The boyhood dream began when Marlon Mathre was just ten years old. He got interested in rare coins when one of his uncles offered him a dollar for an old wheat penny. Marlon remembers giving the penny to him for a dollar and recalls Uncle Harold saying that he’d buy any other wheat penny for the same price. So Marlon saved all his Wheat cents for a year and at the next reunion he presented them to his uncle. But they were all the wrong dates and uncle Harold only paid a few dollars for the year’s collection of pennies. “He gave me a five dollar bill for about 50 Wheat pennies but also gave me his 1967 copy of The Blue Book. I took it home and got more interested,” Marlon recalls. “I guess I got hooked because I haven’t quit looking for rare coins.”

Originally a farm boy, Marlon opened his first coin store fresh out of high school. He jokes that when he decided to open up a coin store many of his family and friends thought he was going to become a corn dealer, not a coin dealer. The first store was just a small 180 sq. ft. room in an old downtown building in the rural town of Yorkville Illinois. Three years later he moved “Yorkville Coin Investments” into a somewhat larger store just down the block. Fifteen years later he opened Fox Valley Coins, Inc. in the neighboring and much larger town of Aurora. It was a great move. Later Fox Valley Coins opened up an additional location in the next town, just East of Naperville Illinois, at the intersection of Route 59 and I88. It too has proven to be a great location and a thriving coin store. When asked why he thinks Fox Valley Coins has been so successful, Marlon says, “We have truly been blessed

Marlon goes on to say that the company has grown and appears to now be one of the largest coin operations in the mid-west. “It’s grown because we try to be fair and honest in every coin evaluation. We treat everyone like they’re family. There’s a lot to look at in our store display cases and people come back month after month because our inventory revolves rapidly. Also the coin auctions are held about every two months, creating a huge audience of numismatic collectors and their friends.” Fox Valley Coins pays top dollar prices – especially for rare coins and currencies. Many people often want to sell entire collections – not just their special or rare coins but their entire collection. “That’s how people almost always get more for their coins and currency here. We’re solvent enough to purchase the largest and rarest of hoards and specimens, but we also have the ma and pa types and younger collectors who come in with the more common coins – which we gladly evaluate, making offers immediately.”