Question For Those Who Collected In The Late 70s-Early 80s..

I was around then but due to old age I either don't remember those years or don't want to. Not sure which.
One thing I do remember was those stupid, dumb Bicentennial Quarters I attempted to hoard. Myself and a friend tried to outdo each other on who could get the most. After about 30 years of that nonsence, at a coin show I asked how much a dealer would pay for them. My best offer was $0.24 each. Not sure but I suspect that was a nice way of saying I wasted my time and money.
As to the dropping of Silver prices, I've been hearing rumors that it is supposed to happen again and soon. Back then I didn't invest in Silver or Gold, only coins so such things didn't bother me at all.
I do remember a really nice Blonde I met in a bar in the 70's though.

It was a more than crazy time and because I had and have such a stash of Canadian silver coins I was on the button. I had been picking a lot silver prior to that in a willy nilly fashion and here's what the silver prices forced me to do ... learn about numismatic values and learn to grade properly.

When silver hit 47 per ounce I sold 1750 dollars of face value Canadian mixed silver from 36 and up. Essentially every head of beef and every swine I raised and sold before I had gone off to University had been converted to silver coins. I paid off my mortgage and bought a couple hundred acres of bush lot on the cheap. The little bit I had leftover I bought a 1948 and 1945 silver dollars both in mint state.

Most profitable coin sale I ever made.

It was a crazy time. Coin dealers had people lined up out the door and down the block waiting to sell silver. Most shops added on two or three more people just to handle the customers selling gold and silver. Small shops that before the boom might have done a few hundred thousand dollars a year were writing checks for over a million dollars a week and were depending on float to make the checks good. Everything had to go out of the shop to the smelter each night so they would be wired payment to cover the checks they wrote that day. For the most part the dealers didn't have time to fool with coin collectors. If you were an established customer before the craze they might pull something out of the safe for you if you asked, but the ones I frequented didn't bother to put anything out in the display cases. You could do better at coin shows, but even there the focus was on bullion. Many dealers and collectors who made a killing on the metals did roll over the profits into better quality coins, mainly from auctions. But coins were not the primary focus of the market. For that you have to look to the 1987 to 89 period.

And it wasn't just the coin dealers. There were people buying silver and gold everywhere. Probably one out of every three people who owned a business had a sign out front saying they were buying gold and silver. Many private individuals were also buying. Most of the dealers were OK when the metal market crashed because they had been turning everything over daily, but a lot of the other businesses and private individuals had been buying and holding waiting for higher prices and they got killed.

At my small town coin shop there were lines of people both buying and selling. The shop owner allowed me to search 90% that had been brought in so I was able to fill many holes in my collection for the current spot. Memorable finds were: 1921 d Mercury dime in VF, 1930 Standing Liberty quarter unc, and a 1880 s Morgan proof like that he gave to me because he did not want to see it go to the smelters.