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Montgomery County Coin Club

April 1999 Bulletin - Web Edition

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Next Meeting: Tuesday, April 13, 1999

Guest Speaker: to be announced!

The Montgomery County Coin Club will meet at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 13, 1999, at the Senior Citizens Center, 1000 Forest Glen Road, Silver Spring, MD. The featured speaker will be announced later.

NumisRiddle of the Month

If a three-cent piece is called a "trime" and a ten-cent piece is called a "dime", then what is a thirty-cent piece called?

The answer appears later in this bulletin.

March Meeting Report

A surprise late-winter snowstorm preempted the MCCC's March 1999 meeting. The featured speaker, noted Silver Spring numismatist Julian Leidman, will present his talk at a later date.

If you would like to volunteer to speak at an upcoming MCCC meeting, please contact President William C. Massey or any of the other Club officials.

Recruiting New Officers

The MCCC still lacks an official Door Prize Manager and a Club Historian. The duties of the Door Prize Manager are simply to distribute tickets for door prizes and the monthly 50-50 raffle, to announce the prizes, and to award them to the lucky winners. A Club Historian is desired to interview senior members, gather MCCC anecdotes, old publications, and photographs from the early years of the Club. The Historian is desperately needed to organize that data before it is forgotten and lost forever. Please volunteer to help us preserve our heritage!

Display Case Wants You!

The MCCC Display Case provides an elegant framework for showing off items from your collection. Please bring something in to share with the fellow Club members! You need not make a major presentation, though a few words about the historical or numismatic context of your exhibit would be most welcome and are sure to generate a round of applause.

The month of April contains a variety of holidays which have been celebrated on coins, tokens, and paper money over the centuries --- Passover and Easter this year, of course, as well as Thomas Jefferson's Birthday and Holocaust Day (both of which fall on April 13, the date of our meeting). And there's St. George's Day (which is celebrated as William Shakespeare's Birthday on April 26), plus numerous other events. Think creatively and turn your favorite occasion into a numismatic display.

Calling All YNs!

Young Numismismatists ("YNs") are always welcome to attend and participate in MCCC meetings. Those YNs who exhibit items get special awards. Please take the initiative and help bring more young people into the pursuit of numismatics --- invite youthful relatives, friends, and neighbors to come to our meetings. You may want to give memberships in the MCCC as gifts; a year only costs $1 for kids, a loss-leader rate that the MCCC offers to help bring more children into the hobby of kings.

Numismatic Musings

MCCC Vice President Ken Swab recommends that numismatists take to heart the words of John Stuart Mill from his Autobiography (Chapter 3):

"I learnt how to obtain the best I could when I could not obtain everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether. I have found, through life, these acquisitions to be of the greatest possible importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very necessary condition for any one, either as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities."

Ken notes that although none of us can afford everything we might wish for numismatically, each of us can nevertheless take joy in our collections, however small or large. Wise words!

Turning the clock ahead half a century from J. S. Mill's time: at the Montgomery County Library used-book sale last month a copy appeared of the 1931 Star Rare Coin Encyclopedia and Premium Catalog (Thirty-fifth Edition) by B. Max Mehl of the Numismatic Company of Texas. The catalog says:

"COIN COLLECTING as a hobby affords more pleasure and greater interest than any other collectable objects. It opens a wide field of study. It develops a taste for art and stimulates research in nearly every branch of learning. It teaches us history and geography, and while a very fascinating and instructive pastime, it has also been the source of much profit, as no one knows better than those who have collected coins in the past, that coin collections increase in value from year to year, thus providing an excellent investment. Coins are often the only historical records that we have of nations which have long since passed away, and which would have been buried in oblivion but for the coins that bear the names of kings and records of events relating to the countries whose money they once were."

Looking further through the Star Rare Coin Encyclopedia one finds listings of prices offered for coins sent in, including such entries as:

an 1804 silver dollar quoted as worth between $1,000 and $2,500
a 1793 chain cent bid of $2.50 - $10 (with a little more for the "Ameri" variety)
an offering of $50 for an 1852 double eagle "If stamped 'Augustus Humbert'"
four-dollar gold pieces from 1879 and 1880 bring $25 - $175
1894-S dimes bid $150 - $300

Selling prices appear mainly in a different catalog, but the few coins offered in the Star Rare Coin Encyclopedia include a generic trade dollar for $1.40, a Columbian half dollar for $0.75, and a half cent for $0.35. Check this book out from the MCCC Library next month, to see further examples of how much times have changed during the past two-thirds of a century.

In a completely different vein, Gertrude Stein wrote:

"As a cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money."

Obviously, Ms. Stein was not a numismatist!

March Featured Attraction: Snow!

As noted elsewhere, the March 9, 1999 MCCC meeting was cancelled because of an unexpected March blizzard which dumped several inches of snow, sleet, freezing rain, and other precipitation on the Washington DC area suburbs. Sorry about that! The MCCC has been lucky in recent years in that few if any of our winter meetings have been preempted by the weather. Perhaps the streak had to be broken....

Other March MCCC Notes

Beginning in mid-March, reports have streamed in from observant MCCC members of Pennsylvania Commemorative Quarters appearing in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Although this new quarter's design arguably looks more license-plate-like than artistic, any change is good!

NumisRiddle Answer