Each roll of Necco Wafers contains eight flavors: wintergreen, chocolate, orange, cinnamon, licorice, clove, lime, and lemon.
During the Civil War, they were called “hub wafers”. By 1912 the confection was being advertised as “Necco Wafers”, a name they still go by today. Necco Wafers were invented in 1850 by Oliver Chase, an English immigrant. His company merged with two others, forming the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO).
Oliver R. Chase with Americas first candy machine, a lozenge cutter. Chase was inducted into the Candy Hall of Fame in 2006.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – A humble 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and bidding expected to top $2 million a century after it was mysteriously minted.
The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is one of only five known to exist, but it’s the coin’s back story that adds to its cachet: It was surreptitiously and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then found to be the real deal.
It all adds up to an expected sale of $2.5 million or more when it goes on the auction block this spring in suburban Chicago.
"Basically a coin with a story and a rarity will trump everything else," said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colo., which has held the coin for most of the past 10 years. He expects it could fetch more than Heritage Auction’s estimate, perhaps $4 million and even up to $5 million.
"A lot of this is ego," he said of collectors who could bid for it. "I have one of these and nobody else does."
The sellers who will split the money equally are four Virginia siblings who never let the coin slip from their hands, even when it was deemed a fake.
The nickel made its debut in a most unusual way. It was struck at the Philadelphia mint in late 1912, the final year of its issue, but with the year 1913 cast on its face, the same year the beloved Buffalo Head nickel was introduced.
Actor/producer Thomas William "Tom" Selleck is best remembered for his starring role as the private investigatorThomas Magnum in the CBS television seriesMagnum, P.I. (1980 to 1988). He appeared in more than fifty film and television roles since the Magnum series including a co-starring role in the highest-grossing movie of 1987, Three Men and a Baby. Before fame, Selleck received a scholarship for and played on the University of Southern California basketball team.