My Dad started metal detecting before I was born. He was a die hard White's guy through and through.
He would hunt just about every day for his lunch break and we would often head out with a picnic lunch on the weekends to regional parks. He would hunt while my Mom and I played Frisbee or on the playground.
As with all the old timers that learned to detect before discrimination, he was an unbelievable audio hunter. He was truly amazing at sifting through trash and finding the old deepies. He had no interest in clad whatsoever. The old coins were what got him going.
My favorite story that he would tell was about a time that he was at a local old park that has been hammered over the years. Today it is one of those places that you can swing for 2 hours with nothing to show for it, but you still go because there is always a chance of finding something really old. As he was hunting, some blowhard stops him and starts talking trash that he had been following my Dad for an hour and digging tons of coins (shallow clad) that my Dad walked right over (implying that he sucked at detecting). My Dad calmly puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out a handful of silver and assorted oldies and says, "Maybe I'm not looking for pennies" He said that dude turned six shades of red and sulked off
He got out of the hobby for about 15 years during the majority of my school age years. When I was in college he decided to get back into it and purchased a brand new White's XLT. I was always curious about why he loved the hobby, so we hooked up a headphone splitter and he taught me how to detect on the maiden voyage of his new XLT. I was hooked and I promptly bought an ancient Coinmaster 6000D and over the years sold/traded my way up to the top machines.
Over the next few years sharing the hobby with him (before he got sick), we had so much fun and they are my greatest memories of him.