Stories like yours kill me.
My sister was a bank teller around 1965. Her manager told her to pull all silver coins aside during the days transactions. He would then buy them from her. She knew what/why he was doing that, but she was a college student and couldn’t afford to do the same thing. Dang.
An addendum to my story: my employer at the time was a coin collector and a bigshot cutomer at said bank. He tried everything to get those Morgan dollars. Threatened to take his business elsewhere, offerred twice the face value, ranted and raved, etc. It was quite entertaining to watch the boss pitch a public hissy.
My mother used to have a shoebox half full of Morgan dollars with the Carson City mint mark. She had an uncle in Reno and every year on her birthday he sent her a number of coins equivalent to her age. She still had them when I was a boy, but alas! she sold all but one of them for a pittance at some point in the interim.