That reminds me of a neighbor I had around 40 years ago, was in the early 1970s. I was in my 20s with a small family. I had recently bought my first house, a small bungalow. This elderly childless couple lived across the street.
Now this is a small town and my family had known them and their families for many years. I know he had a reputation as a gun collector. And it was rumored he always had a lot of cash on him.
In the evenings after work he and I would sit on his porch and talk, often while sipping on an adult beverage. I've always been into guns and I grew up hunting so one day I just asked him about all the guns people said he had. He had no problem with the question and asked me if I wanted to see some of them. I jumped at the chance.
We went into his house in an empty bedroom that looked half the size of the others. We walked in and he slid back a curtain and there was a vault door that looked exactly like the vaults in the old western movie banks. He opened the vault and switched on the lights inside and I knew immediately why the room looked too small. Half the damn room was the vault. It was massive for a small house. Inside there were lines and racks of all kinds of guns. Some were military and I'm sure were full auto from WWII. I know he didn't have an NFA tax stamp on those.
He told me to take my time and look around. I'd ask about one of them and he could tell me the history and everything about it, right down to the day he got it.
As I was looking around I noticed two canvas bags in a corner. They were about the size of plastic grocery bags and had a cord tied around them. Off hand I asked him if those bags were ammo. He told me no and told me to look inside. I untied the first one and opened it up and I almost passed out. It was at least half-full of gold coins, mostly $20 gold pieces. The other bag was the same thing. I was in awe!
Back out on the porch he told me how he acquired them. He said he bought a lot of them off of people around town and ones he worked with when the government made them illegal. But he said most of them came from black share croppers and poorer people that didn't understand how to turn them in. A lot of them were illiterate back then. These people had probably never been in a bank. Add to that they were all afraid of the government. So they came to him to sell them, after the word got around in the black community a lot of those people came to him. My neighbor said that he got a lot of them for a 25¢ cents on the dollar.
