Welcome to the Tarnished Truth, your newsletter. May again already, the flowers are starting to bloom, and other than the 2002 cent and the state quarters I do not believe I have seen any of the new years coins. This might be as I age the excitement of a new years coinage wears thin, or the new coinage is just not getting around, I do not know. Maybe if they still had silver and gold in them I could get excited. Of course if they did they would probably all end up being shipped to China to be melted down, and I would not see them anyway. .

The year the DC-4 flew for the first time.
The year of New England's worst Hurricane.
The year Time Magazine named Adolph Hitler as their man of the year.
The year the steel Rainbow Bridge, NY. Collapses.
The year the minimum wage was set by Roosevelt at 25c/hr.
The year the San Antonio Pecan Sheller's struck in protest of their $2 - $2.50 weekly wage (50 hrs) being cut 15%.
The year Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis won the Academys best actor and actress awards (the awards have gone downhill ever since).
The year of my birth.

I was born in Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand, and at age 1 my family moved to a secluded rural area in North Canterbury where I spent the next 20 years. It was here during the WWII years that a stout stick became a superior weapon and the tall Californian and Scotch Thistles became the free worlds enemies waiting to be beheaded by this young Galahad, the saviour of the world. Sadly those days are long gone. My Wife of 40 years, Robin and I have two children a Son and a Daughter, and our Daughter blessed us with a Grandson late last year. I worked mostly as a designer in the packaging field and retired some 3 years ago. Like most Kiwi's I enjoy sports and participated in Rugby Football (local Representative honours), Tennis (hacker), Cricket (slightly better hacker) and I still enjoy playing Golf maintaining a handicap of 10.

After becoming somewhat disenchanted with stamp collecting, the increasing numbers of issues of bland, revenue collecting labels, became too tedious, not to mention expensive, I "grew" into coin collecting very late in life, and still rate as a raw novice. By following the User Groups and Mail Lists, searching my local Library for every book I can find, and of course the mighty Members of WINS whose knowledge, helpfulness and encouragement is priceless my knowledge is increasing. I have recently been accepted as a Member of the Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand and I know, that will increase my knowledge further.

My coin collecting started very haphazardly, if I saw a coin I liked I bought it, but soon realised I needed a little more focus. Browsing a Krause catalogue I decided that Guinea (formerly French Guinea) would be easy, wrong!!. I am close to completing the circulating coins issued, but some of these are definitely space fillers. Around this time I was following a thread about how ugly and unpopular SBA dollars are and, as Kiwi's always root for the underdog, that became my next project. I have now completed (I hope) this set having all 18 coins plus an error coin, the Proof and Uncirculated sets, the Souvenir sets and other bits and pieces. I am now working on putting together a representative collection of all the coins minted for circulation in New Zealand in the highest grade possible, even though I know, that unless New Zealand stops using coins, it is a collection that will never be completed. This is a wonderful hobby that I stumbled into, there are so many facets to coin collecting that it is impossible to become bored or disinterested and you get to come in contact with a huge diversity of peoples and their expertise, it truly seems to be a global family.

The most I have paid for a coin. nz$450.00 for a 1958 BU 1 Shilling, "broken back" variety. My best buy. The EF US 1913D Nickel type2 that I found in a small box of coins I bought for nz$2.00. My worst buy. The US 1913 Nickel type 2, seriously whizzed, bought off ebay as an AU type 1 for US$19.00. I kept it as a reminder to look before leaping. My most memorable experience. Buying three error coins from our own Jason Craton and receiving 9 error coins.

OK folks, you can wake up now and move on to the interesting stuff that makes up the rest of this newsletter.

Cheers from New Zealand,
Al Lees WINS #22

Sometime in 1876 the diemakers at the mint got especially drunk, andmanaged to hub a die with three wide spread impressions resulting in this 1876 shield nickel FS-012, F-04. You can also see their ineffectual efforts to clean this die up - look at all the die polish lines surrounding the annulet.

While this is a scarce variety, it is not as rare as some of the other shield nickel varieties. It is estimated at URS-6 (17 - 32 known). At that quantity, it is possible to run across one from time to time. Curiously, of the few that I have run across, a large number of them have been gem mint state coins.

Another interesting bit about this coin is that most of them have planchet flaws. I would theorize that the blanks for all of these were punched from a defective strip. The low known quantity argues that few of them were minted, and that it's possible they were all punched from the same strip.