Dad was always so good at finding things. He had a sharp eye.
I had a sharp ear. One of my earliest jobs was counting money & balancing the safe for this company. Five cash registers a day. Then there were two more bags of money that came from remote locations. I was 19 years old. People still spent silver. I could hear that sort of hollow sound in a handful of coins & would know there's at least one silver coin in there. Quarters, dimes, sometimes half dollars. My redneck buddy is a little over 40. I was showing him some of the coins.
"Wow! You can hear the difference."
It's kind of quaint that's new to him.
I grew up with my grandparents who owned a self-service laundromat we lived above. When we first moved there, every machine was based on the dime. Two for a wash, one for the dryers.
Our other machines included a Coke (small 8 oz bottles) and boxed detergent, softener & laundry bag dispenser. All dime based.
We had a large safe as well as money drawer where we could provide change to customers who only had bills or quarters.
I used to hit that box of dimes daily for candy, Mr. Softee and other “expenses”. A buck or two of dimes wasn’t ever missed or even noticed.
I’d get caught every now and then but play it off to needing school supplies or something like that.
As I got older and prices went up, we were primarily into quarters and we stopped providing change to customers.
After my grandparents both died, my mom and I kept the place going for years, but that came at the price of me doing all the work & repairs to the machines, as well as the nightly cleaning of them, the floors and tables, emptying of trash, etc.
Some nights I’d come home so baked I could barely stand up. But I couldn’t leave my mom down there to do all the cleaning like my sister had NO problem doing.
I decided I was going to be paid for this labour, although without letting my mom in on that pay.
We used to empty the coin boxes every Sunday night and then manually count and roll the coins for deposit later in the week.
I always got up before my mom and she’s about as heavy of a sleeper as they come.
We had a shower in the basement, so on the way there, I’d stop by the safe, take the quarters and dimes buckets and some empty roll sleeves and filch as much as I could without it being noticed.
If we had a good week, I could get five or six rolls of quarters ($10 each) and maybe four rolls of dimes (another $20.).
I’d sit in this shower and roll these coins while waiting for the water to get hot, which took a LONG time for a building that was over 150 years old.
I got to the point where I could get within a quarter or two just by visual and weight before sliding the coins into the sleeves. I’d get the buckets back to the safe without anyone knowing the wiser.
It was a pretty good “supplemental” income to my measly salary that my first insurance job was paying me.
I went through more cars in those ten years than I had the next 35+. I got pretty upside down on a few of them, but never missed a payment or had one repoed.
We used to get silvers ALL the time - dimes, quarters and even the occasional fifty cent piece or silver dollar.
People didn’t know or care back then.
My mom ended up with at least a dozen or so rolls of each when we finally sold the place.
But instead of having them looked at individually, she took all of the rolls to a shop that just payed her the going rate for silver at the time.
I think she ended up getting around $500, but who knows what might have been in some of those rolls. There were probably single coins worth that much.
I miss that old place, but not the headaches that came with it.
GO DODGERS!!!
