By David Th omason Alexander
December 2019 will mark my 70th year as a coin and medal collector. It occurs to me that my life in numismatics has spanned a world of change with which I have been associated and which I have followed from the inside. Just possibly, my experiences may provide clues to why things have gone as they have in the numismatic world around me and possibly even how what may develop tomorrow.
My first real awareness of coins came in the summer of 1943, when I was 3, my brother John, 5. My family was living on the grounds of the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. One aft ernoon my father returned from his job with GE in Pittsfield and presented us with a handful of glittering silvery objects bearing a bearded bust and “ONE CENT.”