Observations from a silver and clad coin spill

Earlier today I came across my first ever silver and clad transitional coin spill.

The Nox ID'd at solid 30 with a 29 bounce and only two bars depth indicating a very shallow clad quarter. It was indeed a shallow clad quarter...with two silver rosies directly underneath.

Just to the side were two more coins, a 1965 clad quarter and a 1966 clad dime, that showed up when I scanned the hole. The quarter on top of the two silver rosies was dated 1966. Surprisingly, no pennies or nickels in the small spill.

The 1966 dated quarter and dime didn't start circulating until August 1966. My guess would be these coins were dropped sometime between then and early 1967.

I've always been curious beyond logic as to the timeline when circulating coinage flipped over to majority clad as opposed to majority silver.

Five coins is way too small a sample size to draw any conclusions, but in this person's pocket, most likely in late 1966, the clad outnumbered the silver 3 to 2.

I'm curious to hear others experiences finding a silver and clad coin spill.

Years ago I detected the parameter of an old sidewalk to a side entrance of a lake house that had been turn down (I believe it burned down). I found a 1964 and 1965 quarter side by side, yet not another coin around the whole place.

marcomo.......... that's right up my alley! I VERY CLEARLY remember being a little boy traveling to San Francisco (from Taiwan). It must have been around late April of 1969. Nearly all of the paper bills were dated Series 1963. I had about 70 coins (maybe a little more)......receiving them from various places. NONE of the coins were dated 1969. Nearly a dozen of them were dated 1968.....and were all .....for all intents and purposes...... uncirculated. Almost half of the coins were dated 1965, 1966, 1967. All the coins with these dates ALSO seemed to be nearly uncirculated condition. I remember thinking that it was strange that SO many of the coins were almost the exact same date. I was also really curious as to 'why' I did not have a 1969 coin. I really wanted to see a coin of each denomination that was dated 1969......to see if there were anything different/cool about the new year coin. Was transportation from the mints.....to the Central Banks......to the Regional Banks.......to the businesses.......to the vendors.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., really that slow.......that it took nearly forever to reach the streets. About 1/2 the dimes & quarters were silver; most dated 1964. BUT....... the sentiment was..... they were RAPIDLY being pulled out of circulation. Mostly by the banks. Most folks did not care to collect/save them. Some coin collectors did. ((Hoarding a bunch of quarters and dimes ....was quite a chunk of income in 1969)).
Seemed like over half of the pennies were Wheat's.......and mostly dated in the 1950's. Nobody cared to collect the wheats. They had been made for decades.
Most nickels were dated 1964......and quite a few were 1939. No one cared about the War nickels (35% silver).
In my pocket full of (about 70 coins) change....... two were dateless Buffalo's.
Seemed like about 20% of the cash registers ..... had a few half-dollars in them........but kinda were not really 'preferred' to hand out for change.

A time-gone-by.....observation!

Great info, Tom! I remember the silver war nickels lasted in circulation for a number of years after other silver essentially disappeared from circulation.

Unlike dropped war nickels which I've found in all different condition from almost uncirculated to highly corroded, circulating war nickels universally turned a dark gray from circulation and were always easy to spot...and ignore for this then young coin collector who filled their spaces in his Whitman blue folder in short order. I was more interested in finding the elusive lower mintage Jeffersons like the 1950-D, 1939-D and 1939-S dates.

Likewise the war nickels I've found detecting, even the highly corroded ones have a different look that makes them easy to distinguish from other nickels. This is something Tom can speak to with way more authority than me, but I'm guessing it's most likely that little bit of manganese as well as compositional variance due to wartime metallic availability that makes them often bounce and hit so unpredictably in the ground.

I record all my obsolete coin finds (except wheaties) in a Whitman checklist book which makes it easy for me to see that I've found 39 war nickels since I started detecting in 2008. Based on their large mintages, I have no doubt I've ignored quite a few times more than that due to both their ID bouncing and their IDing as trash targets.

The war nickels were widely found in circulation for at least 30 years after they were issued.

As you noted Tom, wheaties lasted in bulk quite a few years past the virtual end of circulating silver. Unlike silver, they were plentiful in circulation at least through the 1970's if not a bit longer.

I don't remember struggling to find 1969 coins like Tom did. I do remember that it was always cool in the midwest to find "s" dates of any denomination. I would imagine not so exciting or rare for Tom to find living in the city of their issuance.

Interestingly, the dormant since 1955 San Francisco mint was taken out of mothballs (with coins produced not displaying the "s" mintmark) to help produce the huge amount of clad coins needed to dump into circulation when they were first released into circulation in Nov. 1965 (quarter) and March 1966 (dime). The mint continued in operation after that, and reinstituted attaching the S mintmark in 1968.

NASA-Tom Wrote:
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> About 1/2 the dimes & quarters were silver; most dated 1964. BUT....... the sentiment was..... they were RAPIDLY being pulled out of circulation. Mostly by the banks.

My Mom was a merchant teller at Bank of American for about 25 years starting in the early 1970's. I don't think there was any systematic process for the banks to collect silver coins, but I can tell you that a lot of the bank tellers would. My Mom had amassed a couple of shoe boxes of 90% silver coins that she cashed in during the Hunt Brothers silver spike in 1980.

Like you observed with half-dollars, I remember as a kid that most cash registers in stores had a few but didn't use them for change, but if you asked for them I never recall anyone saying they were keeping them. I suspect they were just an oddity out of the norm of the generally circulated coinage at the time. Kind of like Susan B. Anthony dollars, they'd take them, but unless you asked for them, they probably didn't disperse them as change. To a kid half-dollars and silver dollars were special coins.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/2022 09:26PM by Cal_cobra.

I think you're right Brian about the banks not pulling them per se, but rather the cashiers like your mom. When I searched silver dime rolls every week for a year or so sometime between 1967-1969, I definitely noticed that certain cashiers produced better than others. One particularly lovely young cashier who turned into my favorite (needless to say) made my pubescent heart flutter not only with her exotic beauty and smile, but with the rolls she started giving me that unfailingly had at least a few silvers consecutively at the end of every roll. In a fury of pre-teen infatuation, I wanted to tell her what a beautiful person I thought she was. But being an immature kid lacking self confidence around women, all I could bring myself to do was give her a shy smile and muttered thank yous.

A lot of people made some serious geedis cashing in silver coins they collected little more than a decade earlier. I remember coin dealers paying 20-22 times face value which was a huge jump in a very short period of time even though it didn't even come close to reflecting the huge run up in the spot price that the Hunt Bros. engineered.

I have a very vague memory of my mother once buying a few silver dollars for face from one of the local supermarkets she frequented. I'm guessing 1962 but it could have been 1963. What I didn't realize was how often and how many she purchased because I would get one every year on my birthday until I was in my forties. After I was an adult she told me she would always ask if they had any at the service counter. They were only too glad to get rid of them because they were an odd coin that the stores didn't have a compartment for in the checkout drawers. At that time silver coin hoarding hadn't started in earnest yet.

It wasn't until 1963 that the intrinsic value of the silver content first exceeded the actual monetary value. For quite a while after that the government would get the price back down every time the intrinsic value exceeded face value by bulk silver sales from the then still significant government silver stockpile. Fortunately for me, my mother saw the beauty in those dollars and I still have those 30+ dollars. She was a child of the depression and those cartwheels represented a big, beautiful and unattainable coin that could buy so much back then.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/2022 10:38PM by marcomo.

It was the batch consistency that severely lacked........when the War nickels were produced. Because of the bad % ratio of proper molten metal mixes....... these coins were inconsistent with their composition....... from coin-to-coin!

marcomo, I got a real chuckle from your description of your bank teller--back in the day there was NO problem with telling What a woman was--I remember my 3rd grade teacher as being my big crush--beautiful long black hair and all the rest. LOL

Ain't it funny how those early crushes are still seared into our memories so many years later? You were lucky, Doc. My grade school teachers were all old ladies. A couple very sweet ones in kindergarten and 5th/6th grade, but certainly none that made my heart go flutter. The closest I ever got was a student teacher for a week in 6th grade. She was a real looker and I distinctly remember a couple of the girls trash talking. They obviously didn't like how all the boys were going ga-ga over her!

Now don't even get me started about Ann-Margret...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2022 02:38PM by marcomo.

Yeah,Annie M was quite the looker in her day.

Oh yes she was, doc. Although she sure wouldn't be any 10 year old boy's dream girl these days, I saw a recent picture of her and she still looks good for her age.

Contrary to popular belief, minting of 90% silver coins was not discontinued after 1964. In an effort to curb hoarding, 90% silver (1964-dated) and clad coins were minted concurrently into 1966. The last 90% silver quarters were minted in January 1966, the last dimes in February, and the last halves in April. This may explain the presence of silver coins in the spill along side 1966 clad coins.

Very true, BigSky. The date was frozen at 1964 for silver coins in a futile effort to stop "coin collectors" from pulling coins out of circulation. It is quite obvious now, and should have been then, that the problem wasn't coin collectors, it was hoarding by many citizens who had the foresight to realize that the increasing intrinsic value of the actual silver in silver coins made them a good investment for the future.

The powers that be were completely unprepared for how quickly silver was being pulled from circulation by the public. According to a statement to a house subcommitee in 1966 by the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, in 1963 it was estimated that the US silver stockpile was adequate for another seven years. In 1964 the increase in silver hoarding increased so much that it became obvious that the supplies of silver would not last anywhere near seven years and that drastic action needed to be taken...thus the emergency crash program that led to the subsequent clad coinage.

After the clad quarters were released in November 1965 around the country in a huge simultaneous drop of almost 200 million coins (with the fed silver quarter inventory down to only 15 million) a small number of silver quarters continued to be released simultaneously with clad quarters in ever decreasing amounts through early 1966.

The first large dump of clad dimes happened in March 1966, no more silver dimes were manufactured after February 1966. The mint did not even start the manufacture of clad dimes until after the clad quarters were released into circulation. They had prioritized releasing the clad quarters since quarters were the most at risk for shortages during the 1965 Christmas season. From my personal childhood memories, I can tell you that silver quarters were at least initially the preferred target of hoarding. They disappeared from significant circulation before dimes did.

With spot silver coin shortages during the 1963 Christmas season and hoarding becoming more and more prevalent, the mint initiated their "crash coinage program" in July 1964. From what I can ascertain, there were essentially four things they were trying to accomplish with the program: 1. Massive increases in production of silver coinage to offset the coins being pulled from circulation 2. Selling large quantities of bulk silver from the government inventory to depress the spot price of silver 3. Coming up with an acceptable non-silver coinage that would work in vending machines without retrofitting 4. Convince the public that there was so much silver that it would never be profitable to hoard silver coins

Ironically, President Lyndon Johnson in his July 23, 1965 speech introducing the Coinage Act of 1965 stated, "Our present silver coins won't disappear and they won't even become rarities...we expect our traditional silver coins to be with us for a long long time...if anybody has any ideas of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this...there will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content" Falser words were never spoken! LOL

One other thing I forgot to mention BigSky. The silver coins in the spill were dated 1953-D and 1954-D with the appropriate amount of wear for coins in circulation somewhere around 12 years.