Am I doing cartwheels?

There was a surprise waiting for me at the Florida United Numismatists convention.

At the National Silver Dollar Roundtable dinner on Friday night, I was given the President’s Award.

Unfortunately, I was not present to receive it. My colleague Debbie Bradley was there.

Thursday afternoon she had told me that she had found out I was going to receive an award. She then asked me if I had known about it.

I replied that I had not and was doubly disappointed at not being able to attend the convention and the dinner as I usually do.

She suggested that I email her a few words of thanks and she would pass them on to those in attendance.

I agreed and emailed these words, which she read to those attending the dinner:

“When I first began to cover the National Silver Dollar Roundtable in its early days three decades ago back in St. Louis, I was impressed by the high caliber and enthusiasm of its members and leadership. To receive an award from such a distinguished group touches me deeply. I am sorry the weather prevented me from being here to personally accept it. Thank you.”

The organization is a significant one. It helped make the 1980s the decade of the silver dollar. That was quite an achievement in itself.

I would say that a combination of three things make NSDR stand out.

Members of NSDR share a passion for silver dollars from a scholarly angle and an investment angle and they make it all fun.

It is critical to any collector that in order to maintain an interest and build an interesting collection that he or she have fun doing it, but there must be a foundation of knowledge at its root and an awareness that anyone collecting the coins will make a significant investment over time.

It may sound like a simple formula, even a common one, but sustaining such a group from its founding in 1982 to the present is not easy.

In a way, we can probably say that we have all grown up together in the hobby no matter what age each individual was when he or she became interested and involved.

That’s what makes this award so special to me. There is a deep commitment to collecting dollars in NSDR and I have been privileged to play a small part in helping get the word out to collectors.

Thank you, NSDR. I wish you many more years of success.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is winner of the 2013 Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."