DAVID SUNDMAN'S RED BOOK RECOLLECTIONS

Our fourth narrative comes from David M. Sundman, President of Littleton Coin Company, Red Book contributor, and co-author of 100 Greatest American Currency Notes. He received the ANA’s Harry J. Forman Dealer of the Year Award in July of this year.

In the 1950s my father, Maynard Sundman, was frequently visited by dealers from New York City and Boston, who would drive to New Hampshire to visit and hopefully to sell coins. My father liked mixtures, and Littleton often sold mixtures of tokens and medals in cigar-box assortments to our customers. We had some regular suppliers of these, as well as U.S. and world coins. Usually mixtures were sold unsorted, but sometimes we’d break them down by categories and retail the better individual coins. They would range from low-denomination base-metal foreign coins to tokens of the world, with some U.S. issues tossed in as well, principally Hard Times tokens and Civil War cents, often damaged or well worn. Sometime around 1956 or so, while accompanying my dad one weekend to work at our then-small family stamp-and-coin business, I came to really appreciate the Guide Book and the importance of reading it—or at least recalling images of its contents, if not actual values.

Being curious, I liked to rummage through the mixtures my father had just purchased. It was really a treasure hunt—you never knew what you would discover. Even if the values were low, the coins and tokens were really interesting, and it was educational to see which ones I could identify. It also was a source of pride to an eight-year-old when I made a “discovery.”

One particular Saturday morning while I was plowing through a pile of coins from one of these mixtures, I recognized a U.S. token I thought was better than the others—as it was listed in the Guide Book. It was a (1792) undated WASHINGTON BORN VIRGINIA cent in Fine condition. At the time it cataloged for $75, but in actuality it would have sold for more.

This was my first good coin “find.” In hindsight, I can see that this really got me excited about coins and doubtless instilled a desire to follow my father’s profession someday. As an eight-year-old, the idea of finding valuable coins was quite exciting (and still is)! Partly as encouragement to ensure we went to work with him, and partly so we stayed out of our mother’s hair on Saturdays, my father would pay my brother Rick and later Don (born 1954) and me 10 percent of the Guide Book value for any better coins that we found in our searches. So the WASHINGTON BORN VIRGINIA cent coin meant a $7.50 “finder’s fee” to me, which was then a small fortune—representing more than a year’s supply of comic books!

To read the complete article, see:
Red Book Recollections: David M. Sundman (http://news.coinupdate.com/red-book-recollections-david-m-sundman/)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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