Emotion and silver dollars together

Please don’t run me out of town on a rail. I frequently write that Morgan dollars are the most popular collector coin with the possible exception of the Lincoln cent.

From time to time, a weekly poll question has been asked whether this is so. Readers tend to divide between Morgans and Lincolns, but all agree the two series are head and shoulders above all others.

In preparation of this issue that will be given away at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money, it just happened that Numismatic Guaranty Corporation announced it had slabbed a hoard of 16,000 silver dollars.

Former ANA President Jeff Garrett was the lucky dealer on the spot, and now that the coins are slabbed, they will be offered for sale in the retail coin trade.

I expect they will sell out quickly. Because they are all uncirculated, some extraordinarily so, they will command top dollar.

So with this news background, I decided to turn the usual poll question about Morgan dollars around.

It has been phrased, “Are Morgan silver dollars overrated?”

I expect readers will rush to the defense of the cartwheel. The responses will be recorded before anyone reads this column.

But poll takers tell us that results are heavily influenced by how questions are worded. I do not expect coin collectors will be thrown off their love affair with Morgans by the way I worded the poll question.

But some could consider the question hostile to good old collector opinion. If anyone feels that way, I am looking forward to reading the emails of defense.

We would not be collectors if we did not get a little bit emotional about our favorite coins, perhaps even heated.

Come back next week and take a look at the results. The worst possible outcome is not that someone would wonder if the question were hostile to Morgans. The worst outcome would be if no one cared to defend the silver dollar.

If I thought that was even remotely possible, then the future of numismatics is as bad as the doomsters make it out to be.

I am an optimist. I am a hobby booster. There is nothing I enjoy more than absorbing the many messages that readers send my way each week. A close second is helping to break news like that of this silver dollar hoard.

I have owned silver dollars from my first year as a collector. They were not my focus then, but I did have the presence of mind during the roll and bag boom to ask my father for some silver dollars. He obtained two for me and two for my brother from a local bank. I still have them. They aren’t Morgans, though. Mine are two 1923 Peace dollars. My brother got a 1922 and a 1923 Peace dollar. I was jealous of the older date. As you see, emotion and silver dollars go together.