Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

My late grandfather was a coin collector in a small way. His usual technique for collecting was to sort through the coins in his pocket, looking for issues that he didn't already have. The oldest coin in his collection was an 1878 silver dollar, which I doubt he found in his pocket, but I don't know how much business with coin dealers he may have done. Probably not a lot. He kept his main US collection in Whitman coin folders, and none of them were complete.

He also had a miscellaneous box of foreign coins, which he'd picked up on world travels in his later years, and some varied currency notes of both US and foreign issue, as well as a number of US proof sets, mostly encased in plastic shells.

I showed some interest in this coin collection, and so when he was downsizing his possessions in the 1980s, he gave it to me. What I liked about collecting coins was the serried arrays they came in: otherwise identical coins with heads of presidents on them, marching down, distinguished only by year of issue and mint mark - mustn't forget the mint marks, of such vital interest to collectors. This is why I never got interested in collecting stamps. Though much prettier than coins, they didn't come in serried arrays.

For some time after receiving the collection, I kept it up by sorting through my own pocket change, but gradually I gave that up, mostly because the new clad coinage was less interesting than the old silver issues. My last spurt of interest came with the state quarter series of 1999-2008. I had great fun looking for those in my change - to my mind, buying one from a dealer would have been cheating - and eventually I got them all, and bought a folder to keep them in. But I discovered that collecting them had been more fun than having them. I rarely looked at the complete set, and if I was interested in the designs I can see them more clearly displayed on websites.

So now that I in turn am downsizing my possessions, I decided that selling the coins would be a good plan, a decision facilitated by my recent discovery that my once-keen eyesight had deteriorated in detail to the point where I couldn't read the mint marks and sometimes even the dates on the smaller coins. I once had a device that would magnify a coin but it never worked very well. If I were still interested in keeping up coin collecting I could look for a better one, but I'm not.

Just last week, then, an ad turned up in my mail that one of those antiques roadshow outfits would be setting up shop in a nearby hotel conference room for a few days to buy coins and jewelry. Perfect. I went down on the first morning to find it nearly empty: three buyers and no more than two other customers at a time (one of whom looked disconcertingly like the late Dave Rike). They carried the heavy box - which I'd put in the car in installments - in from the car and sorted through the contents. The buyer was especially pleased to find a couple of late 19C silver dollars with Carson City mint marks, plus an item my grandfather had been particularly proud of: an uncut sheet of six $5 bills of National Currency bank notes, series 1929. The buyer said this form of uncut sheets was rare. He paid a pretty penny for that and the lot of miscellaneous stuff, even taking my collection of aluminum tokens from the Shell gasoline presidents and states coin games from the 1970s. And so all that has found a home.