Morgan Silver Dollars...Back in the Day
A few of you have asked me to write about the old days of dollars,
dollars everywhere... and tell some roll and bag stories... so here
goes. First thing I remember was when I had a friend in 8th grade who's father was a silver dollar collector. This was in the early 60s when Morgan and Peace dollars were still in circulation and they were in every teller's tray at the banks. My friend's father would cash his weekly paycheck at the bank and take the whole thing in silver dollars. He'd take the dollars home and go through them every Friday night, keeping the few he might find that he needed for his collection and then using the rest for what they were at the time... money.
About 1966 or so, I was hanging coins on the local coin shop bid boards. I'd buy Morgans by the roll and pick out the cherries for the bid boards. I had to pay $28 a roll ($1.40 a coin) for the P and O Mints, but the S Mints cost $30 ($1.50 a coin) because they came with a lot more Gemmy coins. I once pickedout a virtually flawless 1880-S (or at least it looked flawless at the time) and I stapled it in a 2~2 and wrote "I am a perfect silver dollar" on the 2~2. I hung it on one of the bid boards and a couple of collectors bid it up to $8 or $9, an unheard of price for a common date Morgan dollar at the time. I thought I had really scored!
A little later I started hanging signs in laundromats that said, "Will pay $1.10 for any silver dollar." Dollars were worth like $1.15 at the time, so when I'd buy a group I'd make a nickel a coin plus the extra on any better date that I bought. I keep doing that for a three or four years. I even paid Walt Ankerman (he was just out of high school at the time) to run around Orange County hanging the buy cards up in as many laundromats as possible, the price of course was a little higher, but not much.
In 1972, I starting traveling to national coin shows and buying and selling more expensive coins, but I always did a lot of dollar business. In 1977, I used to run a full page ad in Numismatic News (I think I had the inside front cover) and about a quarter of the ad was a special I ran with about 16 or 17 different dates of Morgan and Peace dollars in "Gem MS65 condition... "Pick any date or all dates... $10 per coin." At the time uncircualted rolls were like $140 or $150 ($7.00 to $7.50 a coin). A few of the local dealers thought I was a big fish because I'd pay extra... like $8 instead of $7.00 or $7.50... to pick select coins out of original rolls and bags.
I've bought and sold so many 1000 coin bags of dollars it's amazing. Here are three bag stories.
First, for you toner fans. When fresh, original $1000 (1000 coin) bags were available, there were usually some great toners in the bags, and occasionally some really wild ones. When frosty Choice Uncs were $10 retail, I used to retail the insane coins for $20 to $25, and if I got something absolutely beyond wild Wayne Miller would give me $25 or $30 for it. Sure wish I would have kept 20 of the wildest. Here's the catch. I probably personally bought and sold several million common date uncirculated dollars, and I've probably seen 10 million uncirculated dollars. The toners weren't that easy to find back in the day when they were $8 or 10 a coin. If I would have saved every coin I saw, I bet it wouldn't have been much more than 100 or 200 coins out of the 10 million. That's why I'm very suspicious of some of today's toners. And many of the toners of today just aren't the same colors that were seen in the 1970s and 1980s. So unless you believe global warming is changing the color of Morgan dollars, there's something fishy about some of today's toners.
Story number two... the world record price. About 1984 or 1985...
about two years before PCGS... common date dollars were really bid for a
huge price, but the had to be really, really nice. Ed Milas of RARCOA
had the Continental Illinois Bank deal, which included an enormous
amount of silver dollars. Ed invited me in the cherry pick 1000 1881-S
dollars. I went through several bags and picked out 1000 cherries. The
price was $500 a coin... $500,000 for the 1000 coin bag. To this day I
believe it's the most anyone has ever paid for a bag of common date
Morgan dollars. I sold them retail for $550, but they most likely
weren't a good deal as they'd probably grade "only" MS66 today, maybe
some would grade MS67. But that was the height of common date dollar
mania... 1984-1986... Finish reading @Source: Morgan Dollars...Back in the Day
