You may call me a numismatist or a numismatic. But before you start inquiring as to how it feels, or whether I need to register as a numismatist for life or how many times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had to change my residence because of its proximity to a school or church, or whether there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a cure for this affliction, let me explain that what I am is fairly innocuous.<\/p>\n
So what is this deep secret? Well, I merely consider myself a collector of coins and currency. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not like the serious collectors who own coin books, subscribe to journals on the subject and attend conventions. No, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m merely one who dabbles and likes to play with money, what little I have.<\/p>\n
In the really olden days, when I was 11, my dad made sure always to have several coins in his pocket. In those days, coins jingled; nowadays they make a dull thud. Dad told me I could be popular with the girls if they suspected I was flush. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d carried a quarter in my pocket, the fruits of a week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth of selling Optics on the street. But the quarter lacked a companion, something to cling and clang against.<\/p>\n
I rooted out a quarter-sized washer from the toolbox and I was set. But apparently no one was impressed. Since then the sound of coins has become duller, and currency \u00e2\u20ac\u201d real, foldable bills \u00e2\u20ac\u201d took their place. That was years before the debit card.<\/p>\n
About 10 years ago, on my 64th birthday, my oldest son, Stanley Adam, mailed me a large tube which I thought might have contained a football poster.<\/p>\n
When I delayed in opening it, by a number of days, he phoned. Inside was a large sheet of uncut two-dollar bills, four across and eight down. They totalled 64 dollars, one for each year of my (younger) life.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What a great idea!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I thought. That began my acquiring my own collections. I enjoyed detaching them and leaving them as tips. Often, as happened at Souper Salad in Santa Fe, the cashier was so impressed that he transferred several of the uncut bills to his pocket and refilled the register with the contents of his wallet.<\/p>\n
I tried to present a full sheet to my brother, Severino, after he did some work for me, but he refused them, saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Write me a check instead. Besides, those dollars probably all have the same serial number.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
They got people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention, but sometimes in the wrong way. I tried to use them once at McDonalds, where the young attendant took them to the manager, who said that under no circumstances could that restaurant take uncut currency, which their bill reader wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t accept. But as I left, she asked me if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d sell her a few. I did, and I asked when McDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s had hired this employee named Mr. William Reader.<\/p>\n
Selling the twos was a losing proposition. At the time, the U.S. Mint charged $85 for a sheet of twos. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wish to make a profit on my own bills and usually exchanged them for face value. The last I checked, the mint charges roughly twice the face value of uncut currency, making these exchanges a bit too costly.<\/p>\n
So I demoted myself to the use of dollar coins instead. I believe Nancy at the downtown Wells Fargo knows what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be asking for each time I enter that bank. I like to collect wrapped rolls of Presidential coins and give them as tips. Invariably, waiters and waitresses need to inspect the gold-colored coins carefully \u00e2\u20ac\u201d they look much like quarters.<\/p>\n
Once, at a Santa Fe restaurant, Los Potrillos on Cerrillos, I left a half dozen as a tip, whereupon I could almost read the waitperson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lips: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ese Americano es muy cheap-eh.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I assured him those were real dollars, not quarters. That insistence convinced him, and as a result, we continue to get great service because of that.<\/p>\n
Last Friday I bought two packs of peanuts at the Russell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s store on Seventh, whipped out a dollar coin, which the checker inspected carefully. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re allowed to accept these,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the young woman said as she summoned the manager, who in turn said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We can accept them as long as I get to keep them.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He did, and I saw him place the same amount in paper into the register.<\/p>\n
You see? People are at once apprehensive of and receptive toward these coins. Once people inspect the dollars, they wish to keep them.<\/p>\n
Others won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t touch them. And for that, I blame the government for not making a bigger splash when the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin came out in 1978, the Sacagawea in 2000 and now the presidential coins in 2011.<\/p>\n
In a column a few years back, I wrote about how the Sacagawea coin, because of its color and size, looked too much like a quarter. I wonder if anyone had ever jammed up a jukebox or a newspaper rack by inserting a dollar coin while believing it was two bits.<\/p>\n
The new coins don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the words \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In God We Trust\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on either the obverse or the back side. Many people, convinced we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken even God out of coins and currency, have been vocal on that subject, calling it the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Godless coin\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and urging boycotts of such coins.<\/p>\n
But if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d looked more carefully, the would have seen those words along the edges of the coins.<\/p>\n
Yes, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fun to carry a coin that draws a second look. But it also has its pitfalls. For example, I took two $25 rolls into a restaurant, expecting to leave a few of the coins as tips. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d planned to put the rest of the meal on my debit card.<\/p>\n
But when it was time to pay, I discovered that in the pocket where I usually carry my billfold, replete with the 600 cards, 12 licenses and 38 receipts, I had only two rolls of dollar coins, as heavy as the missing billfold.<\/p>\n
Guess who needed to dig into her own resources to pay for the meal \u00e2\u20ac\u201d plus tip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You may call me a numismatist or a numismatic. But before you start inquiring as to how it feels, or whether I need to register as a numismatist for life or how many times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had to change my residence because of its proximity to a school or church, or whether there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a cure for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1172,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions\/1172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}