to use it with your response.  It's just a little blog, but it sure is getting a whole lot of views.  Seems to me we can put it use for posterity and share our stories.


Back in the summer of  '77 we had a birthday party for 2 of my great grandmothers.  One was born in 1898, the other in 1896.  The younger grandmother was pleasant, but she was confined to a wheel chair from polio back in the 40s and at her advanced age resided in a nursing home.  We could visit

I used to be cute, even in plaid pants. 
What went wrong?

and talk, but that was about it.  The other lived alone in a little house so far out in the country that it was like going to another world.  She took care of several acres of blueberries, took care of the house, and took care of pretty much everybody and everything.  Her age was starting to show and she could use some help with a few things, asked if I would like to come stay with her for a little while.  Who was I to say no to unlimited molasses cookies?

Besides helping paint the barn and clean up the basement and break up a pile of boards under an apple tree, and hauling said boards into the said basement for later use as firewood, she asked one evening if I could help roll up her can of change because what fingers she still had were not as nimble as they were in her younger days (which was a century ago).  I'm 10 years old, at a house lived in by an old lady.  There are no games, no toys, only 2 channels on the black and white TV, the phone was a party line and calling home was long distance.  That cost money back then and she was frugal...that's why she has a can of change.  It would be 20 years until Al Gore invented the internet.  She did have a set of checkers and a checker board.  We played that a lot.  Besides watching the paint dry on the barn, there was not much else to do.

This night, instead of checkers, we would roll her change.  She had some flat wrappers she got from the bank.  They would just give them to you back then.  "Do you need more?" ...with a smile. 
I got to work sorting out the quarters, then the nickels, then the dimes, leaving all the pennies behind.  Mind you, I was doing this all by myself.  Nannie was writing a letter.  I was helping with the pennies.  Back then, helping means you get to do it all. 

When I got to counting the pennies there was one that I didn't understand.  It was worn out, almost smooth.  I thought it was a button.  She's got a tin full of buttons, musta dropped one in this tin by accident.  I showed it to her, asked what the indian head was all about. 

"When I was your age, that's what pennies looked like"

She explained that when she was my age, that's what the pennies looked like.

It was an Indian Head Penny.  I looked through the rest, found ANOTHER ONE!

This one had more detail.  You could see the feathers, face, earhair, the shield on the back...everything.  I never knew these existed.  From my point of view, coins were perpetual.  For the most part, they still are-40 years later.

I'm sitting there with nothing better to do and a pile of change in front of me.  On a lark I started to arrange them by year to see what the oldest one was.  The pennies went back to the 20s.  Nickels went back too, but not quite as far.  The dimes and quarters were all pretty new and pooped out in the 60s.  Looking at the pennies, there were the kind with the building and those funny ones with just the words. 

I turned into a madman.

From that point on, if there was any change around, I had to look at it.  I found plenty of those wheat pennies.  Found more nickels that kept getting older, back as far as the 30s.  Still, just the new dimes and quarters.  I had another grandmother that handled accounting for a magazine distribution company.  She would find all sorts of interesting coins.  When I visited her she would give me those brand new bicentennial quarters, but said she had to save the half dollars and silver dollars to pay the milkman.  Yeah, there was such a thing as a milkman back then. 

As I mentioned, she worked for a magazine distributor.  The guys in the trucks would pick up bundles, take them to the stores, collect money, and bring the old magazines back.  The old magazines would have part of the cover torn off to send back to whoever so they didn't get charged.  The rest of the magazine was thrown away.  We had piles of comic books without covers.  Archie, Richie Rich, Sergeant Rock...it was good to be a kid.  My grandmother picked up a couple of coin magazines, gave them to me one week.  It turned out people knew about these things.  They wrote articles about them, had pictures of stuff I'd ever seen before...coins with eagles and buffaloes and chicks with wings on their head.  I recall one article in particular about an 1804 Silver Dollar that sold for $100,000!  That's more money than I ever heard of.

I kept at it for ages.  I'd ride my bike downtown, go to the bank, get some pennies, look through them sitting on the curb.  I'd keep a few, then take the rest across the street to another bank, trade them in for nickels.  I'd keep this up for hours.  I could find lots of wheaties, a war nickel now and then, but I could never find dimes or quarters much older than me.  It's like they were never made.  I stuck with the pennies.  The nickels kinda faded away.  There were plenty of pennies to work with and nobody would mind if I looked through their change and kept a couple of pennies.