Were you around when 90% silver coinage was dropped after 1964?
Coinstartled
Posts: 10,135 ✭✭✭✭✭
Wasn't much of a collector but I recall the lighter weight seeming odd. Each Saturday I went to the bank and bought a couple Franklin halfs.
1
Comments
Yes, I was very much aware because I was 15 years old in 1964. I was pulling silver coins out of circulation until 1969 and selling it for 8% preiums to Philadelphia, PA coin dealers. Silver prices over melt were speculative then.
No.
Yes, it was a huge change and it was sad to see the silver slowing disappear. Here in the Silver State we saw it circulate until mid 1965 and then it was really scarce after that.
bob
I was two.
Nope, my parents were 14.
eBay ID-bruceshort978
Successful BST:here and ATS, bumanchu, wdrob, hashtag, KeeNoooo, mikej61, Yonico, Meltdown, BAJJERFAN, Excaliber, lordmarcovan, cucamongacoin, robkool, bradyc, tonedcointrader, mumu, Windycity, astrotrain, tizofthe, overdate, rwyarmch, mkman123, Timbuk3,GBurger717, airplanenut, coinkid855 ,illini420, michaeldixon, Weiss, Morpheus, Deepcoin, Collectorcoins, AUandAG, D.Schwager.
I was a Junior in High School and remember it well. Shows how old I am.
I remember the first clad coinage released in our area was the Quarter. It looked dull and did not 'jingle' like a pocket full of silver. The times they were a changing.
"Keep your malarkey filter in good operating order" -Walter Breen
I just missed it.
I started delivering the Grit weekly newspaper in 1961. 12 cents per copy delivered, I got 2 cents from each paper. This was in western North Carolina and I would still get Indian cents, a barber dime once in a while and plenty of Mercury's, Walking Liberty halves and standing Liberty quarters,and lots Buffalo nickels too. I had one customer who was putting together sets of the currently circulating silver. I would deliver her newspaper last and let her go thru my silver looking for coins to complete here sets. I stopped the route when I joined the Marines but stopped by to visit a couple of years later, about 1969,. Turns out she completed the Mercury and Roosevelt dimes, Washington and Standing Liberty quarters and Eisenhower and Walking Liberty half all from circulation.
Oh the good old days.
W.C. Fields
Yes. I missed the silver then and I still do to this day.
Silver coinage wasn't actually dropped until very late in 1965. The mint had continued to strike 90% silver coins dated 1964. The clad coins started appearing in circulation in most areas in early 1966.
I was 6 yrs old in 1964. Every Sunday we went to my Grandparents for dinner.
After dinner we would sort coins for 90%. My Grandfather would cash his check on Friday and get coins at the bank and I helped him sort for silver.
On Monday he deposited the non-silver back in his account and on Friday he would get more and on Sunday evening we sorted again.
This was obviously a year or two later after clad coinage started to appear in circulation and silver was being pulled and hoarded.
Good times,,,,,,,,
In 1964 i was a egg in my mama's ovary and hadnt been made yet in my daddy's testes.
Liberty: Parent of Science & Industry
I was 8 . . I remember sitting at the bar in my parent's kitchen looking through some change to separate the silver . . . around 1964-65.
Funny . . .when the silver hit almost $50 in 1980 or so I was tight on money and took a few 1964 dimes and quarters in to a local shop here . . .for dinner money for a new starving college grad. . . . .
Drunner
Yep, and the “change” was totally noticed!
We had a TV with an early generation three button “clicker”-type remote control that turned the channel. One was for up, one for down, and, a single five-click button that would turn the TV on & off and change volume (low, medium, high, off, on).
After looking through rolls and rolls of coins in front of the tube for hours and hours, (days, months, maybe years?), I somehow learned that if you carefully, quickly, sequentially drop about five or six silver quarters from about three inches up, down to the floor, in front of the TV, the sound, or the vibration or frequency, or something, would remotely change the TV volume up (low, medium and high), and turn off and on the TV.
I was alone the first time it happened. I was absolutely dumbstruck!.
Naturally, once I figured out the TV mysteriously changed volume and went on/off due to me playing with my coins, I, for a short time, had a terrific fun playing mind games with my family.
Clad quarters didn’t work at all as a TV remote control.
Oh, yes. I was born in 1954. I remember that my father would save his quarters and half dollars in a big glass jar that he kept in a closet. This was Christmas money, and by December, it was almost too heavy for me to lift. This would have been '61-'64, I can still see all that silver. It was my treat to count it and roll it. About $300.00. And then, to the bank it went. If only ....
I also remember those times in which a roll of dimes from the bank would display only a smattering of clad reeded edges. I would carefully extract them because they were the interesting ones .. not that boring old silver.
And, I remember checking the buy prices in Coin World for common silver coins. But I have forgotten the premium back then. Maybe someone can refresh my memory. (I do recall buying a 20-dollar Lib from FJ Vollmer, I think, for 60 bucks. Sold it back for 65-ish)
I miss those days in which circulation could yield something interesting in each denomination, and silver dollars were available at the bank. I have often thought that if there is a demise to this hobby, it is much due to the virtual impossibility of winning over a new collector via a chance find of something eye-catching from circulation... and I'm not talking about varieties or modern serial coinage like state quarters, although I have nothing against either. I mean something "old". Like the AG 16-S walker I pulled from my elementary school's weekly lunch ticket receipts. Then again, I forget that a 1965 dime today is as old as a 1912 dime was in 1964.
Vividly! Incontrovertible announcement that the US actually HAD screwed the pooch!
Inexorable dwindle of supremacy after that.
I was in 8th grade. I brought a new clad quarter to school and showed it to my Social Studies teacher. He dropped it on the floor to hear the ring. I was horrified. I thought I had something special.
Lance.
Nope, I was not born until '75. I'd love to have been around to be able to cash in silver certificates for bags of Morgans. Man.....
Missed it by 14 years.
Gonna get me a $50 Octagonal someday. Some. Day.
Yup, I was around !!!
Second year of college studying pre-med. My collecting days
were behind me so not much thought about the value of
currency, but a lot of thought about the value of girl friends.
It was a time of fun, surfing & other things than the change
of my change.
R.I.P. Bear
I remember the first 1965 quarter I saw. I had gone up to the corner candy store and bought a bottle of Pepsi and should have gotten seven cents in change, and being a coin collector naturally looked at my change after I left. Instead of the nickel there was a quarter that was the same color as a nickel.
I had been waited on by the store owner's father, an old (to me) man with thick glasses who helped out now and then, and I realized that he had been fooled by the color. I went back and talked to the owner (a nice lady) and explained what had happened and suggested that she show him the difference so that he not give out too much change from then on. She said thank you and gave me a nickel in exchange for the quarter.
I totally missed it but love the stories of you ole timers
m
Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
Well, being a 5-9er, I was technically there. Effectively I missed it.
My parents and Aunt and Uncle had a small laundromat from 1967-1977 and there were always thin pickings on silver dimes and silver quarters from the washing machines and dryers, but they had also installed a very old mechanical change machine that provided change for half dollar coins. Ocassionally a 90% silver half dollar could be obtained from this source and later (after 1971) 40% silver halves could be obtained. The silver coin premiums were not big then and I was generally allowed to swap out any half dollars that I wanted to keep.
Funny how that old mechanical change machine did not discriminate the half dollars by weight, but it didn't.
My Dad had an Uncle by marriage who accumulated $80,000 in face value in 90% silver coin in his home's basement. This Uncle was more than a little bit insane on the subject. The Uncle sold his silver at least once or twice in 1980 but always reneged on delivery. He died about the time silver hit its low point in the early 1990s and his widow (my Great Aunt) had the coins out of the basement, sold to a coin dealer, within 24 hours of his death.
But I personally missed the big conversion from silver to clad by a year or two.
I was ten. Parents also saved quarters and halves for home projects - like a new dishwasher. Credit was not used, they saved and paid cash. Not like today. However, they made a tidy profit on their stash.
In those days a quarter could buy a lot as a kid. My allowance was a buck a week and I got 75 cents to mow the lawn - a three hour job.
Needless to say I didn't have a big stash of silver to profit from.
I remember how strange the sound was when you dropped a clad quarter on the table, more like a thud. Now, it's the other way around, you almost never hear the ring of silver.
My parents hoarded the 1964 Kennedy silver halves, like most everyone else.
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Thomas Jefferson
My digital cameo album 1950-64 Cameos - take a look!
No good deed goes unpunished
I was in diapers in '65 but I do remember my dad pulling silver from circulation around 1970. He had many, many rolls of dimes and quarters all pulled from circulation from 1965 to about 1972.
yes, I remember it clearly.
Sad days then
BHNC #203
I was 9-years old, with three paper routes, pulling silver from circulation.
I was grabbing every silver coin I could get long before 64 as my great uncle warned silver will go away soon. He was mostly wrong but partly right. In 1980 silver got so high I took my rolls to a dealer at a motel in Abingdon, VA and sold them for $2200. I was so excited as most had been picked up at face and others traded for, so quite a profit. Wish I had immediately started saving them again after price fell, but only as I could afford to at that time. 16 when 64 rolled around.
Jim
When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest....Abraham Lincoln
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.....Mark Twain
By 1967, when I started to go to a local coin shop and look around, silver was already almost non existent in circulation.
Pete
I was 12 years old in 1964 when the clad coinage started showing up. I thought it was soooo cool, traded some dirty old silver coins for the new cool clad coins.
Recipient of the coveted "You Suck" award, April 2009 for cherrypicking a 1833 CBHD LM-5, and April 2022 for a 1835 LM-12, and again in Aug 2012 for picking off a 1952 FS-902.
I was married with children (two) at that time.....saved a few, but life got in the way....Cheers, RickO
Wow. Y'all are a bunch of old farts.
(I was 7.
I do remember even a quarter had purchasing power back then. I was walking to school one day, a couple of guys in suits flipped me a quarter and told me to tell my parent to vote for <politician's name deleted>. Whatta deal...)
Yep. Paid my high school tuition in the early seventies ( partially ) by flipping the stuff. We didn’t have TPGs at the time, so dealers would basically tell you it was common, and thus worth less than spot prices. Then came the great melting pot in the late seventies (circa Hunt Bros). Then came Rare Earth & Iron Maiden. Ah, but I’m getting off track with the metal.
In ‘64 i was 9 And collecting or attempting to collect IHCs. By ‘67 I had my first job as a paperboy. My sister was exchanging clad for all the silver quarters that were still out there being spent as quarters which I often received collecting for the route.
``https://ebay.us/m/KxolR5
I was 24 and we just lost JFK (RIP) Than I received orders to defend our country.
Nothing good for me to remember in the following three years.
That was all I wanted, what was right. Didn't want her father giving away the store. Back then 20 cents would get you a two-pack of Hostess cupcakes!
Retrodated silver production continued into early 1966.
Now that's money well spent!
Pre 65 coins pretty much maintained their v> @CaptHenway said:
...even better, a Mickey's Banana Split!
The government and mint were issuing warnings they were running out of silver starting in 1961 prompting the public to begin hoarding. This increased drawdown of coins was one of the principle causes of the coin shortage and exploding mintages in the early '60's. Of course a booming economy and demographically induced inflation played roles as well as did the exploding usage of vending machines.
I was very upset about the two date freezes and the actions taken against collectors but nothing was worse than the removal of silver. I fully expected all the "good" coins to disappear in a few years and for nothing to exist except 1965 issues for the rest of my life. It not only ruined the coin market was going to ruin the hobby.
Of course it turned out much differently as mint marks and dates were restored and it even gave me my very own circulating coinage to collect but that first piece of garbage clad quarter I saw in November 1965 (right after Thanksgiving) seemed to usher in the death of coin collecting. Ironically the first clad I saw was exceptionally well made and was among the nicest clads of the date but I certainly didn't know that then and it wasn't so pretty any more after I tried to peel the obverse and reverse. There's something poetic about all this but I don't know what it was. Mebbe it had the 1964 reverse too!
I got a VF 1831 50c in change at the candy store in 1956, Went nicely with my very big-league (bigly?) XF 1914 QE at $14.25 of Bar Mitzvah money the next year, Then Playboy started publishing
Started using MPC about then in Vietnam. Didn't see that stuff until I got back.
Yes, My parents were explaining the situation to me at 6 years old. I remember going to the bank but I was more interested in the nickels because I was still finding dated Buffs in the herd of rolls. I still treasure my parents silver rolls.
100% Positive BST transactions
I was around but only 4 so not much interested in collecting coins.
@RegsitryCoin said:
After looking through rolls and rolls of coins in front of the tube for hours and hours, (days, months, maybe years?), I somehow learned that if you carefully, quickly, sequentially drop about five or six silver quarters from about three inches up, down to the floor, in front of the TV, the sound, or the vibration or frequency, or something, would remotely change the TV volume up (low, medium and high), and turn off and on the TV.
I was alone the first time it happened. I was absolutely dumbstruck!.
Naturally, once I figured out the TV mysteriously changed volume and went on/off due to me playing with my coins, I, for a short time, had a terrific fun playing mind games with my family
We found out my grandmothers Philco tv could be changed by using a Slinky for the same sonic reason. And as kids had a lot of fun (at least we thought it was fun watching my parents etc. wonder what the heck was going on!) changing the channel from a distance.
K
Big, big smile here!!
Thank you @ElKevvo !!
I wish I had noticed the slinky thing. I didn’t think of it. Not that imaginative I guess.
I did try all other denominations of coins, with no success.
I was 13 years old when that happened. I remember the silver disappeared REALLY fast from circulation. It wasn't a happy time.
yes was 12 or 13, didn't collect coins back then, so didn't think to save any, dadnabbit!