Song of the Day 8/15: Buck Owens, “Put a Quarter in the Jukebox”

For some reason the News Journal obituary for former governor and congressman Mike Castle doesn’t even mention, anywhere, what he will be remembered for outside Delaware: The 50 State Quarters® program. That fact is the lead of the AP’s obit – fittingly, because Castle was something of a hero to coin collectors.

While in Congress, Castle wrote and/or sponsored the bills that created the 50 State Quarters® program, the Sacagawea Dollar, the Presidential Dollar Series, the American Platinum Eagle, the America the Beautiful Quarters® program and a number of modern commemoratives — becoming known as “The Coinage Congressman.”

Numismatists weren’t the only ones who benefitted from Castle’s idea for the quarter. The U.S. Mint claimed it made the government $3 billion in seigniorage, a result of people collecting the coins rather than circulating them.

A quarter doesn’t buy much anymore. I’m not even sure it would buy a song in a jukebox by the time Buck Owens released this tune in 1989, a few years before he retired. Inflation had already eaten away at the quarter’s buying power – when Joan Jett recorded “I Love Rock and Roll” in 1976, she only had to put a dime in the jukebox. Like most of Buck’s singles after the mid-’70s, this one stalled in the lower reaches of the country charts.