Do You Remember?

I started in 1958 ... here's what I remember:
- Dad giving my brother and me $5 a week to go to local merchants and politely ask if they had any coins dated prior to 1940 in their till. If they did we exchanged new money for old 1:1. We would always come home with SLQ's, Walkers, Buffs, plus mercs and wheat cents from the teens and twenties. Every once in awhile we'd hit an IHC or V-nickel.
- At county fair time the local service organization (Kiwanis, Elks, Eagles, etc.) got $500~$1000 in coin (silver dollars, halfs, quarters and dimes ... no nickels or pennies) and spread a dozen bales of hay on the ground and mixed in the coins. Kids twelve and under got to scavenger hunt. We spent it all at face value.
- The fair princess wins her weight in silver dollars. They actually put her on a large fulcrum scale and poured the BU dollars from mint bags on the other side till it balanced. Funny they never picked any of the "big" girls.
- Halfs, quarters and dimes freely circulated and were all 90% silver. You had to go to the bank for silver dollars, but they always had them. Funny how you got used to that distinctive ringing sound when you dropped a silver quarter or dime. I really miss that sound.

Now my question to all you younger numismatists here ... what will you remember when this question is posed to you in the year 2058?

2058? I will probably be like, remember how you could go to the store and find Statehood Quarters in the change they gave you? Oh wait, we still get them in change because they made 30-40 billion of them.

I started collecting in the early fifties, so all but one of my wheat cents were taken from circulation; the '09 VDB I bought for around five bucks. I remember mercs, a few Standing Liberty quarters, even "V" nickels and occasionally an Indian cent popping up in change. Fifty-centers, both walking liberties and Franklins, were used every day, and I saw Morgans and Peace dollars in circulation during the summer of '59 when I stayed with my grandparents in northern Wyoming.

How do I feel about all that? Oh, I miss the good old days. Whatever. But when I pulled a '57-D Lincoln (still with the new-coin lustre between the relief design) out of change handed to me at a Quik Shop a couple of months ago, I got as excited as the time when I found an Indian cent in change in the fifties. But then it doesn't take much to amuse me ...

Weerdsteev, almost every kid in my neighborhood growing up in the 50/60's collected coins. We all hunted endlessly for a 1916d dime or an 09s VDB Lincoln. (Oddly enough, we found one or two 09s or 09sVDB pennies, maybe cause I'm from California, but I never found a 1950D nickel.) Most of our parents had a stash of older coins even if they didn't actively collect. I would guess the % of people collecting was the same as now, the "collector gene" is well dispersed through the population pool.

allot of the collectors today are collectors because they have inherited coins from their grandfather or someone like that (not usually a collection perse' but a hoard with no real focus on one type). I know my Grandfather left me like 12 huge boxes of coffee cans, jars,pill bottles, and just about everything else that has a lid full of coins of all types. He hoarded coins for as long as I can remember and my mother said he had done it since she can remember, I remember him telling stories about him doing it as a kid so that would have been in the late 20's early 30's

One interesting thing I remember was the availability of coins in department stores (1960's). I remember that Sears, Higbees and Woolworths had them available. They sold them out of these things that sort of reminded me of juke boxes. The coins were arranged on metal framed pages that swung from a central post. Does anybody else remember that or was I the only one living in the Twilight Zone?