Gold set never to be finished

Why didn’t I tell my readers that the gold First Spouse series will always be incomplete?

A telephone caller to my office demanded to know.

There is no 39th coin, he said.

I have to admit, I was not used to the term 39th coin.

What the caller meant is there is no coin for Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn.

Why not?

Well, that’s how the authorizing law works.

No living President can be honored with a Presidential dollar. No First Lady of an unhonored President gets a First Spouse gold coin.

But why didn’t "Numismatic News" tell readers that? the caller asked.

We did, I said, though I didn’t go into detail with him.

What I didn’t mention was that over the years I had written columns about how illogical it is to have an unfinished set.

I wrote blogs online on the topic.

My comments disappeared without a trace. Nobody cared.

To say that feedback was underwhelming makes it seem like I had some.

Until this caller, that is.

He was not angry. He was just emphatic.

He had started down this road and now he realizes that his set of gold coins will remain incomplete forever.

I told him it is a nice gold set to own. Since he had all of the coins that were issued, he can still call it complete.

Well, that didn’t cut it.

Why should he have to settle for an incomplete set?

The answer to that is he and I might be the only two people who care.

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

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