When silver in our coinage was discontinued, for how long afterwords was the silver coinage readily available in your pocket change? When did it start disappearing and how long was that process?
When silver was discontinued in the mid 60's it wasn't until the early 70's before I started noticing fewer and fewer silver coins in change.
In Southern California silver started disappearing almost immediately when the clad 1965 coinage appeared, and it was pretty much gone by the early '70s.
I read a neat and really good article in ErrorScope last issue...it talks about how the Gov said that they stopped minting 90% silver coins in 1964 but they really kept minting 90% silver coins DATED 1964 untill 1970....maybe I can get permission to type it up and post it so ya'll can read it. Speedy
I was 7 when I saw my first clad dime. By the time I was old enough to carry pocket change all the silver was gone. I started collecting about 1970 and did find a silver coin or two searching my parents change.
The coinage act of 1965 wasn't passed until midyear. Before that the government had instituted a date freeze and said the 1964 date would be minted forever. In August they started production of the 1965 quarters in clad and the mint had the authority to use the 1965 date as long as they saw fit. Concurrently they were producing 1964 dates silver coins and these were made well into 1966 as well as all the 1965 dated coinage. It was not profitable to melt silver until 1967 and before this there was not a lot of drawdown of these coins from circulation. Once a premium developed these coins started going fast. In mid 1968 the Federal Reserve began separating clad from silver to recover the old silver coins. By this time more than half had already been plucked out by the public. This operation continued until mid 1969 by which time there wasn't enough silver remaining to justify running the coins through automatic sorters. The government got the lion's share of these last silver coins. By about 1971 the coinage was picked clean and there was less silver in circulation than there is today.
So,cladking, you're saying that by 1966, the mint was producing '64 silver, and '65 and '66 clad coins? What was the rationale behind that? It sounds really bizarre By '66, were they still cranking the '64 silver stuff out, or was the production rather limited? Did they use new dies for the clad coins? Are the '64 and '65 coins produced later than their date identifiable at all by die characteristics? Also, it seems like some silver '65 and '66 coins, as well as clad '64 coins, would have slipped through the cracks. Do these exist? I wasn't aware of any of this :rolling:
In early '66 they were making '64 silver and '65 clad. Cents and nickels would have all been '65. There were two date freezes in effect at this time; one was for silver which was expected to circulate with the clad indefinitely. The government thought that if the silver were discontinued it would be more likely to be hoarded, so it was continued. The '64 date freeze was legally superceeded by the coinage act of 1965 but there was nothing keeping them from continuing production. The '65 date freeze was not so much required by law as it was allowed by law. At the time the mint was intimating that it intended to make 1965 coinage indefinitely and without mintmarks. By around July of '66 they relented and started making 1966 coinage. By this time there was no more silver being produced. Curiously there are coins of the era which can be nailed down to their mint and year of manufacture. For instance there are some scarce silver quarters minted in Denver in 1965 using a clad reverse die. There are silver quarters dated 1965 but there origin isn't known with certainty. San Francisco used retired SMS dies to strike coinage for circulation through 1967. There is a clad quarter dated 1965 from Philly and made in '65. There are some rare 1965 clad quarters with Philly silver reverses but their year of manufacture is uncertain. There are numerous (~15) 1965 dated silver quarters made in 1965 (origin unknown). There are also several different transitional dimes and there have long been rumors of half dollars. It really gets complicated when you start looking at the SMS coinage. These were begun in 1965 but initially they experimented with 1964 dated coins. Experimentation continued and most of these coins were actually released in sets. There's a real hodge podge of metals, dies, and processes used during these years and most of the transitional pieces are quite scarce or rare now. This wasn't true thirty years ago because you could find the SMS coins in circulation and persistence would find some of the wrong reverse coins. These would be much more difficult now due to heavy wear and attrition.
The mint was worried that hoarding would cause a coin shortage so they continued to produce silver dated 1964 to give the impression that hoarding was not takeing place. They also hedged there bets by producing a huge number(3 billion) of nickels in 1964, about 10 times the totals fort most other years.
Very very interesting. I could care less about any of the 1964 coinage, with one very notable exception, one I must have, the 1964 Peace Dollar.:high5:
In 1966 and '67, you could still find silver quarters, and in '69 silver dimes were still quite common. In fact I got a nearly complete silver collection out of circulation in 1969. The quarters for the most part were gone by the end of 1966. As to the '64 nickel, they were most of the ones I found in circulation for most of the '70s and '80s.
To finish up: 1965-67 nickels are rather rare, and post 1964 nickels didn't start getting common again until around 1970. I think that the first year that coins were minted with the same date from January to December was 1967
The coinage act of 1965 may have technicaly superceed the 1964 date freeze but it also modified the revised statutes to make the date freeze permanent for 90% silver coins. (Sec 204) "Any coins minted after the enactment of the Coinage Act of 1965 from 900 fine coinage silver shall be inscribed with the date 1964." It also put a limit on how long the mint could strike the 1964 coins. (Sec 101(b)) Half dollars, quarter dollars, and dimes may be minted from 900 fine coin silver only until such date as the Sec of the Treasury determines that adequate supplies of the coins authorized by this Act are available, and in no event later than five years after the date of enactment of this Act. So in short Sec 101 permitted them to continue making silver coins for up to five years, and Sec 204 required them to be dated 1964.
Thanks for the clarification Conder101. It was a very bad time for people who were interested in circulating coinage. Not only were most of the old coins disappearing but the new coins were supremely boring because they carried the same date and had no mint marks. Even if you were still interested in the coins they were horribly made. The mint was trying to make as many coins as possible to combat the coin shortage and were straining at their production limits. This meant dies were used beyond their useful life and tonnages were decreased to the point that the designs were weakly struck. And these mintages were huge. Other than the '64 the mintages were in ranges that were simply unprecedented. Billions of each the dimes and quarters were made and since future years were expected to carry the same date these coins would never get "old". It wouldn't be possible anymore to watch coins wear away in circulation and mix in with those from other mints. Also one had the sense that something had been taken away as well. In the past you earned good silver for your efforts and now you might get a debased coin of the same design instead. All this with the rapidly rising price of silver assured that the old coins would continue to disappear. Even after the restoration of dates and mintmarks it was still a few years before circulating coinage was interesting again simply because it was so predictable and so many of the coins were XF/ AU '65- '67 issues. The mint didn't rotate their coin stocks until 1972 so it wasn't unusual to find rolls of brand new 1965 coins right up to 1975 being issued for circulation.
