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Looking back
Celebrating 50 years of the Coin Club
Monday, December 10, 2007
Some folks don't like change.
Others hate bills.
Extras
But neither is the case for members of the Clark County Coin Club, who check their pocket change daily and like nothing more than getting their hands on an usual bit of currency.
Members celebrated the club's 50th anniversary this year the way numismatists should: by designing a commemorative coin and having it struck.
They donated the trial piece and a brass coin from the Silvertown Mint of Manchester, Ind., to the Heritage Center of Clark County.
Half a dozen members then visited the News-Sun offices, which turned out to be an appropriate place for a couple of them to swap to talk coins.
Their collecting days started when they were paperboys.
A lesson from the honey man
Rod Riggle will never forget the honey man on Thrasher Street.
"He had a crippled son, and they had bee hives behind the house," Riggle said.
The house was on Riggle's newspaper route, and with the price of the paper at 45 cents a week in those days, "I started off (on collecting days) with a bunch of nickels."
One day, "the honey man didn't have the right change," Riggle recalled.
And rather than asking Riggle to come back again to collect, the man gave him two old coins: an 1862 two-cent piece and an 1850 large one cent piece.
"In history, this two cent piece was the first coin in this country to have 'In God We Trust' on it," Riggle said.
Getting the coins also proved to be a lesson for Riggle in whom he could trust as a collector.
"I ended up getting 43 cents" for the coins, he said.
That means he got short-changed by two cents that week.
But, as he sees it, "I come out on the long end of it" by learning a valuable lesson, Riggle said. It's a lesson the club tries to teach as well.
As much as numismatists swap coins, "the club's focus is to exchange information and knowledge," said current president Dan Freyhof.
And Riggle said it's best to do those things in a certain order: collect the information first and the coins later.
'"I've never purchased a (coin) book that hasn't paid for itself. I've got $1,000 worth of coin books."
Light and magnification
An old paperboy, as well, J.P. Johnson was surprised one day to get a handful of Liberty head walking nickels with the Roman numeral V on the back of them.
"I had an elderly lady give me nine of those," said Johnson, who joined the club in 1959.
That got him looking more closely at Mercury dimes, buffalo nickels and walking liberty half dollars when they came into his hands.
"I had a guy tip me at Christmas, flipped me a silver dollar."
He caught the coin and the collecting fever.
"Back in the '40s, '50s and even the '60s, there were so many kids involved because the vast number of kids were employed by the News and Sun," Johnson said.
And just as blue cardboard coin saving folders were part of his world back then — "almost any kid collected pennies and nickels," he said — a jeweler's loop or magnifying glass travels with Johnson now.
His magnifies the coin 16 times, a bit more than the rule of thumb that calls for a 10-power loop at a 100-watt incandescent light source.
Johnson said the saying is that "illumination and magnification leads to amplification."
And than helps with the initial inspection, which is always the same.
"You look at the date to see if there's any error in the date," Johnson said, "and you look at the mint mark."
The reason?
Before the process was automated, letters that appeared on coins to identify where they were minted — D for Denver, C for Carson City, S for San Francisco) — were struck by hand.
"Sometimes it was not positioned right," Johnson said. "They'd have to grind it in and put it over another one."
And that's one reason that in addition to liking change and bills, coin collectors like another thing most people like to avoid: mistakes — the kind that make coins more rare and, hence more valuable.
"Even today, there's lot of collecting that's associated with anomalies or error-type coins," Freyhof said.
Sticky fingers
Collectors tend to try avoid making errors themselves.
Johnson said you can always tell a coin collector because they hold coins by the rim.
"Your fingers have an acid on them, and especially on copper, you'll leave a thumb print that will ruin the coin," he said.
In most cases, it doesn't make a great deal of difference, but at times it can.
Said Riggle, "You can have a $700 thumb print easily."
Aside from the danger of leaving a thumbprint, there's the danger that oil from the hands will alter the tone of the coin — the way its color has changed over time.
"Sometimes that adds value to them," Freyof said, and often beauty; the silver on a coin can glow with a sheen of rainbow colors.
But "if you like the way it looks, you'd better contain it," Riggle warned.
The same march of time that can produce a rainbow can paint a coin black.
PVC-made plastic containers have been helpful, and new additives to the plastic have made them even more effective.
Hedging your bets
Although Freyhof said he collects mostly out of interest in the coins, there are those who collect as an investment.
"This begins to put emphasis on a different condition of coins. There are significant dollars in the coins that have not gotten into circulation," he said. "Sometimes it gets out of hand."
With all the special coins being minted both in the United States and abroad, "you begin if it's not headed in the direction of baseball cards, where they overproduce," Freyhof said.
"The coin industry has actually moved to Internet auctions," he said. "Also, gold has become more prominent now than it used to be because of the increase in he price of gold."
But Riggle isn't too worried. Collecting coins "is one of the few hobbies you can get into where you can hedge your investment in your hobby," he said.
With the coins in his collection, "if things get real bad and I need a drink, I can go buy one," Riggle said.
It's a little bit of wisdom the honey man might have appreciated.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
