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Child Development
My Lucky Dime
A Personal Perspective: The pride of my coin collection was stolen.
Posted October 13, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
I have a lucky dime. Well, that’s what I call it. I’ve had it for 50 years, at least this time around. You see, I had it before, and then I didn’t.
It’s not a lucky dime like the one owned by Donald Duck’s uncle Scrooge McDuck. It’s not the first dime I earned, and it doesn’t bring me good luck, not that I’ve noticed, but it’s lucky, nevertheless. It was simply the prized specimen of my childhood coin collection.
An Expensive Hobby for a Kid
I started collecting coins when I was 10 years old. My collection began with one of those blue cardboard penny books where you press pennies into holes marked by year and mint mark. Collecting pennies was all I could afford when I started that hobby.
Back then, my primary source of income was finding refillable soda bottles along busy roadsides and redeeming them for a two-cent deposit. I would save until I had a dollar, then I’d go to the bank and buy two rolls of pennies. Then I’d pick through them and put any "finds" that my collection lacked into my blue book.
Occasionally my mother would show me a few coins she had saved over the years. Mostly they were silver dollars and half-dollar coins. However, she had this one really old Barber dime that I greatly admired. I asked her if I could have it for my collection, but she said, “No.”
She explained that the dime was special and that I wasn’t mature enough to own it. I knew what she was referring to because, on my eighth birthday, a friend of hers gave me a silver dollar as a gift. I didn’t understand that I was supposed to keep it for its extrinsic value, and I immediately rushed to the store and spent it. My mother and her friend were appalled and severely scolded me.
Over the next two years, my coin collection expanded immensely. I astutely added to it by swapping with my friends and dealers at coin shows. I filled my penny books and then moved on to nickel, dime, and quarter books. Plus, I added many unusual curiosities like three-cent pieces, large copper pennies from the 1700s, and commemorative coins.
When I was 12 years old, my mother convinced me that my hobby was stalwart enough, so she gave me the coveted dime. It immediately became the pride of my collection. It was in near uncirculated condition and was rare enough in 1969 to be worth $50. I polished it carefully until it gleamed and put it in its own hard plastic case to preserve its luster and numismatic value.
Our House Was Burglarized
I continued to add to my collection over the next two years. Then one afternoon, I came home from school to alarming news. My mother said, "Our house was burglarized today; they only took one thing; unfortunately, it was yours."
We’d lived in our new house for two years, and my mother was not accustomed to locking the doors when she went out. Our old house was in a safe enough subdivision to leave it unlocked. Lamentably, our new house was situated near a low-income neighborhood with a lot of illegal drug activity.
Mother arrived home from grocery shopping to witness two teenage boys running out of the front door carrying an entire drawer from the chest in my room. It was the one that contained all of my prized specimens. Over one hundred coins are housed in their own little cardboard and plastic cases. I was devastated.
There was so much to grieve: six years of work, hours of pouring over rolls of coins searching for rarities, more hours studying and memorizing coin values, then all of my efforts at making shrewd trades; GONE! Worst of all was losing the Barber dime my mother had given me.
The loss was so great that I couldn't bear ever to collect coins again. I had completely lost enthusiasm for the hobby I once loved so much. It was the first of many lost efforts that I would go on to suffer in my life. (Oftentimes, I think it foreshadowed a pattern of grievous losses, especially the one I experienced when a business that I had built for 19 years was taken away from me in an instant by the judge in my divorce–which will have to be a story for another post.)
A Surprise Reunion
Oh, I continued my habit of keeping silver coins and the occasional wheat penny I found in circulation, but I stopped seeking them intentionally. I no longer traded or went to coin shows. And my friendships with fellow coin collectors fell off. Most of all, I mourned the loss of the Barber dime.
I moved on with other hobbies, interests, and activities, one of which was getting a job. I worked as a cashier in a hospital parking lot less than two miles from my home. Nearly two years after the burglary, my skill at spotting silver in a pile of copper-nickel-clad coins was still strong.
Then one day, I saw the edge of a silver dime peeking out of the change drawer in my cash register. I pulled a clad dime out of my pocket and swapped it for the silver one. Then I looked at it. I couldn’t believe my eyes; it was my stolen Barber dime, the same year, with the same rare mint mark. It was slightly worse for wear, but it had to be the same one; it was too rare to be any other.
My dime came back to me, and that's what makes it lucky!
