“Quinn’s Silver”

On this Valentine’s Day of 2016, just after my wife Dorothy and I celebrated 35 years of marriage, over a night steak and potatoes dinner, with horse radish Au Jus which I made from our garden, I was reminiscing around the dinner table and remembered this story for my son Ben.

My grandfather, Quinn, born in the 1890s, was approaching his late 70s and I was about 8 or 9, as I recollect, but the dates could be a little off, I may have been closer to 12.  One morning, during the mid-summer, he asked me to go get a shovel and some bushel baskets.  This was a rather odd request in my mind, so I asked, “What do you need that for, Papa?” (All six grandchildren called him, ‘Papa’, which he allowed).

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I will show you in a little bit.”

So I went off to get as many bushel and half bushel straw baskets as I could find, and I found three or four large bushel baskets and four or five half bushel baskets, which we used for picking peaches and tomatoes.

“Let’s go over here”, pointing to the side of the barn.

“Dig here.”  So I dug and found a water pipe, capped on both ends, about 2 inches in diameter about 8 foot long.

We went to another building, our feed storage building.

“Dig here.”  We found another long pipe about the same type and size.

Then we went to a third building and dug again.  This pipe was smaller in diameter and a little longer.  All of the pipes were heavy, so I could only carry them one at a time.

In about an hour we had collected 7 or 8 pipes, more or less.

“Let’s take them to the pipe vise and open them up,” he said, with a gleam in his eye.

So when we had carried all the pipes to the old pipe vise, mounted on a post at the corner of the woodshed, we began opening up each pipe.

Under the cap on the end of each pipe was a small piece of corncob about 4 inches long.

“Pour out the pipes into the baskets,” he said.

So for the next little while, I emptied each pipe into a basket.  The larger pipes were full of silver dollars.  The smaller pipes were full of half dollars.  All were full of silver type coins, which has been removed for the most part out of circulation.

I had never seen so many pieces of silver at the same time!  It was like something out of a dream!

We placed them in baskets and the count of everything was close to $3500.

Now I collected coins at the time and I had a coin book which told the value of coins, based on their condition, so I persuaded my grandfather to let me check the silver dollars and pick out any I found of value.  He let another friend look through the half dollars, who also collected.  I kept about 30 out for the family and I don’t know about his friend.

My grandfather let me go with him to the local bank to deposit all this money.  The president of the bank saw us lugging is all this silver and he became very excited, so much so he closed the bank for the rest of the day, while he also went through all these silver coins, to examine them for value.

My grandfather asked for a certified check made out the local Chevrolet dealership for some $3250 which he used to pay for a new 1966 Chevrolet Impala, 4 door, turquoise green.

I asked my grandfather why he dug up all this silver.  He said simply, “I never buy anything on credit.”  “I wanted a new car and this is how I paid for it without borrowing any money.”

When we got home, my grandmother met us in the yard at the back of the house.  “Where did you get the money for a new car?” she asked.  She had a stern look on her face.  So Papa told her, “Well, I saved this money all these years in event of an emergency and I needed a new car, so I decided to use it for this.”

She looked at him with a most unusual expression, which I had never seen before.  “And you never told me all these years about this money!”  “Suppose you had died, and this money would have been left in the ground!”

I think he knew better after more than 50 years of marriage than to respond.  He said nothing and she went back inside the house.  It was the last I heard about this discussion, but I expect he possibly heard something more later that night!

A few days later the word got out in town about the “amazing silver find up on the hill.”  People were really excited in our little community.  Many just shook their heads in amazement when they heard about it.  Others begged me to ask my grandfather to let them come dig on our property to see if they could find any more.  Of course I never did.  But I did check a few other areas myself, just to be sure, but I never found any more silver.

I do remember what my grandfather said, however.  ‘Never buy a car on credit!  By the time you have paid for it, it will be completely wore out and hardly worth anything at all!”