I know that this is going off-topic, but I'd like to answer the question of how was it like in the 1970's. Of course, I started with cents and expanded to nickels and dimes as I could afford it. I started with $10 in cents and slowly worked up to $30 (the bank I went to then used $10 trays for cents - after awhile they gave me three trays so we could just swap and speed up the transaction). I would easily find 40 - 50 wheats in just the $10. The biggest problem I had for years was having enough extra cents to replace those that I removed from the rolls. I did do halves whenever they had any, which wasn't very often even then. I remember the big deal when the bicentennial coins came out and how hard it was to find them! It was very common to get rolls of 40% silver halves as the price of silver was so low that the silver in them wasn't even worth face value. The price of common silver coins was 3x face until about 1978.
I regularly got war nickels and Buffalo nickels, usually dateless. I even got whole rolls of them a couple of times. The tellers would save me "different" stuff, including old Canadian and once 14 rolls of "white pennies" (steel cents) that someone had brought in. I didn't get my first Indian Head until January, 1978 (I was home sick, which is why I remember when). It was a 1901 and I was thrilled. Since then, I've found at least 50. I lost count a long time ago. I've even found 2 Civil War Tokens. There were no "boxes" then. Everything was delivered in cloth bags. I have about 50 or so of those still. I do wish that I'd kept a log back then like I do now. I didn't start the log until 1991. Even then, I could get Franklin and Walking Liberty halves pretty easily.
Now, it's a lot harder. I haven't found a silver half in months, since last August. I do still get wheat cents, but now 20 or more is a good box. It's been years since I've found whole rolls of silver dimes or older nickels.
On the other side, better metal detectors have helped me to find older and deeper coins that way, so that has actually gotten better over the years (I started metal detecting in 1977).
I hope this sheds some light on what it used to be like in the "olden days". Keep in mind that my grandfather got me started in CRH, as he started doing it in 1958! Can you imagine what he found!!
Scott
