In 2003, Candace DeMarco Kagin of Tiburon was walking through a coin show when she saw a nickel carved with the image of a golf caddy wearing a long, cutaway coat.

It turned out the coin was an original buffalo nickel that had been re-configured at the hand of a Depression-era hobo. The coin, Kagin learned, was part of a tradition of so-called "hobo nickels," which jobless men carved in exchange for a meal or a place to sleep as they roamed the country in search of work.

"A lot of them were very well educated but just couldn't work during the Depression era," said Kagin, a retired manager for Visa Inc. who is married to well-known Tiburon coin expert Don Kagin.

She was instantly hooked, and over the past decade she has collected hundreds of the nickels. This month she paid $170,000 for a collection of 218 coins at a collectors' show in Denver, Colo., nearly doubling her collection to more than 500 hobo nickels and grabbing the attention of enthusiasts.

"Now she has the number one hobo nickel collection in the world," said H. Robert Campbell, a Salt Lake City, Utah coin dealer who brokered the sale. "When you hold one of these in your hand it's like history in your hands. It tells a story. It's intriguing. And that's what gets people collecting."

Carved mostly during the Great Depression, hobo nickels became a way for out-of-work men to receive food or shelter without asking for a free handout, Campbell said. The men used crude handmade chisels, files and other tools to re-configure buffalo nickels, which were minted from 1913-38 and featured an Indian head on one side and a buffalo on the other.

The most common engravings depict profile portraits of men, but others feature animals such as turtles and elephants or objects such as boxcars.

Few carvers' names are known, and some carvers have been given nicknames based on features of their work, such as "Scruffy Beards" or "Peanut Ears."

Kagin's collection now includes work by some 30 different artists, including two of the only carvers known by name -- George Washington "Bo" Hughes and his mentor, Bertram "Bert" Wiegand. The two men are considered the masters of the craft, and a carving by Weigand recently sold for $12,500, a record price for a single hobo nickel, according to the magazine Coin World.

To read the complete article, see:With $170,000 buy, Tiburon woman amasses world's top 'hobo nickel' collection(www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_20733318/170-000-buy-tiburon-woman-amasses-worlds-top)