As a young boy I had always been an avid student of geography, so it was a natural for my brother to bring me his left over pocket change from his trip to Portugal and Ireland in 1951 and England and Denmark in 1952. The trip was courtesy of the United States Navy. I followed this up by asking high school classmates who traveled in Europe in 1954 and 1955 to bring me coins, all from circulation. I also picked up a number of minor coins from around the world as premiums from Wheaties. Wheaties, which I didn't like to eat, always had the best premiums of any of the cereals.

I bought a very few coins out of what would now be called a junk box in a coin shop in a department store in Knoxville, Tennessee while I was in high school. As with so many young collectors, I dropped active participation, but not interest, in the hobby while I concentrated on college and graduate school and girls, really just one girl.

There was then no literature available about what coins existed, so I didn't know what coins I was missing. One interesting case was that I had the five Belgian coins, 20 centime, 50 centime, 1 franc, 2 franc, and 5 franc that alternated between French and Flemish legends. I thought it was clever for the Belgians to handle their problem of two languages that way. Only later did I learn that all five denominations were struck in both languages, and that it was only chance that I had no samples of both languages for one denomination.

The second problem that I had was how to store and display the coins. Penny books existed then but were obviously unsatisfactory for the varied sized coins that I had. My solution was to cut slots in 12x12 sheets of corrugated cardboard (spacers from phonograph record boxes) and glue acetate sheets to one side of the slot. Then I glued the coins to the sheet. This is not as bad as it sounds. Lacquering coins for protection has been an accepted technique for centuries and Duco cement is a lacquer. People didn't distinguish between MS65 and MS64 in those days. The glue did lead to some interesting results. I have an uncirculated Turkish 2 kurus copper coin that was glued for eight years. It has spectacular toning where there was no glue and bright metal where the spot of glue held it.

When I got out of graduate school I found my first coin shop, my first coin book, and my first numismatic organization. But that's a story for another time.

In the winter of 1963 when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, I had a little disposable income and some free time, which I hadn't had since high school days. I also had a pregnant wife who decreed that we would go out to eat on Wednesday evenings after she had been to see the doctor. We just happened to frequent a Chinese restaurant in a little arcade in Glenmont Shopping Center. In the arcade was the ABonanza Coin Shop run by Al Bonan. We stopped by after supper. Bonan had a large number of inexpensive world coins, and it was a natural for me to continue working on contemporary world coins.

The Montgomery County Library had a wonderful book, Wayte Raymond's, Coins of the World, where I found out how many different types of coins there were.

I also discovered and became a member of the Montgomery County Coin Club. This was a delightful organization that had excellent educational programs and my first coin show. I also discovered other coin shows and a shop in Baltimore that had lots of world coins. This was late 1963 and early 1964, and the Baltimore dealer, Mary Balistrieri, offered me a deal. He would give me ten dollars in trade for a complete date and mintmark set of Roosevelt dimes, 46 coins at that time. That's when I started searching through large quantities of US change. More about that later.

Anne expressed an interest in coins, but not in my collection. She was more interested in English history. On the theory of "If you can't beat 'em; join them." I gave her the first hammered coin I ever bought, a penny of Edward I, for Christmas of 1963. We had fun with Christmas presents that year. Anne had discovered a bottle of licquer that my mother had purchased for her and I had hidden away. She didn't open it, so she didn't know what it was. I included a partly full bottle of water in each present that I wrapped for her that year, including the penny which was in a huge box together with a brick and ajar with beads. Anne guessed that the presents were a fifth of scotch, a fifth of gin, a fifth of rum, and that what was obviously a phonograph record was Beethoven's fifth. She was correct about the record. She appreciated the coin but said that she'd rather focus on coins that had real portraits. That's how we got started on the English shillings collection which took twenty-five years to complete.

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