His name at his request will remain a numismatic secret. - Harvey Stack, on the man who built the TAD Collection, 2016Pale olive highlights inhabit protected areas where mint color was last to fade, subtly enriching the frosty and highly lustrous golden brown surfaces. The strike is superb, perhaps a bit soft at STATES but well defined nearly everywhere else. The repunching on the date, the hallmark of this famous variety, is easily seen under low magnification. The eye appeal is even and impressive, with only a tiny speck far above star 7 notable as a flaw. A low-lying area caused by material on the die face, sometimes called a planchet chip, is seen below the right side of the upper serif of L in HALF. The fields are pristine, making it easy to wonder why this coin didnt receive an even higher grade. A jogging die crack connects the peripheral tips of stars 4 and 5, then returns to the rim after barely missing star 6. An even less noticeable crack joins the back of Libertys head to the rim, and light cracks extend from the inner tips of stars 6 and 7 toward the coronet, though neither reaches it. Though earlier than the polished die of Manley 2.0, this piece appears a bit later than his 1.0 die state.Acquired by R. Tettenhorst at auction in the spring of 1975, the provenance of this coin and the large cents sold the following year as the "Tad Collection" would not be known for decades thereafter. The majority of the Tad (sometimes rendered as TAD) coins were originally acquired in the 1950s, mostly from auctions held by New York stalwarts Stacks and New Netherlands Coin Company. An announcement in the January 1976 Penny-Wise said "TAD is a code name for an anonymous collector who died several years ago, and the estate is just now disposing of the collection." Previous researchers and catalogers have identified the TAD collector incorrectly, or have ascribed partial ownership to the pseudonym (Doris Nelson) of his female auction representative. The TAD collector was from the Great Lakes region, a collector of significant means who collected not only half cents (sold 1975) and large cents (sold 1976), but also gold coins and major rarities. Quality was of far greater importance than price, a predilection that has placed coins with the TAD provenance on many Condition Census listings over the years. The TAD quality is evident here. There are only three 1809 half cents of any variety graded numerically higher than this one: the Cohen-4 in the previous lot, the Alto-Missouri Cabinet Cohen-4, and the MS-66 RB (PCGS) McGuigan 1809 Cohen-3. There are also two PCGS MS-65+ coins: the Missouri Cabinet-Pogue Cohen-6 in the present sale and the McGuigan 1809 Cohen-6. This coin received the same grade from PCGS as the Tettenhorst/Missouri Cabinet duplicate, though both the owner and the cataloger of the Missouri Cabinet regarded this one as the better specimen. Displayed at the 2009 Half Cent Happening, this coin took top honors, as noted by Jeff Noonan in the pages of Penny-Wise: "The scorers chose Tetts sharp, Uncirculated EDS coin as the winner by nearly a factor of 2:1." The McGuigan PCGS MS-65 BN, ex Roger Cohen, came in third.
