Lake
Worth woman reunited with rare gold coin
By Joel Hood | Sun-Sentinel.com
3:24 PM EDT, July 26, 2007
Reunited
This rare gold coin is an early 20th Century
collectible issued in 1907 and called a Saint
Gaudens Double Eagle "High-Relief"
$20 gold coin. A Lake Worth woman was reunited
on Thursday with the coin once owned by her
family. The coin could be worth as much as $90,000.
A Lake Worth woman was reunited on Thursday
with a rare gold coin once owned by her family
that now might be worth as much as $90,000.
The early 20th-century
collectible is a 1907 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle
"High-Relief" $20 gold coin. The term
"High Relief" refers to the extreme
height that images are raised above the background
of the coin. Only 12,367 coins were made due
to the difficulty in producing it.
Office of the state's Chief Financial Officer,
July 26, 2007
Florida Chief Financial
Officer Alex Sink presented the 1907 coin to Phyllis
Childers of Lake Worth this afternoon in Tallahassee.
Childers is the daughter of Tere Claiborne, who passed
away in 2000.
``She put it into a safe deposit box on her way to
a bridge game one day and didn't tell anybody and
didn't fill out any ancillary paperwork in case anything
should happen to her,'' Childers said. ``It's going
in my sister's safe deposit box with two names on
there in case anything should ever happen to her.''
Childers said the coin is the ``cornerstone of the
family.'' She said family members believe President
Theodore Roosevelt, who spearheaded the construction
of the Panama Canal, personally gave it to her great-great-grandfather,
Manuel Amador Guerro, who was Panama's first president
in 1904 until 1908.
Family members searched for the coin for years but
were unable to find it, unaware it was in the safe
deposit box at a Lake Worth bank in Palm Beach County.