BILLs BEST COINS

I'm a collector/investor of 40+ years who started out by filling in the Whitman Blue Book holes. Boy, what a thrill it was to find the 21 & 21-D Mercs! (Sorry folks, even back then the 21 Mercs were only found by sorting thru hundreds of rolls!). I had to buy my AG 16-D, and still have it. I paid $19.00.

Then Dad jumped into the coin fray. I clearly remember the day he came home with 5 mint-sealed canvas bags of silver dollars he'd gotten from the local bank at face value because they NEEDED THE SPACE in their vault!

We opened one bag, discovered they were all 85-P, sealed the bag back up & never looked at the others! The bags sat around on our den floor for months, mother complaining that they were heavy & difficult to vacuum around. Dad finally needed the idle 'junk' dollars to put back in his ice cream business & traded them off for even money to a local coin dealer. Five thousand dollars in 1959 would have bought you 150 ounzes of gold(were it legal for US citizens to own it!). A dollar was truly a dollar.

You must understand that in the late 1950s silver dollars were a nuisance & only useful to put in the toes of Christmas stockings. Alas!

After college and the Coast Guard, it wasn't until the early 1970s that I revisited my hobby. I didn't fully understand what was happening to our money, but intuitively, perhaps some of the moments spent with Dad stuck, and I began to buy-up all the uncirculated rolls and single Mercs, Franklins, and Walkers I could find at coin shops in the Boston area. Morgans would have been a better choice, but at least I shied away from Lincolns and Buffaloes. Accumulating numismatic gold would have been the wisest choice. Oh, well.....

During this period I individually & handpicked my complete Washington Quarter set. I still have it, and you can click on its image to the right.

I share these personal experiences in hopes that young collectors can derive the same or similar thrills that I so fondly recall to this day now being in my mid-50s.