Hello,

After about 30 years in the coin collecting hobby, I have finally
gotten "serious" and joined both this scholarly organization and the
ANA as well. I really think the ANS has some great resources and am
interested to see what comes from it after the move is done.

A bit about me: I started collecting coins in the early 1970s when my
grandfather sat me down with a bag of wheat pennies and a fresh
Whitman folder and showed me how to sort them by date and mintmark. I
was hooked. I gave up for a while when gold and silver shot through
the roof and then regained interest in my late teens.

In college, I had a brilliant frind who went on to study nuclear
physics, we went to a prayer group together. I collected American
halves, he had assembled a fine collection of Roman and Judean coins.
We made a few swaps of our duplicates. So since about 1985, I have
been collecting ancient coins, in the 1990s I started collecting
Reformation era German & European coins.

I took 2 years of Hebrew and 1&1/2 years of Greek in college at
Bethany Lutheran College. That was about a decade ago and of course I
still use it to my astonishment. I am a political scientist by
education (International Relations with a Middle East focus) but have
little use for it in my daily life.

I am looking forward to many arcane discussions about types and
varieties of the coins I collect and sell and a am fairly starved for
adult conversation as I spend most of my time at home with my 4 small
kids. You can only watch so much kids tv on cable before you wonder if
your mind is rotting away. I find myself watching a lot of late night
cable documentaries on everything from the Romans to the Mayans. I
just watched one about Mary the mother of Jesus and one about the
Samurai last night.

Wow! More than I anticipated saying. Well, have a great day, keep me
in the loupe,

Jim McGarigle