Mar 13, 2007 4 min read

It was probably one of the biggest words I had ever learned – numismatist. And, I knew what it meant – basically, a coin collector. A close cousin got me interested in the hobby when I was about 10 years old. He had been collecting since the 1940s when he was a boy, telling me more than once how he would visit my parents and grandparents, dump out a box of old, grungy looking coins on the floor, and begin sifting through them. They would chuckle, he said, and think he was a little nuts.

Yet, over the years, he had the last laugh by building a collection worth tens of thousands.

On each of his visits to our home, there was one suitcase he carried that weighed much more than its appearance. It contained several binders filled with his American gold coins. They were a thing of beauty (despite their intrinsic worth), bearing engraving so crisp and detailed that it hurt my eyes to stare at them too closely.

He had every gold coin denomination you could imagine, from $1 to $50, many of them rare as well as artistic.

When I began collecting, I started small. I’d get a roll of pennies at our local bank, take it home, and begin examining it to see if it contained dates I needed for my collection. By the time I began the hobby, it was pretty big business.

Most of the rare coins had already been located and socked away in collections. I found very few in my practice of exchanging rolls of coins at the local bank. To buy coins meant shelling out a lot more than their face value. Books with pop-in holes and labeled with dates for pennies, nickels, dimes, etc., rested in racks at the variety store as well as establishments specializing in coin and stamp collecting. There were all kinds of accessories, holders, value guides, etc., to gobble up money that would be better spent on desirable coins.

My cousin helped me by giving me some of the “key dates,’ coins that were important to a collection but not common enough anymore to find in loose change. By the time I was done I had filled one penny book from 1941 through the 1960s, missing only the very rare 1955-S double strike, a coin the San Francisco mint mistakenly struck twice with the engraving die. The date and some lettering looked as if it had a shadow. Those coins helped pay for some of my college books.

Strangely, collectors look for imperfect coins, ones that aren’t exactly right that come from the U.S. mint, which can become rarities in themselves and, based on their availability and demand, command very high prices.

It’s one of those few occasions when something damaged that should have gone to the scrap heap becomes worth something. You might call it the mint’s garbage turned treasure.

So, when I read recently how the mint let some of the new gold-colored dollar coins escape without the words, “In God We Trust,’ along their edge, I was intrigued. I had picked up 10 of them from the bank the day they were issued, just to put away in case they ever become valuable (or I need an emergency $10 for some reason).

All of mine are the way they should be. But that won’t stop me from looking, casually, as I see more of the dollar coins, for one that isn’t right. It’s a practice I have never really stopped, remembering again the gold coins my cousin regaled me with.

It’s very unlikely I will ever find anything really valuable drifting around in circulation. But it’s still fun looking.

Have a good day.

James Pletcher Jr. is business editor at the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at 724-439-7571 or by e-mail at begin jpletcher@heraldstandard.com jpletcher@heraldstandard.com end

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