Nice find! Typical wear for a war nickel, the lettering on the reverse tends to fade away, I don't know exactly why, I've heard it's because of the manganese content but I don't know if that's true or not
I am sure other CRH's have found some strange stuff too. gonna keep searching dimes. I had better luck finding silver in a $250 box.
My best find would have been in the late 90's while I was on the road servicing my accounts in Saskatchewan. I arrived at Cymric which is just an old store sitting on the side of the highway. When I went in to exchange their product the owner asked if I would look at something for her seeing as she knew I collected coins. So she goes to her office and comes out with 2 rolls of quarters. I opened the roll and slid them out and into my hand and to my amazement it was all silver. The earliest being 1950's and going back to the 1890's. I was so excited to see them but she quelled that pretty quick when I asked if she wanted to sell any and she replied NO! She said she had just back from the bank in Strasbourg to get change for business and this was what she had received but wanted to know what they were worth. I took some details and told her I would call in a couple days with the information. I figured if she got a couple maybe I could to, so I drove south and went to the Royal Bank in Strasbourg. As I had no money I used my Visa in the ATM and took cash out on it. I went up to the teller and asked if I could get 10 rolls of quarters. Well she only had 4 rolls she could give me so I took them and left. Sitting in my van I opened the first roll and it was all modern stuff, my heart sank as I thought then that there was no way I was going to get any. However opening the last roll I was delighted to find that beautiful look of silver. My roll did not go back so far, as my oldest was a 1908 and up and into the mid 40's. Still I turned my $10.00 into just over $300.00 and kept a few which I have to this day.
I think it's a coin struck through grease so the letters did not appear. In my opinion that's a better find then a normal 1943p nickel!
I've never found anything like that around here in So Cal... I weigh my MWRs before I open them so I can tell how many copper coins approximately are going to be inside of them. I'm thinking that they mix your coins differently where your vendor is than where I live before they roll them...
Whenever I get a box of new cents or nickels I for the most part will look through the rolls. One time I had a brand new box where over 2000 of the coins were new yet there was still a few wheats in there. I have also found nickels from the 40s in new boxes of nickels. Loomis supplies my coins and it is very interesting that older coins will get into newer coins.
I've found a bunch of stuff like WAM's ,doubled dies ECT... But my personal favorite is a missing reverse clad layer Connecticut state quarter.
I've gotten a few of the 125 gram (4.4 ounce) new cent rolls, and once I got $20 of all new nickels when neither the teller or I was paying attention...but that's about it. My tellers know I don't like brand new coins, so they will show/tell me what they have when I get to them and will steer me to other tellers when necessary.
I rarely get boxes... I usually like to sample what the tellers have (get 10-20 rolls at a time) and get more from the particular teller/branch depending on what's in their rolls. The other day I got 12 String&Son rolls from my local BofA.... looked good on the outside, but there wasn't a single pre-60 amongst the 480 coins! Needless to say, I didn't get anymore from them and went to my usual Wells Fargo branches after that!
I've been shifting from boxes to individual rolls more as well, you can get a mix of denominations, and it seems to be less of a PIA for the tellers
I don't think BoA is the best for coins, I have yet to find any silver other than war nickels (which weigh the same as regular nickels). And I know for a fact they don't get their coins from the mint.
It's really "hit or miss" for me with them... my local branches tend to get a ton of shipments of new rolls... usually they are from String & Son... I've had much better luck with Wells Fargo, and smaller local banks.
Yesterday, my teller at the main branch was so cool... he was just about out of nickels and I told him I wanted a box worth... so he goes back to the vault and gets two different TYPES of nickel boxes... One LOOMIS and one Generic... So he opened both boxes and the LOOMIS box was all newbies, but the Generic one wasn't, so I got that one... 19 pre-60s including 2 War Nickels and 4 2009-Ds later I'm a happy camper!
picked up 2 boxes of nickels, yielded 56 pre 60s, no war nickels or key dates , but I did get a near UNC 1964 clipped planchet
I may have to amend my best find. I "pickled" a bunch of my dateless Buffalo Nickels the past few weeks and one of them turned out to be a 1921-S!