At least till I was 10 or so, when suddenly there was a wave of advertising in the papers and on TV for Silver coins (mid '70s I think - perhaps later, with the Hunt brothers silver rush? It was very pervasive) - my parents cashed in their (rather small horde) of silver coins at that time, and many of the neighbors did the same.
Man, we were quite the herd generation back in the '70s - I remember one time there was a rerun of a Dennis the Menance episode where he was collecting coins, and the week after that a few dozens of us boys at school suddenly became numismatists (luckily there was no general-access Web back then, or we all would have been experts too 
)…
I can tell you exactly when it hit, in early 1979.
About two weeks AFTER I cashed out my old coin collection.:smack:
Moderator advice.
Ralph. If you can back up your assertion with any factual information, then do so. If you can’t then don’t bring idiology into General Questions.
[/end Moderator advice]
[begin posting as poster]
The bad old gummit didn’t “withdraw” silver coins from circulation. All they did was to change the composition in 1965. They withdrew nothing from circulation. The public withdrew silver coins and made whatever profit there was by selling them for their scrap value. The Treasury realized NO profit on the silver. Johnson got bubkes. Wait! He got tsuris. 
IIRC this was an issue that needed to be addressed when they started making the Sacagawea dollar coins. They needed to have similar properties to the older dollar coins so that the few machines that accepted them would take both old and new.
(bolding and coloring mine)
Interesting typo.