Dennis, a central Illinois native, was introduced to numismatics around the age of 12, when his father and his paternal grandfather gave him a Whitman folder for Lincoln cents, and invited him to search the family “penny jar” and look for coins to “fill the holes” in the album.
Coin collecting took a back seat to academic pursuits until about 1986, when Dennis made a lunchtime foray to a local coin store in Portland, OR. Thus, began his renewed numismatic journey which led ultimately to collecting early U.S. copper coins. Dennis joined EAC (Early American Copper club) in 1992, and attended his first EAC annual convention at Fredericksburg, MD in 2001. He completed a date-set of business strike half-cents and sold that collection at auction in 2015. His current focus is on collecting nice examples of 1796 large cents by Sheldon variety.
Dennis, who now lives in Orange County, CA, joined the ANACS team in early 2017, and he now represents ANACS at coin shows in southern California and southern Nevada.