How I Became a Coin-Collector-and-Land-Pirate

By James C. Johnston Jr.

How does one decide to become a coin collector? I became a coin collector partially because I was a very strange kid who was spoiled rotten, and I am a much better person for it! That is my story, and I am sticking to it. At heart, I am a pirate and collected coins in much the same way as Black Beard did who was a successful collector of other people’s coins. As a kid, I loved history. At 81 years of age, I am still a kid, and I still love history.
When as a young person choosing a life-career, I was exposed to a lot of very stupid advice. What is stupid advice? That is any opinion which does not agree with my view of things in general. When I told people that I wanted to study history, a lot of people who thought that they were better in touch with the world than my most thoughtful self were aghast. “Well what good is that?” Cried my much older cousin the engineer? “What the Hell can you do with history?”
“I presume you mean using history to make a living?” I replied. Then without waiting for him to ask another inane question about my intellectual love of history and my life-choices in general, I said, “I can do a lot with history. I can teach history. I can write about history. I can lecture about historical topics. I can turn my historic love of antiques as evidence of history into a business which I can run on-the-side. Then I can appraise antiques for: probate, divorce settlements, and insurance. I can do the same with coins and stamps. It is all about history after all, and it’s much more interesting than most other income-lines of endeavor. And that’s what you can do with history.”
So far, it’s been a very good life even when considering a perceptible dip in the general interest level of collecting anything in general. History teaches us that this too will pass. There are so many facets to what I had outlined in terms of what sort of living could be made out of the study of history and the artifacts of that self-same historical study. The possibilities are indeed endless, and in the end, humans love to hear a good story, and if that story happens to be real, so much the better.
So my friends, that is what I have done with my life so far, and the activities I have enumerated have also afforded me the opportunity to make scads of really good friends which will last for a lifetime. My friends are of all ages and backgrounds. Of course, throw in politics as one of my favorite activities, since I am also a very social animal. Political office holding for more than a quarter century on top of everything else also filled my need for a social and civic experience.
Life, you see, can both very full, ultimately rewarding, and very good according on how much effort you are willing to invest in it in terms of acquiring intellectual and historical experiences so that you can understand just what is going on at any particular time. If you also happen to own a large colonial period home, and have some nice fireplaces, and like to cook historic meals or otherwise, and treat kids to this historic experience so much the better. Should you have been fortunate enough to have become a professional educator of the young, you are very lucky indeed to get to share history in such a dynamic way. Sharing what we have learned is also what living is all about.
Over my teaching career, I cooked historic meals for my friends, and many of my classes of students of history came to my house to cook in the fireplace using my reflector oven to roast a large joint of beef, roast potatoes in the ashes on the hearth, and cook vegetables in 17th and 18th century iron pots on the self-same hearth, and then gather around three large tables, of 18th century vintage, and feast in my Great Room which can accommodate thirty-plus people for an entire school day as a field trip. We always had pumpkin pie and apple pie for dessert, and trust me, you never saw such a happy bunch of young people enjoying gastronomic history.
A certain vice-principal along with my pal the principal also dropped by about the time the meal was ready to join us in this happy repast. I informed them that, as the waifs they were, they were welcome to join us at our colonial tables and to have a seat for the feast. My 81 years have been crowned with joy and success so far in my persuite of all things historic. My old students, now ranging in age now from 42 to 76 generally, are still my close friends. If you are a real teacher, and spend your days with young people not too far away from adulthood, you are very lucky indeed, and you should become friends as long as you are the alpha friend. Believe me there never was a mistake about understanding that reality.
History of all things related to money in all of its many forms fascinated me ever since I knew what money was and its endless possibilities. The physical form of money, especially in the beautiful form of coins, was of endless fascination to me. One interesting thing that you may have noticed for yourself even from birth is that coins are round and flat. That makes them easy to stack and generally have fun with when you are four years old.
I have loved coins from my earliest childhood. I also had an Uncle, named Joe Foss, who was my mother’s younger brother. Uncle Joe was the nicest of people and very close to his sister, my mother. Joe joined the navy at age seventeen in the last months before World War II. He became a cook while in the service and ended up in a most improbable place for a sailor, Peru. Alas, he loved it there, and when he returned home after the war, he brought back from this far-away country of mountains and Llamas the largest collection of silver and carved wooden objects.
I was amazed by the sheer quantity of the material Joe had put together, but the most impressive thing of all to me is that he had a huge leather pouch of coins. My “Greed-Collector Genes” were fully developed by now and fully excited and alerted to all possibilities. The coins themselves were quite a mixed bag. Some of them were United States silver coins, and the balance was mostly made up of silver Panamanian and Peruvian coins. These round and exotic disks of shiny silver fired my four-year-old-imagination to the point that my precocious little head almost exploded with the impact of great excitement, and I become obsessed with the idea of getting this rich prize for myself.
Many of the Peruvian coins had wonderful coats-of-arms on them and were made of brass which to me looked like gold! Now the great child psychologist Jean Piaget has stated that children do not develop an “ethical sense” until they achieve the age of twelve, and I am sure that is quite true. Now, you might ask yourself the obvious question, “If that is true, why do children under twelve years of age mold their behavior to a socially acceptable standard most of the time?”
Piaget explains that children do this “conformity-thing” to: avoid punishment, to please people in authority by using good behavior to gain approval and love, and then of course out of a fear of punishment. “Ethics” has very little to do with so-called good behavior until the age of understanding has been achieved. As “a some-what normal, yet horrible and certainly very strange four-year-old”, I plotted both day and night how I could get Uncle Joe’s treasure away from him and make it my own.
This plotting became a continuous activity absorbing most of my wakening-hours. I became so obsessed with the idea of making Joe’s treasure my very own that I actually became a “land-pirate” at a very real level of acquisitive corruption at the ripe old age of four. I even employed some sophisticated psychology stratagems on my hapless victim to achieve my evil ends!
I stared at him with an inane smile on my lips. I knew just how unsettling this was. It had been very effective in contriving the interest levels of my many aunts, mother ,and grandmother in directing them in the area of fulfilling my wants during and after the war years when I was the only baby and guy around. I thought of the pleasure I would get by having so much treasure and I even thought of maybe even rolling about in it. I really didn’t know what I would do with so much wealth, but just the idea of having it filled me with the sweet warmth of full-blown greed. I wanted those coins!
My obsession did not go unnoticed. My mother who had read all of the new books by a Doctor Spock just thought it was “another phase” in my cycle of psycho-sexual development. I might add that she had the good sense not to over think these little quirks of mine. Oh yes, later on that is exactly what she told me about her reaction to my “bag-of-coins phase”. She also read Freud as a lot of people did in those decades from the 1920’s to the early 1950’s. It was quite a trend in those days. But little did she know what a monster she had helped to create. A real monster who was already obsessed with a love of the past and a desire to possess all of that which he wanted in terms of coins and other treasure to have and to hold as his own as part of getting touch with an earlier age!
Joe hid his coins, and I found them. He took to sleeping with them under his pillow. They made such a huge lump that I seriously doubt that he ever got much sleep. I asked to look at his treasure in the most innocent way I could muster several times a day. Oh yes, I could be cute, and I could be coy, but there was no mistaking my criminal intent beneath my sweet smile. I was really by now a hard bitten land-pirate, and I was bad to the bone all 40 pounds of me! I guess that is when I really became a dedicated coin collector.
I did find a way to get some coinage out of my dear uncle due to a very strange and quaint custom of the day. When a child lost a tooth, back when I was a kid, the child would put said tooth under his pillow it hope of getting some compensation for this intimate loss. And low and behold, the next day a quarter would appear in its place under your pillow.
With Joe also living in the house, two quarters would appear under the aforementioned pillow. The question now came, “Where could I get a sufficiently large supply of teeth to build my own empire of wealth?” No doubt, this tooth-loss thing was just about the most fool-proof scheme of civilized piracy yet! Wasn’t life wonderful.
That getting dental wastage wasn’t going to be easy. I had a younger sister with lots of big teeth, but if I attempted to look into her mouth, she would give me a good bite. I respected that fact with very good reason. When the family pooch, Chipper by name, nipped her she gave him such a bite that we didn’t see him for days. The same fate befell the nasty kid who lived next door. He discovered, much to his everlasting regret, that being unkind to my sister was intrinsically fraught with peril. After he hit my sweet sister while at play one fine summer day, her retaliation was immediate, and my mother had to pry my sweet sister’s teeth off of his arm using some force. Let us just say that after that incident, he treated my little sister with a much greater degree of respect. I guess that Piaget was right.
The two older girls who lived next door were a good source for a few more teeth. Barter worked out pretty well here to secure what I needed. The same was true of the huge parcel of kids who lived in the old apartment house on the other side of our property. All of these kids were older than me, but when it came to piracy and grand larceny, I left these rank armatures in the dust.
By the way, did I happen to mention that I was born during World War II and was raised by a parcel of women who adored me as the only male in sight, and did I happen to mention that they spoiled me rotten! Those days were just so good that I still bask in the glorious memory of them. All was well until this guy came back from the war. As it turned out, it was my father, and my days of total spoilage were all but over, but not quite altogether.
By now I had collected more than a dozen teeth, and I began reporting their loss at discreet intervals. Money poured out Joe’s bag and my mother’s purse and from the odd aunt as well. All of those quarters found their way to the space under my pillow. Even my father sometimes contributed to this effort, that is, if he had been made aware of it. Maybe there was a place for him in my scheme of things after all. Eventually he too became putty in my hands.
My first coin collection really began to take shape, and my money bag began to fill-up. In my mind, I always compared its size and weight to Joe’s. My money bag was actually an old sock whose mate had no doubt been retired because of a hole in its heel. I was always aware of the relative value of coins. You see, I could also read numbers and even some words to be found on them indicating value.
I learned to do this “reading thing” sort of on my own. I liked being sneaky, as a good pirate should be, even when learning stuff like reading. I also discovered that it is not always good to let everybody on to exactly how much you know. Knowledge was a weapon in this struggle for wealth and entity. Whereas all of the adults in the house would read to me at the drop of a hat, I would follow the pages of print with my eyes focused on that page remembering the sound of words and memorize the word that went along with the sound by their shapes and composition of letters. This seemed very easy and reasonable. By the age of four, I was reading print in a very fundamental sort of way.
I even took fiendish delight in correcting one of my least favorite aunts when she made mistakes in her reading of familiar stories to me. I really freaked her out by correcting her when she either made a mistake in pronunciation or got the word wrong altogether! I knew what the words said as long as they were in print. I also got her when she tried to skip passages in the book to hurry Old Mother West Wind along. I refused to be cheated out of my Thornton Burgess! I would never let her get away with that!
Oh yes, one more thing about my tooth scheme, I always waited until some conversation was going on among the adults or some other commotion before I announced a loss of a tooth, because I instinctively knew that it would have less impact as a news item, and that the placement of the quarters under my pillow would be more pro-forma. By the way, my poor Uncle Joe eventually moved out to his own digs with his money bag still somewhat intact much to my infinite regret. It was indeed now somewhat reduced in weight but substantially intact. Now I was well on my way as a collector of: Seated-Liberty Quarters [yes there was one example dated 1853 with arrows], Barber Quarters, Standing Liberty Quarters, and Washington Quarters. I found them all to be very pretty, and to this day, United States quarters are among my favorite modern coins.
After a few months of pursuing my tooth scam, my mother began wondering if she had given birth to a shark as tooth after tooth began to appear from under my pillow. By now, I had discovered where my supply of retrieved teeth was being stored by my mother. She probably did this out of some misdirected sentimentality I suppose, and I would slip out one or two of them at a time from the container that held them. My mother never knew that she was merely a custodian of my precious lost-teeth for recycling under my cash-cow of a pillow.
The adults knew something was up, but they dared not think “the unthinkable” namely that I was a despicable little con-artist destined to end up in the State Penitentiary as a master criminal ultimately to be behind bars for life. This most likely would have been the best thing to do for the safety of all mankind. I often wonder what psychology book my mother read next to try to figure me out at that point of truth. Later on, my mother worked with an artist as a fellow designer-decorator at Evans-Case Company in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Here my mother even designed special porcelain light-and-=cigarette sets for actor Richard Boon of the “Palladin” T. V. series. This beautiful blond, blue-eyed and very petite lady once told me that she would hear my mother talking softly to herself as she worked away at her desk on a new design.
I would ask Irene, for that was this dream-girl’s name, “What would she say?”
Irene smiled and said very quietly and intimately while sharing this little secret of ours, “That Boy! That Boy! What am I going to do with him?”
I just smiled to myself. It’s good to be the spoiled-rotten kid sometimes.
But getting back to my tooth-and-quarter scam, it was very true that after a few months, the resident adults concluded that I could not possibly have lost thirty-five or more teeth at the age of five which I now was. Yes, I was soon found-out for the bounder that I was, but there was no absolute proof, and the jury was out on my fate as a pernicious land-pirate. My parents just nodded with a shrug. Once again, “It’s just another phase,” was stated, and on they went with their lives. After all, I was only then but five years old. And after all, can a five year old be that disingenuous? Yes we can. As a recently-former-child with a very good memory, I can tell you that children can think some very interesting thoughts, and with the right motivation, they can learn to execute some pretty sophisticated schemes. and that is how I became a coin collector!
Now I am 81, and I have collected just about everything that is good and great. I still love history, lecture to adoring fans [at least they look that way to me], appraise objects of great artistic integrity, and write just about everything historically interesting. Surprisingly, I eventually somehow did get to be twelve years of age, and I did develop an “ethical sense” and an appreciation for the letter of the law in that regard, at least, to the point that I will never take open advantage of “specialized-knowledge” in any instance of making a purchase. I shall simply ask what the seller wants for the object offered for sale and give the full price that is asked. That is an “arms-length-sale” in any court of law both Federal and State that happens to conform to all the statutory requirements. I have just one more piece of advice for you based on my vast 81 years of experience basic survival. Be nice!

Jim Johnston is a retired Franklin educator, author, historian, and much else beside...