Dennis: In the American South, a “Yankee” is a Northerner who comes down to visit—and a “Damn Yankee” is one who doesn’t go back home. I’ve been the latter for a long time. I grew up in Central New York (that’s the Syracuse area, for anyone who thinks Buffalo is right next to the Bronx), and I moved to Atlanta about twenty years ago.
A lot of people envision Manhattan when they think of New York. For my entire childhood and through college, Canada was actually physically closer to me than New York City, which seemed a thousand miles away. Drive a half hour north of Syracuse to the City of Oswego, and Canada is only about forty miles distant, across Lake Ontario. By car, Syracuse is actually as close to Manhattan as it is to Toronto—about a four-hour drive for each—but the Big Apple felt like a different world. Canada felt more like a neighbor.
In upstate New York we had a very tangible constant reminder that Canada was close by: In the 1980s and ’90s, it wasn’t unusual to find Canadian coins in your pocket change. I remember getting them, and saving some. They were “exotic,” because they showed maple leaves and sailing boats and woodland animals, and there was enough variety to make a nice collection of types. The royal portraits on their fronts followed Elizabeth II from the youthful queen of the 1950s and 1960s to the mature monarch of the 1970s and ’80s.
Occasionally you’d find a 1967 Dominion Centennial commemorative—the cent with a rock dove, the five-cent coin with a running hare. I found at least one silver ten-cent piece from 1967, with a mackerel on the reverse. By the 1980s the Centennial twenty-five-cent coin (with a bobcat) and fifty-cent coin (with a howling wolf) were too valuable to be found in circulation. Their silver value was triple their face value. But you’d sometimes see older non-silver coins—cents and five-cents—with the profile portrait of Elizabeth’s father, King George VI.
Even though Canada’s dollar was worth about $0.70 U.S. back then, its coins passed at par in upstate New York. If you got a Canadian twenty-five-cent coin in change instead of a U.S. quarter, you wouldn’t make a fuss. You could turn around and spend it for $0.25 U.S. Nobody cared that it was “worth” $0.18. Of course, you might make sure it was the first coin you spent out of a pocketful of U.S. coins. But you wouldn’t worry about a cashier rejecting it. The only challenge might be trying to spend it in a vending machine, because they were calibrated for U.S. coins and a Canadian coin would go plunk-plunk-plunk straight through its innards and plop down into the tray.
Since I moved to Atlanta, I’ve never received a Canadian coin paid out in change. I kinda miss seeing them. I did once find a Swiss half-franc masquerading as a U.S. dime—but that felt more like a unicorn in the wild, rather than a friendly and familiar neighbor visiting from up north.
Steve, you live closer to the Canadian border than I do these days. Do you ever get Canadian coins or other foreign coins in change?
Steve: I grew up in Livonia, Michigan, about a 30-minute drive to Windsor, Ontario. The “RoachHaus” always had Canadian coins. As you noted, there was an informal system in place where you could use Canadian coins in regular commerce at home, as long as you weren’t greedy, that makes me think of the many different coins and issues that circulated in early America and the ways that merchants would value them.
You were lucky to find some cool Canadian coins. I only would receive lower-denomination common circulating coins that I would then have to figure out what to do with. When I would cross the border, I’d come back with “Loonies” and “Twonies” – the $1 and $2 coins – that would be saved for a future Canadian adventure; since Canada’s drinking age is 19 versus 21 in the United States, Canada’s proximity to Michigan proved especially handy in college.
Living in Baltimore, Maryland, I don’t see Canadian coins in change much (though admittedly, I don’t get change that much as most of my transactions are on cards, which I know numismatists will say adds to the problem of coins being less relevant).
However, to the annoyance of friends and family, I’m a devotee of checking the change return of any coin counting machine and I more often find small-denomination Euros and UK coins, much more than Canadian coins (which are also rejected).
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Image: A Swiss coin hiding amongst U.S. pocket change.
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About the Collecting Friends Blog
Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
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About the American Numismatic Association
The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.
The ANA helps all people discover and explore the world of money through its vast array of educational programs including its museum, library, publications, conventions and numismatic seminars.