note: this is dedicated to the squalid arrogant elitist decadent gouty “DFW†primitive, he with the Teutonic hausfrau
, who’s in this business--franksolich however will admit that it’s on the up-and-up, his business delivering exactly what’s promised, and at decent prices; yes, franksolich has purchased things from a primitive enterprise, but under another name and address, because I don’t want primitives to know what’s not their business to know--Last evening, there came here an unexpected visitor, a guy from the big city who’s in his early 20s and who drinks like a fish……and looks it. I’ve known him for about five years; I was once his boss. His father has a really good job, and after the guy graduated from high school, attempted to get him on board with the same company, but he didn’t last long.
He doesn’t like to work. I have no idea what he likes.
When he worked with me, he learned I’d once been a coin collector, and thereafter constantly queried me about the value of this coin and the value of that coin. Any information I could give him was fragmentary and outdated at best, because I quit collecting coins a long time ago.
By my late 20s, I’d figured out I was obsessed with it, trying to fill up every slot in every coin-album, and trying to collect them all. So I gave it up, keeping only an exceptional collection of pre-1861 English copper coins (farthings, half-pennies, pennies, two-pence) and Liberty Walking half-dollars (minted 1916-1947), both of which I liked for their aesthetic qualities.
He brought over a big box of coins, all mixed up.
I was dismayed; it was late at night, too little time to help him, whatever help he wanted.
He told me the source of his collection--his late grandfather--and it made sense. They were kept in some sort of military (ammunition?) case, and there were a couple of military souvenirs from the second world war in there too (nothing exceptional). Other stuff had been added to it, up to the late 1960s.
And some of it was junk; his grandfather had apparently belonged to some sort of “bill of the month†club, in which one was sent a foreign bank-note once a month. Lots and lots of inflation marks from Germany 1921-1924, with their “zeros†and overstamps. And those tiresome, tedious reprints (from the 1960s) of old Confederate currency.
But despite the junk, it was still a pretty good collection; for some reason it included a great many British half-crowns from the 1930s and 1940s, in excellent condition. I guessed--and as it turned out, I was right--his grandfather had been in England during the second world war. The coins were circulated, but just barely.
I told him I was interested in the half-crowns, but suggested that instead of coming to me, he take them to a professional coin-dealer in Sioux City or Omaha, to have them evaluated and even sell them. As I’ve said, it was a pretty good collection, well worth his time and trouble.
He mentioned selling them on eBay, but I attempted to discourage him, because he doesn’t know a whole lot about them, and could get rooked. Best that he deal one-on-one with a professional.
The additional problem here being that being a novice, he has the usual attitude that simply because something is “old,†it’s valuable. The collection’s worth a nice amount of money, but I don’t think it’s worth anywhere near what he thinks it’s worth.
I told him to look up the values of the half-crowns, and get back to me on what he wanted for them; there’s a lot of them, again all in excellent condition, but not so many that I can’t afford to somewhat overpay for them, as a favor to him.
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There were silver, copper, and nickel pieces from just about every issue of American coinage since the Civil War 1861-1865, most of them in fine condition, but alas there was also a set of real dogs--a couple of rolls of Standing Liberty quarter-dollars (minted 1916-1930).
These were of course beautiful coins, but unfortunately they were designed in such a way so as to wear down very quickly. I imagine there’s more of them in existence with the date worn off, than with the date still intact, just as with the Indian Head five-cent pieces 1913-1938.
And alas, there’s nothing one can do with coins with the date worn off.
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There were rolls and rolls of mixed date-and-condition silver dollars (the
real silver dollars), but to my disappointment, more than a quarter of them appeared to be 1921 Morgan dollars.
There were two sorts of silver dollars minted in 1921; the old Morgan dollar and the new Peace dollar.
Even back in the good old days, silver dollars were not popular as a medium of exchange; hundreds of millions were made, but usually they just sat in bags in banks or at the U.S. Treasury. This is why it is so easy to find them in uncirculated condition, even back to the 1870s.
Once in a while, one encounters a Morgan dollar considerably worn flat; it’s not that way because it got around a lot, but rather because probably it was a high-school graduation present (a common tradition at the time), and carried in one’s pocket for the rest of one’s life.
The 1921 Morgan dollars are a particular drag, because s-o-o-o-o-o many of them were made, so as to satisfy the silver interests of Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah during the early part of the last century. To keep the silver mines in operation, the government was compelled to buy whatever silver was mined, as there wasn’t at the time much of a market for the metal anywhere else.
The government was reluctant to buy so much silver, as it pretty much usually had all the silver it needed, but Democrat U.S. Senators from the silver states, who had much seniority and power in Congress, compelled the treasury to mint them…..even though almost nobody wanted them.
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I’ve always been sentimentally attached to silver half-dollars, which to me have the weight and heft of real money, just like the old English copper one-penny pieces, about the size of our half-dollars.
My older brothers were newspaper-delivery boys when I was very small, and some of my earliest memories include bags of half-dollars dumped on the table once a week. In those days, newspaper-delivery boys collected subscriptions every week, using metal ring on which was held several cardboard punch-cards, each date being punched as collection was made.
I’m not sure, but I suspect that maybe during the early 1960s, fifty cents was the “average†weekly cost of the newspapers, and hence why so many half-dollars.
But they were apparently used for much more than just that; I also have memories of my father emptying his pockets of spare change, and there were always at least two or three half-dollars in the clump.
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Half-dollars seem to have quickly gone out of favor during the mid-1960s, but it probably wasn’t necessarily due to people hoarding the then-new John Kennedy half-dollars. In fact, in 1964 alone, the treasury minted more half-dollars--in one single year, remember--than it had minted the preceding 175 years all put together.
I blame it on the vending-machine industry. Vending-machines had of course been around a long time, but it was during the mid-1960s that they really took off, and were found everywhere, selling every sort of item.
The philosophy then was that nothing sold in vending-machines would
ever cost as much as fifty cents, and so such machines weren’t made to accommodate the big coins.
After which the half-dollar considerably disappeared from common ordinary everyday use, although the mints
still produce hundreds of millions of them every year, simply because a few congressmen who feel sentimental about the long-ago president demand that they do it.
