Fame & Fortune: Author Jeff Shaara 'Gods and Generals' author expands his father's legacy
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Bankrate: What attracted you to coins?

Shaara: I started as a little kid with one of those little blue books that you put the pennies in and I just took it from there. I did a lot of business at a local coin store in Tallahassee, Fla., and just accumulated a collection. This coin dealer invited me to a coin show he was sponsoring at the local Holiday Inn, so I paid the $30 and set up my stuff at an 8-foot table and I went home with $300. When I was 16, $300 would buy you a car. I was impressed with that!

Bankrate: Were you equally shrewd with the money you made in coins?

Shaara: Well, I was responsible. I talk about buying a car, but I didn't; I drove this old wreck of a Plymouth Valiant all the way through college. No, I bought property. One of the first big purchases I made right after I was married when I was 20 years old, I bought five acres of land in Tallahassee, Fla., that we eventually built a house on. So I've always been geared toward real estate and investing. The stock market always fascinated me. Even to this day, I read the Wall Street Journal every day. That's the only newspaper I read. Because I'm still in touch with all of that. I like doing that.

Bankrate: In hindsight, it must have prepared you to manage your father's estate.

Shaara: He had some unpublished things and all of his early short stories that we had to renew the copyrights to. And of course "The Killer Angels" was an ongoing concern, especially as the movie became a reality and then his estate became fairly significant. The heirs were just me and my sister, and she's an anthropology Ph.D. up in Pittsburgh, and she had no clue about business. She asked me to handle it, so that's what I was doing. One of the real feathers that I'm proudest of is, I took an unpublished manuscript of his to New York and flogged it around. It was called "For Love of the Game," and baseball had become sort of en vogue at that time, so it was published and of course it became a film. So that's the second time that a book by my father has been made into a movie that he didn't live to see. That's the sort of thing I was doing, just managing things, putting his house in order, because it was pretty much a mess.