Searching for silver in the wild.
relicsncoins
Posts: 8,030 ✭✭✭✭✭
Back in the late 70's and early 80's my dad you used to go to a lot of junk yards looking for parts for old cars. Back then you would take your own tools, pull a part and then take it up to the office for the price. There were lots of 50's and 60's cars in the junk yards back then. I was around 10 years old and while my dad was pulling parts, I was searching through the seats of old cars looking for silver coins. I remember finding quite a few wheat pennies, a few mercs and a fair amount of rosies. On occasion I would find a silver quarter.
Need a Barber Half with ANACS photo certificate. If you have one for sale please PM me. Current Ebay auctions
3
Comments
Never searched the car seats for silver.... but was in a few of those old car junk yards scavenging parts!
Back in the 1970s, my grandfather would routinely buy dilapidated Packards, Hudsons, Studebakers, and similar cars. He would sell rare parts from them and would sometimes sell the entire car to someone who intended to restore it. At any given time, he had close to 100 of these cars on his property.
About a dozen years ago, I began the hobby of metal detecting. I've dug up close to 600 silver coins since then; however, I sometimes wonder how many silver coins were under the seats of all those old cars that my grandfather owned. I've heard of junk yard employees even finding firearms in old cars. I even heard about two guys who cut open an old couch at the city dump and pulled a number of silver coins out of it.
My old 1968 Mercury Montego MX went to the junk yard back in 1977, after it was totalled by two drunken girls in a VW Bug that swerved out of the lane and hit me head-on at almost 50 miler per hour. I walked away. They did not. A day before that, while taking a turn somewhat aggressively, my nice watch slid across the dashboard and fell down the defroster vent. I never had a chance to retrieve it.
PS:
I have also heard that old pianos are a good place to look for coins. When I heard that I went to check ours. All I found was a 1959-D Lincoln/Memorial cent.
On trash day I see pickers going through the chairs and couches looking for coins.
I used to help clean up on Saturday mornings after Friday night high school football games and I would find silver coins under the bleachers and around the concession stand. At my young age, it was lucrative.
I knew it would happen.
Had a paper-route when I was 10ish and I delivered to a restaurant. Always checked the phone machine for coins. Lift the receiver, work the return lever - once in awhile it sounded like a slot machine. Found a few silvers that went into my Whitman folder...