The
Underweight Kennedy
By
Ken Glickman
October, 2008
Nothing was out of the ordinary
until I went through the roll when a
half dollar caught my eye.
Looking at its obverse, I could tell
its circumference was slightly off -
not perfectly round - around the
four o'clock position. Upon a
closer inspection, I could also see
that some of the lettering were
somewhat stretched out and/or
incomplete - especially the letters,
B and R, in LIBERTY. They were
hardly distinguishable from the
normally imprinted letters for B and
R. The date was barely truncated on
the bottom at the rim. The reeding
was noticeably missing from the rim
around the four o'clock position.
While the normal weight for a clad JFK Kennedy half dollar is 11.34 grams, the clad coin in question weighs only 8.0 grams, and its date reads "1979." A quick consultation with The Red Book confirmed my suspicion. The official weight for a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin is 8.1 grams, and its first year of issue is also 1979.
Bingo! A wrong-planchet error!
My thrill upon finding such an error coin was, however, short-lived.
Four days later, my euphoria suddenly turned into chagrin when I was gathering my other wrong-planchet (of the same metal composition) and off-metal (of different compositions) Kennedy halves for an impromptu presentation at my local coin club. I was shocked to find that one of them was a PCGS-slabbed Kennedy half dollar struck on a SBA planchet.
Oh, my bad, my memory! I had thought my "raw" SBA-planchet Kennedy specimen had helped fill that last "missing hole" in my collection.
In any event, I took it as a small comfort, thinking that coin collectors with not-so-great memories do indeed have more fun as they would keep surprising themselves over and over again.
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