(WA) I was really glad when your club invited me to share my coin collection. It's been my passion since I collected my first Lincoln cent in 1971; that's the current penny with Abraham Lincoln's image. Just a little history before I start in on my own collection. Lincoln pennies are made of copper, and they were the first United States coin to bear the likeness of a President. It was back in 1909 [nineteen-oh-nine] when the country was celebrating the centennial of Lincoln's birth in 1809 [eighteen-oh-nine] that the decision was made to redesign the one-cent piece in his honor. Before that, the penny had an American Indian head on it. The new penny was designed by artist Victor David Brenner. This is interesting because he put his initials V.D.B. on the reverse of the coin in its original design. There was a general uproar when the initials were discovered, and only a limited number of the coins were struck with the initials on them. Today a penny with the initials from the San Francisco Mint... called the 1909-SVDB... is worth over $500. Now... when I started my coin collection, I began with the penny for several reasons... there were a lot of them (several hundred billion have been minted)... and there were a lot of people collecting them... so I had plenty of people to trade with and talk to about my collection. Also... it was a coin I could afford to collect as a young teenager. In the twenty-five years since then, I have managed to acquire over 300 coins, some of them very rare. I'll be sharing with you today some of my rarer specimens... including the 1909-SVDB.
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