The coin collection (Published Feb 28, 2022

 

The coin collection

 

I was introduced to coin collecting at a very early age.  The miniature golf courses, which my father owned, also had penny arcades.  By the time I was a kid, the name “Penny Arcade” was a misnomer.  Only the weightlifting machine and the scale were a penny, several of the games were a nickel, and the best of the arcade games, the riffles and skee ball, were a dime.    Starting at about age seven, almost every day, I would go thru the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters with my dad looking for coins to put in those blue coin collector books.  If we did not already have the coin, then into the books they would go.  In fact, we had several of each book, at least of the penny books, so I would have to find even more of each year’s penny to make the books complete.    And of course, each year had coins with a letter under the dates, “S” for San Francisco, “D” for Denver, and no letter meant the coin was minted in Philadelphia.  So, for most years you can find three different coins for a given year.  Even if we already had the coin, and found a better coin, we would pull out the old coin and replace it with a new or better coin.  The shinier and newer the coin looked, the better it was.  So not only was it an art to find the coins but to find the best of each coin.  Dimes could be made even shinier, and thus more valuable in my mind, by breaking a thermometer and rubbing the mercury over the face of the dime.  That would make the dime look like a newly minted coin. 

When I was a child there were still many Indian Head Pennies around, but I never found enough to have the little blue collection book specifically for them.   Nickels changed designs later than the penny.  All nickels from 1938 back were Buffalo Nickels with a buffalo on one side and an Indian person on the other.  Then in 1938, the nickel changed to the Jefferson Nickel which we still have today.  This required two collection books, one for the Buffalo and one for the Jefferson nickels.  Once in a great, while I would find an older nickel, the Liberty Nickel that had a big “V” on the back and looked more like a European coin to me than an American coin.  Dimes also required two books, one book for the Mercury Head Dimes that were minted until 1945, and then the Roosevelt dime.  Occasionally I would still come across the dimes from even before the Mercury Head called the Barber which was apparently named for the coin’s designer.  I did not find these often enough for them to have their own book.   I think my collection stopped with the dime books.  Maybe my father thought that collecting quarters was a bit expensive for its time though I do remember having quite a few of the Washington quarters from different years and even a few “Standing Liberty” and “Barber” ones.  I know we did not collect the half-dollar coins.  At the time the half dollar had a picture, Benjamin Franklin.  If I found an old half dollar, called the “Standing Liberty”, my dad would let me keep it. 

I recall that in the penny collection, the most sought out pennies were the 1909 “VDB” and the even rarer “S-VDB” As I recall, I did find a “VDB” but never found the “S VDB”.   Other than these VDB pennies, multiple penny books were totally filled with all the coins.  The nickel collection for both the Buffalo and Jefferson were also complete as I recall.  And for the dimes, I was very proud to have the complete collection of the Mercury head and the much smaller collection of Roosevelt dimes, smaller in that there were only about fifteen years of Roosevelt dimes at the time I was collecting so that was not thought of by me, as a collection at all. 

My dad had his own old collection, some going back to the Civil War or before.  And my grandmother had a coin collection as well.  I do not know what happened to either of those collections.  It seems I got some of those coins, perhaps they are buried with what I retained of my collection somewhere in our attic.  I stopped collecting coins by the time I was around eleven years old and collecting coins has fallen out of fashion.  If I did find the coins, not sure the kids would even want them.  The coins do not seem to be worth as much as I thought at the time, I was collecting them 

When I was about eleven years old, the school had a carnival.  One of the booths had goldfish, each goldfish had its own small bowl.  The object was to throw a dime at the bowl.  If the dime went into the bowl, the goldfish was yours.  I was given a couple of dollars to go to the carnival.  I quickly went through all of that money in food and other games before I happened upon this goldfish coin toss,   I had a solution.  I ran home, ran to my room, and grabbed the mercury head dime book.  I quickly punched out every dime, ran back to the playground, and successfully won at least ten goldfish.  I was so proud and happy.  They poured all the goldfish in a coffee can with water which I so proudly carried home.  We did not have any kind of fish tank or aquarium, so I kept them in a glass milk bottle which I cleaned out.  Friends came over to admire my fish collection.  By the following weekend, all the goldfish had died.  My Mercury Head Dime collection was gone and my interest in collecting coins had waned forever.   Maybe, not forever, we did collect the quarters some ten years ago when they released quarters that featured each State on the back.