Welcome. The Paso del Norte Coin Club has been meeting in El Paso since 1964, which makes this our 35th year. We are about sixty members from El Paso, Las Cruces and Ciudad Juárez, from ten years old to past eighty, and we collect everything from Roman bronzes to this year's quarters. Some of us know a great deal. Most of us are still learning. All of us are glad to see a new face.

I am Miguel Nava, the club secretary and the editor of our newsletter, La Moneda. I have carried the mail in El Paso for twenty-eight years, after two in the Army, one of them in Vietnam. I collect Lincoln cents, which I started doing on my route because people pay for stamps in pennies, and Mexican coins, which I started doing at nine when my grandfather in Chihuahua gave me a silver peso and told me never to spend it. I haven't.

This is the best thing to happen to coin collecting in my lifetime, and I do not say that lightly. Starting this January, the United States Mint is issuing five new quarter designs a year, one for each state, in the order the states ratified the Constitution and joined the Union, for ten years. Washington stays on the front. Each state's design goes on the back. Everybody in America is looking at their change again.

So far this year: Delaware (January), Pennsylvania (March), New Jersey (May) and Georgia (July). Connecticut is due in October.

Two things every new collector should know:

• Mint marks. Each design is made at Philadelphia and at Denver. Look on the front, just behind Washington's ponytail, for a small P or D. A complete set has both, so that's ten coins a year, not five. Here in El Paso we mostly get Denver coins in change, so the P's are the hard ones for us.
• The map boards. Folders and big wall maps with a hole for each state are in every store right now. They're a fine way to start a child. Fill them from your change, not from a dealer. That's the fun of it.

I made a printable checklist with the 1999 schedule, the designs and the statehood dates: State Quarter Checklist.

For a plain explanation of the program from a dealer's side of the counter, I also like the page at Sterling Coin & Stamp. Mr. Sterling explains the P and D mint marks and the proof coins, and he says the same thing I say: these aren't rare, and the fun is that ordinary change is worth looking at again.

We have five young members this fall, Jeremy, Michelle, Joshua, Adam and Aimee, from ten to fourteen years old. Every young member gets a free Lincoln cent folder and a state quarter map to start, and a "YN Corner" at every meeting with Kathleen Durbin, our YN advisor, who taught fifth grade for twenty years and can make anything interesting. Young members bid in the auction like everybody else, and they are allowed to sell at the show at their own table. Last month Michelle gave a five-minute talk on the 1943 steel cent, with a magnet, and got a standing ovation.

Parents: there is nothing here but good. Coin collecting teaches history, geography, arithmetic, patience and how to handle money honestly. And it's cheap. A child can build a fine collection of Lincoln cents from change, a dime at a time.

A coin's grade is a description of how much wear it has. Collectors use a scale from 1 to 70, which sounds strange until you know it came from an old pricing formula. The grades you'll hear most:

Learn to grade by looking at a lot of coins, under a good lamp, with a 5-power glass, next to somebody who knows. That is what the club is for.