Chuck Sharp is the founder of the Clarkston Coin Club and this is his story in Coin Collecting s a Kindergartener on the way to school in the 1940s, Chuck Sharp stopped by a gas station and asked the manager for some change for the penny peanut and gum machines. Instead of using the changer on his belt, the man swept some coins from the till and put them in his hand. “They were white, like silver. I was startled. ‘Hey, you gave me dimes,’” Sharp told him. They were pennies, but zinc coated, issued during World War II to save on copper. “That got me interested in coins. Since then, I wanted to learn all I could about them,” he said.