He knows he’s not as lucky as that guy in Arkansas who found a gold dollar with George Washington printed on it instead of the Indian. First time that has happened in the 208-year history of the U.S. Mint, which is why it’s worth so much.

Herman Eagle knows his gold dollar isn’t worth anything like that. It isn’t a misprint. It’s noprint. A blank. But what might a blank be worth?

Would you believe $20? Maybe even $25?

Years from now, when his grandkids get old enough to realize Paw Paw’s been buying them gold dollars, it might be worth more, but, on the other hand, if the machines miss a lot more, well, it will always be a good story.

Herman got the blank when he bought 10 gold $1 coins from Fidelity Bank in front of Salisbury Mall.

“I handed all of them to my wife at the same time,” he says, “and she was counting them, and as she counted them, she noticed one wasn’t stamped, and she said, ‘You gave me a blank.’ ”

He took a look.

It was blank all right, so he called the bank when he got home, and told the teller.

“And she said, ‘Bring it back.’ But I didn’t bring it back. I’m not going to bring it back. I’m going to keep it.”

Not that he’s a coin collector.

But he’s got two grandsons — Morgan, who was born in 1998, and Joshua, who was born just four months ago, both sons of Bonnie and David Stiller — and he and his wife, Catherine, have been saving all the quarters they get that were made in 1998 and 2000, their birth years.

“And when they came out with this golden dollar ... OK,” he says, “I spoil the grandkids.”

But they’re not old enough to know he’s doing it, and he doesn’t go out of his way. He just gets things he runs across to keep for them when they’re old enough to understand.

And he and Catherine have hung onto a few other coins through the years — first, three silver dollars Catherine’s mother, Minnie Baity, left her when she died. One’s an Eisenhower dollar made in 1971 but the other two have a little age on them. One’s dated 1888 and the other, 1889.

And a John F. Kennedy silver dollar. And a pickle jug half full of quarters.

“We bought a microwave with the quarters one time. I drop them in when I come in at night.” Now he saves them for Morgan and Joshua.

“But I’m not a collector. I just look at the coins when I get them, and if something looks interesting Ikeep it.” He doesn’t buy any coins.

But he got his daughter two Princess Diana coins from a man who came over from England and helped him set up a machine at Kern Rubber Co. when he was maintenance supervisor there. He worked for Kern Rubber for 27 years before he retired.

And he’s got some “wheat” pennies and some of those old lead pennies the government gave out during World War II, when copper went to war, and some foreign coins. Just interesting coins, waiting for the grandchildren in a safe deposit box.

And he’s got a story about a $20 gold piece that belonged to his uncle, William Clifford Eagle.

“Just before he died, he showed it to me, and then he put it back in a little vault he had,” but when he died and his children were settling his estate, the vault was stolen. And that was that for the $20 gold piece — which might be what his blank gold dollar coin is worth now.

But if only a few of the billion gold dollars the U.S. Mint will turn out this year are blank ...

“It could appreciate in value,” says Paul Gilkes, a senior staff writer with Coin World. Blanks get fed into the stamping machinery at the rate of 550 to 600 a minute, and that’s fast. A lot of them could slip through. You can’t figure why people want to collect mistakes, he said, “but they do.”

Not Herman Eagle.

He’s got one, and if it’s really worth something by the time the boys get big, they’ll be richer for it. .

If it doesn’t, it won’t matter. By then his attention will be focused on something else.