Coins July 2021

Have you ever bought some coins for someone and then later wished you could take it all back and start over? Or, perhaps wished that you had never gotten involved at all? Here’s my story: I would like for you to read it and think about what you would have done in the situation. This all began several years ago, with the ending taking place in December 2020. My wife and I were visiting relatives in a large city. One of my nephews had in the last several years begun to earn large sums of money. His financial advisor had encouraged him to diversify some of this money into something other than stocks, bonds, and property. The only coin that really fit my collecting interests at the time was the Saint. He and…

I have been having fun and SO MUCH GOOD FORTUNE! As a kid I knew about silver certificate and the 1943 wheat penny and that was about it. In 2019, a 30+ year friend had a devastating car wreck that took his wife, then fire took his house, so I was the only family he could turn to. He was always asking if he could go through my change. One night, just outside of building I live in, I found a sandwich bag with 36 pennies from 1820 to 1889! I said thank you Universe. Turned, went back to my apartment, looked at my friend and said some pennies from heaven missed you and asked me to bring you the best thing for you when you were needing a little…

THE MERCURY dime is what started this writer collecting coins. In the fall of 1950 I lived in Longmont, Colorado, and a local grocery store advertised that it would sell a pound of margarine for a dime if that coin was dated 1940. It did not take long to discover why the store was so ‘generous:’ this particular dime was very hard to find in that part of the country. There is more to the history of the Mercury dime than just being used an as advertisement for merchandise, however. In the first place, although called the ‘Mercury’ dime, it is also sometimes referred to as the Winged Liberty Head dime as the head is of a woman, not a man. (Mercury was a male god of the Roman world whose…

The Mint announced April 12 the names of the first two women to be honored on coins issued under the American Women Quarters Program. Famed writer Maya Angelou and trailblazing astronaut Dr. Sally Ride will be the first distinguished American women celebrated on the reverse of the program’s circulating quarters. As authorized by Public Law 116-330 – the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 – the Mint will issue circulating and numismatic quarter-dollar coins with reverse designs emblematic of the accomplishments and contributions of a prominent American woman beginning in January 2022. Contributions may come from a wide spectrum of fields including, but not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space and the arts. The women honored will come from ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse backgrounds. Since the…

FOR DECADES now, the quarter has been one of the four real workhorse coins of everyday commerce within the U.S. The cent, the nickel, the dime, and the quarter are what pops out of our pockets for almost all of the small change transactions we undertake. And yet, way back when a young Congress finally got around to authorizing a Mint in Philadelphia, quarters appear to have been something of an afterthought. None were made at all until 1796, and even then, the total output was the tiniest of trickles. Let’s look then at some of our early twenty-five cent pieces and see just what sort of collection of them we might be able to assemble today. What beginning? While Julie Andrews was the one who famously sang that it was good…

THE LATE J.H. Cline, Standing Liberty quarter aficionado, had this to say about the coin in the introduction to the 4th edition of his book, Standing Liberty Quarters: “Like no other coin or series, I loved the Standing Liberty quarter at first sight[,] and that love still burns white hot!” I can’t say that I was that enamored with the coin when I was a junior collector in the 1950s, but it was definitely one of my favorites. After all, it was nothing like the staid Washington quarter that almost always appeared in my change. I say “almost,” because Standing Liberty quarters and even the odd Barber quarter showed up from time to time. My love for the series really began with a coin my father brought home that he had found…