A few years ago, I was in a McDonald's restaurant and witnessed a man and woman of about 35 years of age and their daughter ogling a treasure they had received in change. Their excited cries revealed that they were holding a half dollar--an object that none of them had ever previously seen.
The foregoing tableau merely reflected the fact that U.S. half dollars are not normally found in circulation. This was not however, always the case. When I was a youth over five decades ago, 50-cent pieces were ubiquitous and had their own compartment in every cash register drawer. Seventy-five cents in change would be tendered in the form of a half dollar and a quarter, not three quarters as it is today.
What happened? As my fellow geezers will recall, dimes, quarters, and half dollars used to be made out of an alloy containing 90% silver. In the mid-1960s, due to the rising price of silver (or the pressure of inflation--take your pick on the description), many folks hoarded silver coinage. In addition, the government was losing its shirt minting silver money, as the value of the metal in it exceeded the face value of the coins (it is pretty pathetic when you have the power literally to manufacture cash but cannot turn a profit). Consequently, the government in 1965 started producing dimes and quarters out of a silverless cupro-nickel alloy pressed over a copper core (called "clad" coinage).
In order to make the fact that cheap copper slugs were replacing honest silver coins more politically palatable to the public, the government did not remove all silver from the 50-cent piece. In 1965, it instead started making half-dollars consisting of silver on the outside with a copper core on the inside. Unless closely inspected, these coins maintained the illusion of being 90% silver, but in reality, the copper core brought down the silver content to 40%, which made them still profitable to mint.
Unfortunately, the price of silver continued to climb, and eventually even the 40% half dollars had more than fifty cents worth of silver in them. People, following Gresham's law (which states essentially that money made out of cheap metal will drive out of circulation money made out of valuable metal), hoarded these 40% half dollars, just as they had been already hoarding the 90% silver version as well as the silver dimes and quarters. After a few years, there were very few half dollars in circulation, and Americans were using quarters in their place in all of their daily transactions.
Eventually, in 1971, the mint ceased using any silver in the making of half dollars and switched over to the same composition used in clad quarters and dimes. However, citizens by then had grown accustomed to not using 50-cent pieces at all, and they (the half dollars, not the citizens) languished for the most part in bank vaults, where they can still be found today. Since 2002, the mint has only made a limited quantity of half dollars each year for collectors and is no longer producing large numbers for general circulation.
If you wish to buy some of those fresh collectible 50-cent coins from the mint, click here.
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