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| The dollar coins are similar in size to a quarter |
I didn’t even know dollar coins were still in circulation. I looked down at them – barely bigger than a quarter – and remembered why Susan B. Anthony dollar coins didn’t go over all that well in the late 70s and early 80s. They looked and felt like a quarter. At least the new dollar coins are gold, which makes them a little easier to distinguish.
“You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, right?” Obviously, she felt bad for pawning these coins off on me. I bobbed my head from side to side as if to say, “I guess.”
As I drove home, I remembered collecting a few real dollar coins (I say “real” because only things from the past can be considered so – of course, I’m kidding, sort of) as a kid in the early 70s. They had President Eisenhower on the front and an eagle on the back, which I think changed to the Liberty Bell in 1976 for the bicentennial.
There was no mistaking these coins for a quarter. They were huge. They could have doubled as a pirate’s eye patch. And they were heavy. At one point, I saved eight or ten of them in a box in which I also stored Kennedy half dollar coins, Indian head pennies, silver pennies from 1943, wheat pennies, a Canadian coin or two, and a few other odds and ends coins.
I think I still have most of those coins stored somewhere (although, I may have spent the Eisenhower dollars and Kennedy half dollars on baseball cards). I hung on to most of the collection because the coins were oddities and therefore, collectable. It never dawned on me that any of these might actually be worth something someday. My guess is, most of them aren’t – at least monetarily.
The new gold coins won’t make the collection, but receiving them did trigger a memory and they helped me realize my small coin collection from yesteryear is a nice snapshot of my childhood – assuming I can ever find the collection.
Even if I can’t, it’s still a nice memory.
