Editor’s Note: For nearly 70 years, the feature-rich pages of Coins magazine, Numismatic News’ venerable sister publication, have tracked the history, fun and the growth of this great hobby, while also attracting new collectors to pursue what was once deemed the “hobby of kings.” Dusting off these time-aged issues, from the early 1960s and beyond, each installment of “Past Times with Coins,” written by its former longtime editor, explores what nuggets of interest they contain.
Payable on demand in silver, Silver Certificates (first issued in 1878, the same year as the Morgan silver dollar) were paper money’s contribution to the free silver movement, which dominated much of the nation’s politics into the turn of the 20th century.
By the 1960s, with rising silver bullion prices, the government was looking to eliminate these notes. Already, the higher denominations had been changed to Federal Reserve Notes, which carried no such hard metal redemption provision, and all that remained were the $1s. These would start to
