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Trade you a Kennedy half-dollar for a 1963 North Carolina tercentenary coin?

If a trade were possible, it could result in a nifty profit, especially if the Kennedy coin were one minted many years after the first in 1964.

A modern Kennedy half-dollar is worth, well, 50 cents. Eddie Bridges of Greensboro estimates that a tercentenary 50-cent coin from 1963 would now be worth $12 to $15 to collectors.

Bridges despairs not quite 50 years later that the tercentenary coin never went to mint.

Like many former athletes, Bridges, who was an Elon football player and track star, remembers losses as well he does victories.

For a while, enthusiasm for the coin was high. Bridges has a file of support letters from Gov. Terry Sanford, Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles, U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin and U.S. Rep. Horace Kornegay.

Bridges at the time worked downtown on North Elm at the old Greensboro Sporting Goods store. Although best known now as a wildlife conservator, he collected coins then.

State officials were scrambling to find money for a project to mark the state’s tercentenary (300th anniversary).

As Bridges’ friends know, he’s not only a dreamer, he has energy to burn, even now at age 76.

So one day, Bridges walked a half-block to the Piedmont Building to Greensboro businessman Skipper Bowles’ office to propose the coin. Bowles, later a Democratic gubernatorial nominee, had worked closely with Sanford.

“That’s a heck of an idea,’' Bowles told Bridges.

“He picked up the phone,” Bridges recalls, “and called Gov. Terry Sanford. I mean he went straight to the governor, who answered the phone. Bowles must have had a private line to the governor’s office.”

Sanford expressed enthusiasm, telling Bowles, “All you’d need to do is to get to Jack to sign off on it, and we’d be in business.”

“Jack” was President John F. Kennedy, with whom Sanford was close. Kennedy’s help was vital because the coin would be national currency, sold through North Carolina banks. Sanford followed with a letter to Bridges promising that the idea was being pursued.

Enthusiastic letters came from Ervin, who noted his friendship with Bridges’ parents. Ervin was from Morganton, where Eddie Bridges grew up.

Rep. Kornegay, representing Guilford and other counties, supported Bridges’ idea. Bridges went to a top local banker who said banks would embrace selling the coins (for $5 each).

The momentum was there, and the realization the coin had to be public by the end of the tercentenary year.

But then President Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, and the coin idea fizzled.

Bridges believes Kornegay lost interest. Kornegay, Bridges says, helped draft a bill for the Kennedy coin.

Bridges said Bowles later told him he thought “Horace had snipped us.”

Bridges and Bowles fully supported the Kennedy coin. But why not another for North Carolina’s celebration?

Bridges blames the Byzantine bureaucratic process for minting special coins, explaining: “You couldn’t do one coin, and then turn around an do another.”

He was told that North Carolinians buying tercentenary coins as keepsakes would raise $200,000, huge for the time.

Perhaps remembering a line in a Bowles letter, “Anybody can say, 'It can’t be done.’ No progress is made that way,” Bridges moved on to other projects.

In recent years, he has raised money to endow an Elon baseball scholarship honoring Jack McKeon, the Elon grad and retired Major League baseball coach.

Bridges’ efforts led to the conversion of a Bur-Mil Park barn into a wildlife education center.

He served 12 years on the State Wildlife Commission, and has been honored for his conservation work.

Maybe it’s not too late for the coin. North Carolina turns 350 in 2013.

Get to work, Eddie!

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9873 or beale1@clearwire.net