Each corner of the globe has its special hazards; volcanoes and earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, floods, wildfires and landslides—the list of nature’s nasty surprises is long and sometimes very deadly.
In the American Midwest, our special affliction is the tornado.
What we used to call the “Weather Bureau”---now the NWS, or “National Weather Service”---has been keeping better statistics on tornadoes since 1950. Last month, unfortunately, a tornado hit Joplin, Missouri (of “Route 66” fame) and killed more people than any single tornado since 1950, when the NWS began keeping its more precise tornado statistics.
Below is a contemporary of the NWS commitment to improved recordkeeping, a 1950 Jefferson nickel.
Because of decreased demand following the ’49 recession, only Philadelphia and Denver coined nickels in 1950, to a total that was the lowest since the Great Depression year of 1933 (when none were struck).
The Philadelphia-mint coins like this one were by far the more common of the two 1950 nickels, but still, for the many thousands of Americans assembling coin sets at the time, the Philly-mint 1950 was among the tougher Jeffersons to find in circulation. (Perhaps, in part, because of its connection to the Denver-mint 1950d, which was the subject of an incredible speculative frenzy during the ‘50s and ‘60s.)....
| Dateianhänge: |
|
100_3041.JPG [ 40.2 KiB | 10027-mal betrachtet ] |
|
100_3042.JPG [ 40.85 KiB | 10027-mal betrachtet ] |
v.