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silver dollars

Bounder

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2018
Messages
262
When I was in the navy and going to a technical school in Millington Tennesee in 1963, the city fathers of Memphis asked the base commander to put Memphis off limits to military personnel. He said he would get back to them in a month. The next payday everyone on the base was paid in silver dollars and that was a large base. Two weeks later he did the same thing. After another week he asked the city fathers if they still wanted to be off limits. When they saw the millions of silver dollars floating around, they rather quickly changed their minds. I would think the area around Millington and Memphis would be a good hunting ground for some of those dollars if you could find the right places.
 
Smart base commander ! :lol:

I went to a technical school in Millington Tennessee for Navy Aviation electronics back in either 1970 or 1971, wish I would have known about that back then, maybe it would have gotten me into metal detecting way back then :lol:
 
When I was in the navy and going to a technical school in Millington Tennesee in 1963, the city fathers of Memphis asked the base commander to put Memphis off limits to military personnel. He said he would get back to them in a month. The next payday everyone on the base was paid in silver dollars and that was a large base. Two weeks later he did the same thing. After another week he asked the city fathers if they still wanted to be off limits. When they saw the millions of silver dollars floating around, they rather quickly changed their minds. I would think the area around Millington and Memphis would be a good hunting ground for some of those dollars if you could find the right places.

Wow. That's a lot of silver. What is a rough estimate of a typical 1963 weeks worth of wages?
 
Wow. That's a lot of silver. What is a rough estimate of a typical 1963 weeks worth of wages?
A silver dollar would buy a dollar’s worth of goods back in 1963, right around what eight dollars would buy today. Minimum wage was around $1.25/hr then, the equivalent of about $10/hr today.
 
I was enlisted E-5 with four years service and made the grand sum of $230 per month. We got paid on the 1st of the Month and the 15th of the month. Take out the taxes etc and you can see that a weeks pay was not very much. In 63 the military got a pay raise. The first raise since 1958.
 
navy pay

In 1963 as an E3 I was getting about $76.00 a month. A year later I arrived off the coast of Vietnam on an aircraft carrier (USS Constellation) and was promptly put on a search & rescue team. With the hostile fire pay and the making of E4 my pay went up to about $225 a month but in greenbacks not silver dollars.
 
I just found out the bar 1 block from my house, that has been there since the late 1800's used to known as "Silver Dan's Saloon" as he was known for cashing peoples checks, and paying with silver dollars. I figure there has to be at least one that is somewhere. HA, probably under cement somewhere.
 
The OP story doesnt make sense. There were no silver dollars in 1963. Last silver dollar minted was 1935, and Ike dollars didnt begin until the 70s.
 
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