1945 10C, FB (Regular Strike)

Charles Morgan:

The Mercury Dime reached its final year of production in 1945. Adolph A. Weinman’s celebrated design was first issued in 1916, a year before the United States entered World War I; its production concluded only after America detonated a pair of atomic bombs over Japan to hasten the end of World War II. The world the design entered was vastly different from the one it left.

Despite the transition from the "Winged Liberty" motif to the Roosevelt Dime, the Mercury design remained a fixture in American life for another two decades, appearing regularly in the back-page ads of Silver Age comic books. When the era of circulating silver coinage ended in the mid-1960s, the era of finding Mercury Dimes in pocket change vanished along with it.

Collecting the Full Bands 1945 Mercury Dime

With a massive mintage of 159,130,000 pieces, the 1945 Philadelphia issue is one of only five dates in the series to surpass the 100-million-coin threshold. Because of this abundance, the date was long dismissed as a common coin and ncirculated specimens were frequently traded as mere bullion well into the 1980s.

However, a select group of astute dealers- including the late Tom McAfee of Winter Park, Florida, remained keenly aware of the date’s profound scarcity with Full Bands (FB). To bring this anomaly to light, David Hall, then a prominent dealer, educated Coin Dealer Newsletter (CDN) editor Allen Harriman on the situation, convincing him to include Full Band pricing in the "Greysheet."

A dedicated market for the strike attribution soon followed. While 1945 Full Band dimes seemed scarce at the time, it was only with the advent of PCGS grading and the subsequent transparency of population data that the market's opinion was truly solidified—particularly regarding Gem-grade examples (MS65 or better) with the coveted FB designation.

In this context, the 1945 Mercury Dime (#5056, #5057) reveals itself to be a nearly impossible strike rarity. In fact, a mere 1.26% of the 1945 Philadelphia dimes graded by PCGS qualify for the Full Bands designation, with the few survivors concentrated primarily in the MS64 and MS65 range. The scarcity is so profound that a collector may have a better statistical chance of securing a Gem Full Bands 1916-D (#4907)- the series undisputed key date- than finding a 1945-P with fully struck bands. Only the lingering impression that vast quantities of uncertified 1945 Dimes exist prevents this conditional rarity from reaching price parity with the 1916-D.

Vintage Market Snippets

• Coin dealer Lu Riggs offered uncirculated rolls for $6 in the August 1948 issue of The Numismatist.
• At an April 2016 online auction, Stack’s Bowers sold a BU roll of 1945 Mercury Dimes for $493.50.

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David Hall: I first became aware of the "Full band" situation with Mercury dimes in about 1975. I was at a coin show and the late Tom MacAfee said to me, "I want to show you something very special and teach you something about Mercury dimes." So he pulled out a 1945-P and told me he had just sold it to a customer for $50. Since this was a $2 coin as far as I knew, I was pretty puzzeled. Tom told me to look at the bands on the reverse. He said if I could find another one with full bands he'd pay me $40. And so I started looking for that date and others and soon discovered that some Mercury dimes...1943-D, 1944-D, etc...always come with full bands, and some so-called easy dates in Uncirculated condition are really rare with full bands. By 1976, I had convinced the Coin Dealer Newsletter owner/editor Allen Harriman to list separate full band prices in the CDN and the market soon gained traction. Today, the 1945-P with fully struck crossbands Mercury dime is one of the great condition rarities of numismatics, a Gem non-bands is $20 or so, and a Gem with full bands is a five figure coin.