Welcome to the Tarnished Truth. your newsletter. Being a member of WINS allows you to be in contact with fellow hobbiest whom have an exorbinate amount of knowledge that can be tapped through our mailers 24/7. If this were your only place to interact with other collectors it would probably be enough to keep you informed and motivated about your hobby. However if you have a local club that you can also belong to, the rewards can be great and the friends you can aquire are many. Also after you put in enough years in this hobby and you start to concider what you can give back to the hobby, the local club is an excellent place to start. The State Quarter program is giving us a great oppertunity to inspire our young people with the love for this hobby that we have. Check the prize button at the bottom of the newsletter, you may already have won an MS 63 ST. $20 gold piece! .

Here are our three winning articles from my recent contest that was open to all WINS members to write an article entitled "My Favorite Coin Series". I would like to thank all the entrants for their really well written articles, and also extend a special thanks to the three members who so willingly gave of their time and expertise to stand as judges for the contest. Those judges are JD White, Ralph J. Huntzinger, and Mark Watson

I was born March 1st, 1948 in Seattle, Washington; grew up in the NW suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota; married Janet Marie on November 25th, 1969; lived on Maui, Hawaii from 1976-1987; moved back to Minnesota and settled in Elk River (about 30 miles NW of Minneapolis) in the summer of 1987. Jan and I have two daughters, Jennifer Lynne (1971) and Elizabeth Marie (1981), and three grandchildren: Cheyenne Lynne (1994) and Echo Marie (1995) by Jennifer, and Chance Allen (2002) by Elizabeth.

I started collecting coins in the late 1950's. My Grandmother Blake would take me to the bank where we would pick up rolls of Lincoln "wheats" (they all were "wheats" back then), and I would sit at her kitchen table trying to fill my blue Whitman folders. I still recall the excitement of finding one of those worn pennies from the teens or twenties. I could tell before I saw the date - this one is going to be an OLD penny - it just had that "look". I also remember the special feeling experienced while opening those rolls, searching through the resulting pile, filling the holes in the folders, then stacking the pennies on the table in groups of ten and putting them back into rolls. The nerve endings in my fingers and forearms were alive - it was almost electric.

My Grandfather also helped to pique my interest during this time. He had a huge stash of silver and gold kept in a special locked steel cabinet in the basement. Occasionally, I would get the chance to look at those coins, too. Hundreds, maybe thousands of silver dollars and halves, dozens of gold double eagles and eagles. As a ten-year-old, these were beyond my understanding, but that same electric feeling surfaced in my fingers. Oh, but that I knew then what I know now. As I grew through my teens, then married and raised a family, coin collecting moved to the background. I never lost track of those Whitman foldered wheat pennies and I always checked my change - keeping anything worthwhile, but this is an expensive hobby, and other things took priority.

The company I was working for went out of business in 1990, and I started a "temporary" job working at a local bank as a courier. This job primarily consisted of delivering paperwork and supplies between branches, but also included rolling coin with the automatic coin-rolling machine. Canvas bags were delivered by armored courier, and more came off the coin-counting machine as customers brought in coin to be counted. Every once in a while, someone would bring in a stash of old coins. I would buy the bags when they came off the counting machine, take them home, and dump them out on the dining room table. As a family, we would look through the pile of coins, setting aside all the wheat pennies or war nickels. We never found anything particularly valuable, but my interest in collecting was awakening (that "electric" feeling was still there).

While working at the Bank, I saw a need for someone with computer expertise, and I bought myself a personal computer for my birthday in 1991. Over the next few years, I self-learned what I could and eventually landed a job in the Bank's IT department. This fact (read higher pay for an IT person than for a courier), coupled with the facts that my children are now grown and the Internet has exploded with coin sales, has finally put me into a position from which I've been able to totally rekindle my interests in this "Hobby of Kings".

1922 Lincoln Cent----The various different types of this coin, if genuine, are caused by overused dies. There are 1922-D that were struck before the dies failed and that vary from strong strikes to what may be called (by PCGS) "Weak D". There are also two types with no visible D. One is known as "weak reverse" which was struck by a weak or overused reverse die. The other is known as "strong reverse" and is the only coin that is generally recognized as a "No D Variety". What to look for (known as diagnostics) The second 2 in the date is stronger than the other digits. The word TRUST is stronger than the words IN GOD WE. Personal experience---I found several "Weak D" and a couple of strong reverse no D. Never found a "no D weak reverse" Is My experience a fluke or is there a fluke in the recognized value?