Rare dime worth way more than 10 cents fetches $506K at auction

How much would you pay for a dime - 10 cents? How about more than $506,000?

A dime that had been thought missing since the 1970s turned up at auction, selling for $506,250, The Associated Press reported.

The coin with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on it was minted in San Francisco in 1975, but it was missing something, the “S” stamp that marks where it was minted.

It was one of two that did not have the letter.

The coins came from an uncirculated proof set of six coins sold in 1975 for $7. The coins should have had the “S” on them but collectors realized that two dimes from the more than 2.8 million sets were missing the mark a few years after they were released.

A man who was not identified kept the dime in a bank vault for 40 years after he and his mother, identified by the auction house as “Ruth E.” bought it in 1978 for $18,200 or about $90,000 in today’s money. It was a monetary safety net for the parents who operated a dairy farm, the AP reported.

When the man died his sisters in Ohio inherited the dime, selling it at auction on Sunday at a California-based auction house.

Great Collections offered the dime with the rest of the proof set and the original invoice from FJ Vollmer & Co., Inc. which sold it to the family in 1978.

The first unmarked dime sold in 2019 for $456,000 at auction then was resold to a private collector a few months later, the AP reported.

The proof sets included a Lincoln cent, Jefferson nickel, a bicentennial Washington quarter, a bicentennial Kennedy half dollar and a bicentennial Eisenhower dollar, according to Sky News. The bicentennial coins had the year 1976 for the celebration of America’s 200th birthday and were added to the set to get people to buy them.

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