CRH in the 50s

[jrf30]

CRH in the 50's

This is from Dan Soawrd, in NUmismatic news. I found this section very interesting. Amazing how things have changed. :-)

<< Like many of you, I started collecting when I was around 10. That would be 1957, if you are interested. As a teen-ager, the local bank let me and one of my friends use one of their back rooms to go through bags of pennies, nickels and dimes to fill the holes in our Whitman folders. My friend actually found a G-VG 1916-D Mercury dime during our time at the bank.>>

WOW.

ANyway, just an FYI. Oh, how it must have been back then to search. Shoot - EVERY coin was silver or wheat. ALL of them. LOL. How do you sort if they ALL are keepers? :-)

 

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[fistfulladirt]

Re: CRH in the 50's

When I first started roll hunting in the late '70's, I remember going thru halves, dimes and quarters, not finding squat. Wasn't the greatest time for a kid to start the hobby as silver prices quickly approached $50 an oz, and everyone had their hand in the cookie jar.
I do remember grandma giving me a fistfull of mercs when we would visit every few months, she worked at a small town post office, she pulled silver from circulation as she knew I was collecting. Miss ya grandma. Had my eye on grandpa's coins, especially that old gold quarter eagle....miss ya too gramps.

 

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[SFBayArea]

Re: CRH in the 50's

A 17 Year old kid making minimum wage in 1950 would have to work 750 hrs after tax to be able to afford a box of halves. That being said You Only had to work 1 Minimum Wage Hr to buy 1 Oz of Silver compared to today of 4.25hrs of Minimum wage to buy 1 oz of silver.

I guess what I am saying is the move in the 50's would have been buying bar not CRH.

.50 for $12 or .75 for $34

Yeah.. but how much was an ounce of silver in the 50's?

 

[DigginThePast]

Re: CRH in the 50's

A 17 Year old kid making minimum wage in 1950 would have to work 750 hrs after tax to be able to afford a box of halves. That being said You Only had to work 1 Minimum Wage Hr to buy 1 Oz of Silver compared to today of 4.25hrs of Minimum wage to buy 1 oz of silver.

I guess what I am saying is the move in the 50's would have been buying bar not CRH.

.50 for $12 or .75 for $34

Yeah.. but how much was an ounce of silver in the 50's?

Silver was about 75 cents in 1950 and went to about 85 cents by 1951. It rose to about 91 cents by 1960.

So, if you took a Dollar bill in the 50's and bought a Morgan Dollar you would be sitting on $26.28 in silver today.

Using an average value of 88 cents for an ounce on silver in the 50's you would be sitting on $33.93 for that ounce of silver as of right now.

As things stand right now, silver bullion would have been the way to go, potential numismatic value aside which could be substantial. Consider if you had used those 50's Dollar bills to purchase at face value high grade or uncommon circulating silver coins and sold them 10 years ago when silver was $5/oz.

 

[CHAINCHOMP]

Re: CRH in the 50's

so, anyone who searched back in the 1970 or before, im just curious, did halves, or any coins for that matter come in boxes? did they come like they do today? or were they in a bag? sorry, just curious. keep it up and hh!

 

[sitman]

Re: CRH in the 50's

My father was the bookkeeper for a small chain of drug stores in the late 1950s. One of his tasks was to count the change and deposit it at the bank. Because of this, he became interested in collecting coins, and started avidly searching through the change. He didn't have a lot of money, so he concentrated on the smaller denominations. Early Lincoln cents were readily available, and common Indian Head cents from the 1880s and newer could be found with some effort. He never found any Flying Eagle cents. Buffalo nickels circulated along side Jefferson nickels, and one could still find worn Liberty Head nickels on occasion. Like the nickels, Mercury head dimes circulated along side Roosevelt dimes, and worn common date Barber dimes could occasionally be found. He never found any Seated dimes. Heavily worn, dateless Standing Liberty quarters were fairly common, and any of the early Washington quarters were typically quite worn. Common date, worn Barber quarters could also occasionally be found, but no Seated quarters.

The father of one of my uncles collected coins in the 1950s. He knew the bank managers at several small town banks who would let him come in on Saturdays and go through coins while being "locked in" the vault. I suspect that by "locked in" he meant that the secondary door and not the main vault door was locked. Being older than my father, he was in much better financial shape and could afford to purchase anything he wanted. He was able to assemble near complete sets of all coins (cents to dollars) from the Barber era to the present.

 

[ducktrapper]

Re: CRH in the 50's

We CRH'd back in the late 70s/early 80s. In many ways, we found less than we do today. Wheats in my area were about as scarce as they are now, and we only had enough money to buy 10 rolls at a time, typically we would find a wheat or two in 10 rolls. Silver seemed scarcer then, I find a higher percentage of dimes now than I ever did then. For some reason we did not chase halves, would have been the smart thing to do. I had a couple nice solid 90% rolls of Bens when I finally did start chasing halves about 1983. We had one neighborhood grocery store that let us swap rolls each week. He'd take our old rolls, put them in the front of his box so the cashiers would use them first, then trade us fresh rolls, which were always hand rolled. We once found a Shield nickel in one of those rolls. We'd bike there on a summer afternoon, trade our 10 rolls of pennies and two rolls of nickels, bike home, search the rolls and generally feel happy with a couple wheats and maybe a war nickel. We thought that was a great way to kill an afternoon!

 

[srcdco]

Re: CRH in the 50's

"so, anyone who searched back in the 1970 or before, im just curious, did halves, or any coins for that matter come in boxes? did they come like they do today? or were they in a bag? sorry, just curious. keep it up and hh!"

To answer your question, coins all came in cloth bags. I have a couple of U. S. Mint bags for 1967 quarters (yes, they actually printed the year right on the bag). I also have a U. S. Mint bag for 1974 cents from Philadelphia - also printed on the bag. By the early 1980's, the year and mint were no longer printed on the bag, but were stamped on with ink. The bags were more generic. I have a couple that were reused, so they have multiple stamps (date and mint) on them, with the previous ones crossed out with marker. The only U. S. Mint bags that I don't have an example of are half dollars and dollars.

The problem with bags is that the rolls would bend and break, particularly if the bag was dropped. In the late 1980's / early 1990's the first boxes started to appear. The first ones (I still have a few of these), were not flat, but were tall. Instead of having 5 rows of 10 rolls (of cents) they had 10 rows of 5 rolls. Now, the mint sends everything out in huge plastic bags that are moved around with forklifts because they are so heavy.

Scott