Last Year For Finding Silver Dollars In Circulation

What was the last year you found a 90% silver dollar in your pocket charge or from a bank, how did you feel when you received it, what year was it, what year was it when you received it?

 

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I found a dime about a year ago. Found a quarter about 3 years ago. I just remember how fun it was.

 

1964

 

You're still about 65 cents of a full dollar, Idhair.

 

1964 dime in coinstar a couple months ago

 

I doubt that any living person on this forum has ever received a 90% silver dollar in change, without asking the teller for any "old coins", etc.

Banks don't give dollar coins as change anymore... Not really.

 

I regularly received them (along with the smaller denominations) while running a cash register in the Hispanic section of OKC throughout the late 60's into the mid-70's. Immigrants would bring them over the border from Mexico.

I ended up buying my first house for $400.00 face in silver during the Hunt brothers silver run up of 1980.

 

1964 Alaska

 

When I was young, I could go to my local bank and get a silver dollar, almost always a Morgan Dollar, for a dollar bill. That continued until about 1964. By then the price of silver had reached $1.29 per ounce, which was the tipping point where a silver dollar melted for its face value. After that, you had to pay a premium for silver dollars from a coin dealer.

 

I agree with Dougmeister, you need to ask the bank employees. I got 3 1921 Morgan Dollars from my favorite bank teller around Christmas. Last year she saved a total of 8 Morgan's and 3 Peace Dollars for me. They are on occasion still turned in to Banks. Most tellers keep them to sell for Melt! My teller gets cookies and doughnuts monthly and I get them for face.

 

In 60 years I have never gotten one. People tended to hoard them or give them to kids as birthday presents and such. As far as 90% quarters and dimes, I had a paper route and I would get a couple every week or so up until about 1971.

 

I remember getting a Franklin half as a kid. This was the 1960's and even though they had been making Kennedys for a few years, the Franklins still circulated. The silver wasn't a big deal at that point, because you aren't going to save a half dollar for 51 cents worth of silver. Which if you were allowed to melt/ sell for melt, you would receive less than 50 cents anyway.

 

As I recall in 1964, dollar coins were easily available in banks but don't recall ever getting one in change...just too heavy for spending and not popular at all for general circulation except in Vegas. Tough to remember details like this. The CC dollars were sought, but they were all circulated as I remember. GSAs were not released yet so the CCs were the valuable ones worth keeping if found. I never found one but a friend had a bunch of them...all circulated. I searched bank teller drawers for nicer unc. dollars and sold them to my friend's father for $2 when I found one, but most dollars were well circulated, and besides, I could only afford to collect cents anyway.

 

Now that you mention it, I did see a lot of Franklins up until about 1970. They were very common before 1964. That's when 50 cents would buy a meal.

 

That's why I never saved silver quarters from my paper route. When you are only making 5 or 6 dollars a week it's hard to set aside 1 or 2 bucks in silver every week. I did save a few silver certificates but they disappeared decades ago.

 

Last fall. A 1922 Peace Dollar. Had asked the girls at the corner store to save any kennedys they come across. Went in one day and one of them handed it to me. For $1. I also on different days got 2 ike silver dollars. I was one happy fellow ALL day long. I doubt that will ever happen again.

 

I never received a silver dollar in change nor did I handle one while I was working in a small convenient store in the early 60's. On the other hand I handled many Franklins and Walkers while working as a cashier in the cafeteria in junior high school. Normal meals were 50 cents and the machine I was using always gave a half dollar in change for a dollar bill.

 

Silver dollars circulated mostly in the western part of the U.S. My grandmother had a portrait picture taken and she was wearing a Morgan around her neck. That was rural Nebraska around 1940. When I was young she would send me one for my birthday and I would foolishly take it to the bank and exchange it for a dollar bill. Back east silver dollars were available at most banks until the mid-sixties. My paper-routing days started in 1959 and lasted until 1963, and I never received a silver dollar in payment. One customer, however, had a coffee can of old coins under the counter at his greenhouse, and at Christmas time would hold it up high, telling me to pick one. He was my favorite customer.

 

I ran an antique/used furniture store from the early 70's through the early 90's. Until the widespread accessibility of ATM's and the 24/7 convenience they created made standing in line seem ridiculous, I'd interact with one or more of the tellers at our branch bank across the street from the store every day while depositing the daily proceeds. The regular tellers were all primed to save anything "unusual" for me. So, well into the 80's it wasn't at all unusual to get a 90% dollar or two per month this way. Silver halves, "Ikes" and the like were so commonly available to me that I couldn't always afford to buy them all (at face) The occasional foreign coin (and not just Canadian) which happened to be close enough in size to a US denomination would come along too - often those would be silver of some fineness or another. Odd clutches of $2 bills, etc, might also be offered.
It wasn't long after freestanding bank ATM's became common on urban sidewalks, went into every convenience store, and drive-up ATM kiosks popped up (like Fotomats - remember them?) in many parking lots, that the great majority of friendly little local bank branches closed - so I don't really know if the supply dried up at that point in the 80's or not. I suspect that with less hands-on handling of coin at teller stations and the "no coins in ATM or drive-up teller" policies which were soon enacted made the handling of "hard cash" a lot less common for the greatly diminished corps of tellers.
Of course, prior to the mid 60's, it wasn't all that unusual to get zinc/iron '43 cents and the occasional Indian head, buffalo nickels, "Mercury" dimes, standing liberty quarters, walker halves, and even the occasional severely worn Barber in change.
Pre mid-'60's pocket change used to be several orders of magnitude more interesting in those days and this probably accounts for some of the demographic "bulge" of collectors which has been diminishing in per-capita participation - but in a rapidly expanding population, so the net effect is not all that different - in recent years. What is different is the general population of coins becoming so incredibly, boringly, stereotypical that it's amazing that anyone can be drawn into the hobby any more without the prompting of personal involvement and interaction with established collectors.