What was your first coin, and what's the story behind it?

Here's mine. Byzantine half follis. Found it in a puddle in a parking lot.

I have two "first coin" stories:

My first non-Euro coin was a 10 Drachma coin we found randomly in our home (under a couch). However I gave it to my sibling, who wanted to make a coin collection themselves.

My first non-Greek coin was a 1 Litas coin around 10 years ago. In my country we have a custom where on New Year's day we make a cake where we put a coin or a token (similiar to galette des rois in France). Whoever finds the token in their slice will be lucky for the new year. 

My aunt who baked the cake decided to put the coin, instead of a more generic token, and it landed in my slice. This ended up being the first piece of my collection.

panagiotis3301

I have two "first coin" stories:

 

My first non-Euro coin was a 10 Drachma coin we found randomly in our home (under a couch). However I gave it to my sibling, who wanted to make a coin collection themselves.

 

My first non-Greek coin was a 1 Litas coin around 10 years ago. In my country we have a custom where on New Year's day we make a cake where we put a coin or a token (similiar to galette des rois in France). Whoever finds the token in their slice will be lucky for the new year. 

 

My aunt who baked the cake decided to put the coin, instead of a more generic token, and it landed in my slice. This ended up being the first piece of my collection.

Nice! That's a cool way to start a collection, with a piece of cake and a couch.

If I remember correctly, that was an iron 5 pfennig coin I found in my backyard, on a mild day, while playing, some time in the mid-80s. I still have it to this day, even though it was a crisis coinage, its condition was surprisingly good.

The first coin in my collection was from my father. Having 3 sisters and a mother at home, it was always special when my dad managed to peel himself away from work to spend some time with me. He was always pretty nerdy (Though I always have been too) and liked anything mechanical. Planes, trains, automobiles, boats, barges and basically anything with an engine would pull him in its direction like a magnet.

One day he and I went out to the train yard and watched the trains come and go. We watched cargo getting loaded and unloaded, passengers doing much the same. After a while he asked me if I wanted to do something he did as a kid. Of course, being a curious little 7 year old I agreed. We walked alongside the tracks a ways and we stopped, my father handed me a penny and told me to put it on the tracks and then hide. I did as I was told. balancing the penny on the rail and hid behind a small tree. A few minutes of waiting later a train rushed by. When it had passed my dad and I walked over to the tracks to find the penny flattened. As we walked back towards the car he explained the hardness of metal, and that copper was no match for a little pressure and steel.

A few weeks later we were at a museum and he walked me over to a penny press and told me to insert a penny. I did as I was told. then we cranked the handle and watched as the gears and the press turned inside the cabinet. when the penny fell into the tray he handed it to me to inspect. As we walked around the rest of the museum he taught me about gear reduction, how one turn of the crank was only one fifth a turn on the press barrel and how that reduces the force needed to perform work on an object. 

Its been 21 years since then and the coins have long since been lost but what remains is the knowledge and education he gave me. The hunger for information and the curiosity to seek it out have remained. I am 10+ years into my career as a master certified mechanic and it likely never would have happened without a few damaged pennies. 

That's a great story.

NOTE this is a repost of a post I did in an earlier thread with a similar name about Granma, a 1899 Britannia Penny.

My story has been posted on other forums and posts before and is quite long. There were basically 2 phases to my coin collecting, adult and child. In a halfshell the adult one started around 2011 when I was buying and onselling coins online for two old ladies at a church/mission shop and making a bit of cash on the side. Around 2019, I stopped selling everything and started keeping it and then specialised into UK old coins, NZ coins, silver and all the rest with the gold and bullion.

But here I will mention the kiddy collection and that is because several of your stories involve Britannia pennies and I am coincedentally writing a thread about them on this forum now too. It seems these coins were the entry point for a lot of us, me included. I was around 8 or 9 in 1985 and whilst playing at some friends place, his mother gave me an old milk jug and told me to look at her old coins whilst my friend had to do some chore that could not wait. It was fascinating, coins from all over the world (Mostly modern change and being 1985, this would be mostly 60s and 70s) but there were a few older coins in there and I wanted to find the oldest and it was a manky old Britannia penny from about 1898 or 1899 or something. I had so much fun, she said I keep one coin and of course it was that penny. Something about it fascinated me, learning about history at school and reading books about the “olden days” fascinated me and having a coin from that time was cream on the cake. I found a Christmas card from 1985 and it was actually to my parents from me, various fowls (We had chooks), our dog and “Granma the old penny”.

Granma - likely looked like a more worn version of the coin on the left.

I probably had it for years and got a few more coins over the years. By 1988 I had about 20 coins with the penny of course, I think there was an American quarter, some NZ pennies and the best was a 1948 Halfcrown and 1942S USA quarter (Silver). In early 1989, my Mum took me into town and bought me a packet of 50 world wide coins for like $10 from a local coin shop and this was fascinating. I was collecting stamps and getting into the coins. My parents had friends who travelled and were more than happy to give me their change coins. By 1991 aged almost 15 I had around 250 coins in a wooden box and I decided to save pocket money and get serious, buying my first lot of proper coins, being a complete set of silver NZ threepences from 1933 - 1946 (Except the rare 1935) and they cost like $12 or something, a lot of money when you get $5 a week pocket money. Over 1991, 92 , 93 I added more NZ coins, so I had most of the old NZ and had started deep into the UK. Of course all were like the cheapest condition (Good or VG), but later I got more sophisticated and started buying better coins like silver crowns, Morgans, florins etc in 1997 - 1999 as I entered my 20s. But then in 2001 I had my coin collection stolen out of my car in the rural north island when I was moving and the shock hurt me so much (The penny would have been amongst it), it scared me off collecting again until the 2010s. Now of course all of my better coins are photographed, insured, listed and recorded. I know everything i own, when I bought it, what I paid for it and how much its worth. I also have all my gold and bullion stored in a vault. 

No way in 1985, did I think that penny would lead to a collection worth around $250,000 some 40 years later.