by 4 bit » Sat Jan 21, 2012 4:06 pm
Last November I stopped at a bank branch in a grocery store near my home. I had only been searching for silver for a couple of weeks. I was buying some halves and the teller in the next wicket offered to sell me twelve large dollars. As she was counting them I saw a Peace dollar among the Eisenhowers. I hadn't even been asking for large dollars at the time as I had never considered the possibility that someone would be clueless enough to deposit a silver dollar at face value.
Since then I never left a bank without asking for large dollar coins. The requests yielded only cupronickel clad Ikes until last week. I asked for halves and large dollars and the teller pulled a huge bag of Eisenhower dollars out of her drawer. As she started to count them, I saw that one of them was whiter than the others. I tried not to get my hopes up, as I've seen plenty of discolored Ikes before. When she got to the white one, I thought I heard the sound of silver, though I've been wrong about that before. As she continued to count the dollars, I thought I heard silver again, and noticed that there was another white coin. There were 131 dollars in the bag. When I got to my car I fished the white dollars out of the bag. Sure enough, they both had S mint marks.
Then, earlier today, only one of the banks I visited had any large dollars at all. One teller showed me an envelope with 21 of what I thought were the cruddiest looking Ikes I had ever seen. Still, I bought them because you never know. As the teller counted them to verify that there really were 21 of them, I thought one of them sounded funny. I got to the parking lot and looked in the envelope. It turned out that I was wrong. There were 20 of the cruddiest looking Ikes I had ever seen and one 1922D Peace dollar that was surprisingly not too bad looking, aside from what appeared to be scotch tape residue on the reverse.