-- Posted 19 April, 2006 | | Source: SilverSeek.com
Have you ever taken a mallet to sterling heirloom flatware and pulverized it to piece of mangled junk? I have. You have to do this to get the plaster filling out of the handles before it's weighed for its value. Candlesticks, server sets, it doesn't matter; cash is worth more to the owner than any family heritage sentimentality. Once weighed, the customer paid, the sterling was tossed in one of numerous garbage cans. One for the forks, knives, spoons, another for the candlesticks and larger pieces. Of course the donor would have to sign a liability waiver, for once that mallet hits the heirloom its antiquity value is no more.
This was an integral procedure that went on during the "big silver melt" of 1980. We had silver coins come in by the bags. As I recall we had three automatic coin counters running. It was a noisy place. At the door of the coin shop we had an armed security guard. I wore my .380 Walther on a belt holster on my back under my shirt. We could only permit a dozen or so in the shop at any one time. Outside, at times as many as three or four dozen were lined up waiting their turn to convert their silver to cash money. It was exciting. We all knew we were racing to hyperinflation. Silver would easily hit $100, and gold was going to $2,000. No problem. For several weeks we ran an armored courier service nightly direct to the refiner in NYC. No middleman. We got good prices. I was only a go-fer. The owner became a multi-millionaire. He's since died of cancer, but how did he do it, you ask? He was able to do it because he had a generous line of credit with a local bank. The other major factor making him successful was that he did not hold the silver, but turned it over to the refiner daily. He made his profit " on the turn", on the spread between the bid and ask. He was the marketmaker for the silver melt in Albany.
As a lifelong coin collector I cringed every time I had to count out Morgan and Peace silver dollars, and even some seated liberties, into a melt bin. Barber dimes, quarters, uncirculated or not it didn't matter into the melt bins they went. Who had time to sort them for their numismatic value? They had to be on that truck that night to NYC! You coin collectors will like this one. One of the other coin dealers after paying the melt value, later on opened it and discovered a mint choice uncirculated roll of 1936-S quarters. Today, one of those single coins in a roll of forty will fetch upwards of $1,000 each!
That's how the silver bull market ended in 1980. Nobody believed it at the time. Silver will rise again, just be patient. But it didn't. No one knows whether we'll get a repeat of these events on this go-round. Any sterling still remaining in families will certainly have lost even more of its sentimentality for those great-grandparents who cherished it are long since gone. To their descendants the sterling is just so much silver value. Something to be dusted and polished just because it was great-grandma's. I just can't imagine any repeat of the magnitude of what we had in 1980.
Only when someone places an old silver dime or silver dollar in your hand and asks your opinion for its worth will you know the bull run in silver is over. And, the likelihood of that occurring any time soon is nowhere on the horizon.
If you think the current silver run is an event to behold going from $8 to over $14, try the ride from under $4 in 1975 to over $50 five years later!
- - CV
-- Posted 19 April, 2006 | |
