Note: This is an article is from NBC on July 21 (not a press release).

Florida Couple Earns Pretty Penny From Sale Of Rare Coin

By NBC
FRIDAY, JULY 21, 2006
NBC

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Nowadays, pennies aren't even worth the metal with which they're made. A rare few, however, can fetch 600 million times what they're worth.

Denis Loring and Donna Levin, of Singer Island, reaped a windfall from a copper 1792 penny the couple bought last year at a Beverly Hills auction for $437,000.

Two months ago, the penny sold for a whopping $660,000 to "an East Coast energy company executive" who wished to remain anonymous, said Greg Rohan, president of Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, which arranged the transaction. The couple took home $600,000. Heritage made a $60,000 commission.

The coin had originally been owned by descendants of Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Connecticut's governor in the 1790s, Rohan said. It had been kept for decades in an old tobacco tin.

The chocolate-colored rare coin, one of only nine known to exist, bears the date 1792, the inscription "Parent of Science & Indust: Liberty," and the likeness of a woman's head representing "Miss Liberty."

"As silly as it sounds, coins like this, you don't really ever own. You get to be a custodian," Loring said Friday. "It was here long before I was here, and it will be here long after I'm gone."

He said the new owner has a "multimillion-dollar coin collection."

Loring's wife, Donna, said her husband had been trying for years to get her interested in coin collecting.

"He kept pushing me to find a series of coins that I thought would be neat to collect," she said. "I thought, 'Why don't I pick something that is so arcane that we won't ever be able to find the coins to fill a collection?'

"Never in a million years did I think we'd actually find something. But when it came up for auction, Denis said we had to get it," Levin added.

Having now convinced her husband that she was a coin collector like him, the couple was ready to pass it on to another owner, but not just to anyone.

"When I sold my first car, I didn't sell it for the highest offer because I wanted to make sure it had a good home," Levin said. "The same with the coin. I wanted to make sure it did not just go to some random person who looked at it as a little trophy and didn't care about it.

"And I actually got my husband to believe that I was a collector, briefly."