9:43 p.m. - Heads or tails?

Lee Noble

April 22, 2007 09:37 pm

— No, buffalo nickels were not made in New York, and wheat pennies aren’t the fiber-rich, healthy counterpart to white pennies.
No matter whether you could make heads or tails of numismatic — or, coin and paper money-related — jargon, a coin show in Anderson had a lot to offer on Sunday.
The Madison County Coin Club sponsored the show in the UAW 663 gymnasium, Anderson. Coyle Shaw, the club’s president, said the show was excellent and late afternoon attendance was good despite warm weather outside.
“I thought it might hurt a little, but evidently they mowed the yard yesterday,” Shaw said.
The event featured 19 coin vendors with 31 tables full of coins, according to Shaw. More than 200 people attended Sunday’s all-day event by mid afternoon.
Fold-out tables lined the perimeter of the gym, each having a few showcases full of coins. Small lamps lit each showcase as collectors bent over them to get a closer look, searching the cases for an addition to their collection.
Barber half dollars topped Shaw’s shopping list for the day, but he couldn’t find any among the coins the show had on display.
“Naturally, everybody’s got two or three interests,” Shaw said. “They’ve got some holes in their collections they’re trying to fill.”
Joel Thompson, 12, of Anderson, was looking to fill a few holes in his own collection.
“I don’t have that many coins, but I like foreign coins, old foreign coins,” Joel said. Joel bought coins from Germany, Belgium, Italy and Yugoslavia from vendors at Sunday’s event.
Joel’s father Tim Thompson doesn’t collect, but learned something he never knew about domestic currency from one of the experts on hand.
“What fascinates me is how much these collectors know about these notes and coins,” Tim Thompson said. A vendor explained to him what the markings on an United States one-dollar bill meant, denoting everything from where the money was made to where it was distributed.
Husband and wife vendors Ken and Fay Hall and their friend Jack McKnight came all the way from Bloomington to display the for-sale pieces from their collections.
As members of numerous coin clubs around the state who travel extensively to follow such shows, they said they were pleased with the show Madison County’s own coin club had organized.
Vendor Jim Brown came from near Fort Wayne to sell his stock. Brown said he may spend anywhere from two to 20 hours preparing for a show.
“It depends on how bad you got hit the last show,” Brown said. “You’ve got to restock your inventory.”
Restocking inventory into each showcase could take as many as two hours itself, according to Brown.
“The coins aren’t just in chronological order,” Brown said. “They’re chronological and by denomination.”
His business is knowing what makes Barber half dollars, wheat pennies, buffalo nickels and mercury dimes valuable to collectors, so the more care Brown puts into displaying them well, the better chance he has of being found by a collector shopping for a specific coin.
Officials estimated vendors brought upward of a million coins to the show Sunday — counting how many were in rolls, boxes and on display — so the better Brown displays his coins, the more likely shoppers will be to find the coin they need fill the slot in their collection.