by Chris Marcus, Miles Franklin:

My grandfather volunteered for the Air Force at the start of World War Two.

He became the guy who aimed and dropped the bombs on those bastard Nazis. Known technically as a bombardier, my grandfather flew on a B24 Liberator airplane and was shot down on his 25th mission. He lived to tell us about it many times over Marco Island sunsets and strong Manhattans.

Maybe I’ll tell you one of his “on duty” war stories in another post, but today I’m going to tell you one of his “off duty” war stories.

While stationed in England, when he and his crew in the picture above had a free weekend, they would go out drinking and doing all the other things that came along with boozing it up hard.

The tailgun nest on a B24 Liberator was very cramped and small for your average size person.

A little guy fit in it perfectly though.

Their tailgunner was a guy named Jack. Jack was on the shorter end of the five foot tall spectrum.

When my grandfather’s crew was in the mood for getting into it, they would head out on the town. After drinking for a while, the restlessness would kick in so they would send the tailgunner Jack into a pub all by himself at first.

The rest of the crew would wait patiently outside.

Jack would go up to the bartender and ask if he had any ummm, “ladies of the night”.

The bartender would say “yes” and then Jack would ask, “How much?”.

In this instance, the bartender replied: “three pounds”.

Jack replied: “What!?!?!? I can get the QUEEN for three pounds!”

And with that royal insult, the bartender and his English pub patrons started moving in to rough the little tailgunner up in defense of their Queen’s honor.

At that moment, the rest Jack’s B24 bomber crew would barge in to the bar and all hell would break loose.

Now here’s how I manage to loosely connect this story to the point of today’s lesson.

Back in the 1940’s, three British pounds or shillings (I forget which it was) was just change you held in your pocket.

That pocket change was also made out of real SILVER.

I bet you never really pay any attention to your pocket change today, do you?

I do.

Why?

Because most United States pocket change minted before 1965 has real silver in it too.

This kind of pocket change is worth way more than its face value.

We refer to this kind of valuable pocket change as “Junk Silver”.

What is Junk Silver?

I touched on junk silver in my last article which you can read here if you haven’t yet.

Junk silver is any coin that has no collectible value but contains real silver.

In the United States, junk silver mostly refers to coins that were minted before 1965, like quarters, dimes and half dollars. These coins contain anywhere from 35% to 90% real silver.

Some dollar and half dollar coins dating up to 1976 also contain silver.

There is a cool website called COINFLATION that will show you just how much silver is in a particular piece of junk silver and how much that coin is worth today. It also has a neat “melt value” calculator.

http://www.coinflation.com/unitedstates/

For instance, when I visit the URL above, I see that at today’s silver price, a 1964 quarter is really worth $2.88 because of the silver it contains.

If you like pictures more than words, here is a quick junk silver intro video I made for you.

Anyways….

I usually sell all my junk.

I sell old iphones before they go out of style and the new one comes out. I sell back books on Amazon after I read them. Old clothes, cars, computers, mopeds, whatever.

Hoarding annoys me for the most part.

But I love to hoard my junk silver.

Besides the obvious fact that it contains real silver, I also hoard junk silver due to something I call the PREPPER PREMIUM.

What is the prepper premium?

Read More @ MilesFranklin.com