Old Schools

[dale3fan28]

Ok this question is for the older guys..no offence, lol. I got a list of all the schools in my parish(Louisiana's County,lol) and the dates they opened. Most are in the mid '50s at their current location. Did kids of the 50's carry pocket change as we do today that is pretty common to carry coins from the 70's & 80's? What I'm asking is, we carry coins on a daily bases that is some 35-45 years old. A coin minted and carried around that old in the 50's would have put it being made in the teens-twentys-thirtys-forties eras. Did kids carry around silver coinage in the 50's like that to schools? If so, I sure will be doing some school hunting in the near future before the kids go back.

 

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[Tom_in_CA]

Ok this question is for the older guys..no offence, lol. I got a list of all the schools in my parish(Louisiana's County,lol) and the dates they opened. Most are in the mid '50s at their current location. Did kids of the 50's carry pocket change as we do today that is pretty common to carry coins from the 70's & 80's? What I'm asking is, we carry coins on a daily bases that is some 35-45 years old. A coin minted and carried around that old in the 50's would have put it being made in the teens-twentys-thirtys-forties eras. Did kids carry around silver coinage in the 50's like that to schools? If so, I sure will be doing some school hunting in the near future before the kids go back.

The post WWII era was very prosperous. And yes, kids started having change in their pockets. But prior to that (the depression, the '20s, the teens, etc..) kids had less coinage being carried, when compared to the post war boom in the USA.

This fact was well-pronounced if you've ever had the chance to work a school from when it was virgin, to the present. Here's what I mean:

I distinctly recall in the mid to late 1970s, when I first started this, that back then, parks and school lawns were much more virgin. People were hunting, but ... it didn't seem like anyone had any advantage over the others. There was no disc. yet (at least not that we had yet ) and you just went around with your 66tr or 77b listening endlessly for whispers.

There was a particular school here blt. in 1921 that we used to hit all the time. And yes, we got a lot of silver and wheaties from it. But I distinctly recall that the vast majority of the silver and wheaties we used to find, was primarily 1940s/50s stuff. And if/when we DID find the earlier teens and '30s dates, we could tell they were circulated longer, into the 1940s and 50s. At the time, I just wrote it off to the fact that the older coins must logically be deeper than what we were reaching (makes sense, right?). But flash forward many years to the '80s and '90s, and machines were indeed going deeper. So we'd go back to these same zones in search of the earlier/older coins. And yes, we found a few in these hard-worked spots. And yes, we could now find 8" deep *crisp* teen wheaties (evidencing lossage right in the early '20s of the beginning of the school). But I noticed that the sheer volume of the amount of silver never compared to the demographics of the # of coins from the post war era.

The school had always been the exact same size, thus meaning the same amount of students (you would think). So it became obvious to me that the kids after the mid 1940s (and especially into the prosperous 1950s) were indeed carrying more coins than their predescessors. Also things like school lunch programs (where you bring your nickel for milk, or your quarter for the hot lunch, etc...) began to be introduced in the 1950s and '60s.