Katie Thornton

Okay, massive room.

There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of vendors.

This was my first time at a coin show, but right away I could tell that this convention was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious.

More than anything, this show was for collectors, mostly of US coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom.

I have now.

There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like when the machines smushed the pennies, or as they call them, elongateds.

So I'm of the age where my sort of introduction to coin collecting was the state quarters.

Do you have any you could show me?

Oh, yeah.

Of course, everyone in America knows about state quarters.

Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now.

They put billions of these special quarters into circulation.

On the front, you'll see the classic profile of George Washington, but turn any of them over and you'll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself.

The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon, Kansas has a bison, and Illinois, well, it couldn't decide.

So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Tower in the background.

But the State Quarters series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some coins.

Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, hey, cute, a fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it.

But that's just not true.

In reality, just beneath its shiny metal surface, the State Quarters initiative was a high-stakes government program, one in which coin collecting played a critical role.

Today, the story of how the U.S.