Читать книгу Coin Collecting For Dummies - Neil S. Berman - Страница 28

As kids, we could ride our bikes to the bank on a Saturday morning and swapped our allowance for rolls of coins. At the bench outside the bank, unwrapped the rolls, and pulled out all the old coins we could find. Then, fill the rolls with replacement coins, and run back inside to the teller, and swapped the picked-over rolls for new ones, repeating the process until they ran out of money or time. At the end of the morning, we would have piles of Indian-head cents, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters, Walking Liberty half dollars, and plenty of the more modern silver coins that had been discontinued a few years earlier. We spent the next week trading our treasures with other kids, and even sold some of the coins to local coin dealers — at a profit. We were budding tycoons having lots of fun.

Sadly, since the late 1980s, kids would be wasting their time trying to find anything rare or unusual in change. Occasionally, a Wheatie (the Lincoln cent with wheat ears on the back, struck before 1959) shows up, but all the silver coins have disappeared, and the modern-clad coins have huge mintages and no collector value. No wonder kids have migrated away from coins to baseball cards, and other collectibles.

Past programs like the 50 State Quarters and Sacagawea Dollars brought many new people into the hobby of coin collecting. Here are a couple of the reasons why people got getting excited about coin collecting again.