Collecting silver in 1971 in junior high school
Bif
Posts: 14 ✭✭✭
My parents generously gave me one dollar a day for lunch in 1970/71 when I went to junior high school. I would make a sandwich in the morning, so I could save all my money for buying silver. When you purchase something from the lunch area, you had to have exact change so they had a change booth that people could get exact change. I remember making friends with the girls that worked in the change booth and they would save the silver for me. I knew at the time that this was a real opportunity, so I remember saying to myself someday years from now I’m going to look back on this and wonder what was the average day of silver that I was able to get. One time I got a half dollar, 2 quarters and three dimes. That was an average day. I still remember walking up to the booth during nutrition or lunch and one of the girls waving at me. She had a standing liberty quarter for me.
I distinctly remember all the kids on my block were into pinball, and would go to a place to play pinball, but I thought that was a waste of money, I spent everything I had collecting silver.
30 plus years later I was telling my two sons, who were about six and eight years old at the time that story. Then one of them asked me if I still had the Silver Coins, and I said I do, do you want to see them? So I got out a newspaper and spread it out on the bed and dumped three to $400 in Silver Coins on the bedspread. I was teaching them a lesson about saving money instead of spending it. Both of them are good savers now, having graduated from college in the last couple of years.
I never thought back then that I could have been buying gold, always assumed it was too expensive. Wish I knew back then what I know now.
Comments
Good story!
Mr_Spud
Nice story.
I have good coin story from 1971 also.
I was a sophomore in high school in the fall of 1971. I played basketball on the sophomore team and we started preseason practice on November 1, 1971. Practice lasted until about 6:00 p.m. At that time of year it was dark out when practice finished. I did not drive yet, so after practice my parents would drive to the school to pick me up and take me home.
One day after practice I was waiting for my parents to arrive and pick me up. I was by myself just inside the doors to the main entrance to the school. In the area just inside the main doors was a pay phone attached to the wall. I used the pay phone to call my parents to tell them to come pick me up. The phone call cost a dime, which I deposited into the coin slot on the face of the pay phone.
As I finished the call and hung up the phone into it cradle the phone mechanism malfunctioned. All of a sudden the machine started spitting out dimes out of the coin return slot. The dimes flew out of the slot and landed on the floor. There was no one around except me. The dimes hit the floor, made lots of noise doing so, and were rolling everywhere. I watched and the machine disgorged dime, after dime after dime. When the machine ran out of dimes to disgorge it became quiet. I looked around at the dimes that were laying on the floor.
I then bent over and started picking up the dimes as fast as I could, placing them into the pockets of my jeans. I picked up all of them. My pockets were full and my jeans were very heavy. When I walked the coins in my pockets made noise. My parents showed up and I walked out of the school, got into my parents car and went home. I told my parents what happened. When i got home I emptied my pockets and counted the dimes. I do not remember exactly how much the dime haul came to, but it was between $10 and $20. I pulled out and kept all of the dimes that were silver.
As I remember this event, I recall dimes cascading out of the coin return slot like a river. It reminds me of some times when I hit the jack pot playing slot machines (including one time about 5 years ago when playing a video poker I played one dime, drew into a Royal Straight (Ace, King, Jack and Ten of Spades on the initial draw and drawing one card I obtained the Queen of Spades) and won $400.00 (in dimes).
@SanctionII
Years ago I went on lunch break and a similar thing happened. when you entered, the cafeteria hallway had a row of pay phones on each wall. I believe there were ten phones on each side. As I was walking down the hall, one of the phones just spit out a couple of dollars in change. As I was picking up all the change, I noticed a large piece of cotton on the floor.
Apparently this was something people used to do back in the day. Open the coin slot and shove a piece of cotton or a rag up in the coin return. Then they would come back a few days later, pull the cotton out and take the change. I guess they didn't come back soon enough and the change got so heavy that it pushed the cotton out.
The good old days -
Wisdom has been chasing you but, you've always been faster
My best friend and I were sitting in my room after school in 8th grade. He was also checking with the change booth girls for Silver so he would go to one side and I would go to the other. One time he got a beautiful condition 1951 S quarter that I needed for my coin book. I asked him what he wanted for it and of course he wouldn’t sell it to me because he wanted to keep it. Then he looked at me and said “ if you can guess what time it is, I mean exactly what time it is, I’ll give you….. anything. I remember looking at him and thinking OK we got out of school at 2:51, took us 10 minutes to walk to my house, we’ve been sitting in my room for a few minutes. So I said 331. He has this look of horror on his face, and then takes off his watch and hands it to me, it was exactly 3:31, even the second hand was a few seconds after the 12, obviously this is way before digital. So then he says well what do you want? And I said I don’t know, then, he said well you have to tell me something, and I said no I don’t. So then he says here you could have the 1951 S quarter, and I said no I don’t want that now,
I’ve known Bill since the first grade and we’ve been best friends our whole lives. Once in a while, I’ll bring it up, you still owe me anything, and he gives me the look.
My silver collecting was in the mid to late 60's. $ 2.00 allowance on a Friday and $ 2.00 on a Saturday. Spent alot of time in the local pool hall and got to be pretty damn good. I could turn that # 2.00 into $ 4 to $ 6. The owner once gave me change for a dollar and I heard the distinct sound of silver. He saw me take notice. SILVER !!! For the next 2 or 3 years he sold me silver dimes, 2 for a quarter. I'd buy a dollars worth ( 8 ) every Friday & Saturday. Now 50 years later, I still have them all. Circulated, but I still got em.
Starting around 1963-64 while in school I always bought a carton of milk from the vending machines at lunch time. The milk was subsidized by the government, so it was very cheap, ranging from 4 cents to 7 cents. I would pay with a quarter and get only cents and nickels in change. The war nickels from 1942-1945 were still quite common, but few people were aware that they contained 7 cents worth of silver. With silver at $1.29 an ounce, it was a 40% profit on each coin. Over the next 3 years I amassed 7 or 8 rolls of them, which I kept until 1980, when they were worth about $2 per coin, and that was AFTER the market peak of $50 per ounce. Not a bad payday!
Some of the enterprising collectors in the 60's used to go to the local laundromat and put bills in the change machine that dispensed dimes and quarters looking for the silver coins.
Never heard of the cotton in the coin return ploy.
Don't forget, buying selling and owning gold was still restricted in 1971. You could collect gold coins, and own jewellery and other "Art", but you couldn't just hoard bullion like you can today. Nor was it widely advertised that it was something you could theoretically do with your money. So it's no wonder it never occurred to you.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
By 71 you were catching the tail end of silver in change. By 74 it was very seldom but I was stationed in Bermuda and was finding Mercury dimes and Buffalo nickels still in change.
Don't feel bad about the missed opportunity in gold, because it wasn't there. There were obviously no circulating gold coins in 1971, and private ownership of gold was banned until 1975.
So, buying gold would have involved you saving all your money for 4-5 years, and then going to a bullion dealer and buying whatever you could get for close to $150/oz. Not very realistic for someone cherry picking silver from a cash register 4-5 years earlier.
I am a bit younger and don't ever remember silver in circulation besides in the late 1970s seeing 40% halves in teller trays and buying them. By then all if not most of the 90% was long gone.
I made my first mint purchases back then getting a couple of brown box and blue envelope IKES ... I wish I would have bid on Morgans
Really? 90%'ers gone in 1970? You should talk to @joeykoins about 40 & 90%'ers being found in 2023. 😂 🤣
Disclaimer: I'm not a dealer, trader, grader, investor or professional numismatist. I'm just a hobbyist. (To protect me but mostly you! 🤣 )