One day about four years ago I was finishing breakfast at the greasy spoon about a mile away, when I needed to get change for a dollar (so I could finish out my tip). The waitress on the register gave me my change, and I looked down and saw a double flash of white in my change -- she'd given me two silver quarters! I went back to the register and checked, and her drawer was alive with silver quarters -- someone had taken a roll of them to the bank without opening them (a thief? busybody wife? kids?) and cashed them for $10/roll. I got more of them from the cashier, who was in her late 20's and from Mexico to boot, and had no idea what she was looking at in that drawer. I went back to the counter, said look at this to the guy next to me, and dropped a couple of them on the counter. Instantly, the older black guy next to him jerked his head around when he heard the coins hit the counter -- even after 45 years, he knew what the sound of real money hitting the bar sounded like, and snapped to instantly. I went back and got more change, and then I told the girls what they had. I must have got about $1.50-2.00 in silver quarters out of that drawer. Looked over a second later and two of the waitresses were pawing through the cash drawer, getting them out. The black guy went over and made change, too, and got a couple.
“even after 45 years, he knew what the sound of real money hitting the bar sounded like”
That’s great; I would hope that whoever hoarded that silver never had to find out how it was spent! I was born after the switch (devaluation), but I’ve collected coins for years; before I had a family, I used to collect bullion coins (when silver was below $5 an ounce). I really liked the Canadian Maple leaf for silver, as its face value (C$5) was much closer to the silver price than that of the American Eagle (US$1). I had a coin dealer sell me a silver Bahamian $25 coin for $5 (slightly higher than its silver value), then spent it a year later in the Bahama as $25 (the US and Bahamas dollars trade at par; their slot machines accept bills from either country). They retire them when they show up (like the American $1,000 bill), but it wasn’t as old - I think it was from the early 1970s.
At silver’s lowest point I sold a Canadian Olympic set (about 20 sterling ounces) for its Canadian face value in Ontario; it had become worth more as Canadian paper than it was as silver!