Collecting Jefferson Nickels
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG COLLECTOR in the 1950s, my main coin of interest was the Lincoln cent. This was followed closely by Jefferson and Buffalo nickels. You can easily see their appeal to a young, not too enterprising kid: They didn’t cost much to collect.
In Jefferson nickels, the low-mintage 1950-D had recently made its appearance, and stories abound of how people acquired and saved vast quantities of uncirculated rolls. In just a few years, the price of these rolls, which was about $40 ($1 apiece) at the time I started following them in a coin newspaper, would begin its ascent.
Before that happened, I managed to convince my father that we really needed a roll of these “rare” nickels, he wrote a check, and I mailed it to a dealer whose ads I had been watching. “Sold Out” was his quick response, as I was probably a month or two too late to get in on the dizzying rise of the 1950-D nickel.
If I had gotten a roll and sold it at the right time (when it reached $1,000), the profit would have paid for a year of my college career. But I didn’t, and for years I had to be content with circulated examples I found in my roll searching.
I’ve read articles by people who contend that circulated 1950-Ds were hard to find, because of the vast number saved in uncirculated rolls. From my experience, it depended on where you lived. In my area of the country (north Louisiana), Denver-mint coins were the norm, and for a time one summer, circa 1960, I averaged finding one 1950-D and one 1939-D a day.
The nickels that I searched so avidly that summer were designed by Felix Schlag, whose initials did not appear on the coin until 1966, well after my roll-searching days.
