Pennies from Heaven

Some high weirdness at hand this week. Read several articles in my daily dump of trivial information and was immediately infested with an earworm. Now I’m bouncing around the house to the gravel-crusted tones of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong croaking Pennies from Heaven. And it won’t go away unlike the smallest denomination coin in our American monetary system which is about to become a numismatic curiosity.

In short order, we will have no more new pennies. Not from heaven, the mint that manufactures them, nor from the 7-11’s, K-Marts, and neighborhood bodegas that still deal in cash. Is it the end of an era? Have we become so flush that the lowly penny has ceased to have any meaning? Any real purchasing power? Are our copper coins featuring Abe Lincoln scowling in profile doomed to disappear from commerce like the British tuppence or ha’penny? Apparently so.

Before the term becomes completely meaningless, here’s my two cents’ worth on the topic. And you’d better save your penny for my thoughts which are free for the nonce. We need to ponder all the women and girls in our society who grew up with the name Penny entered on their birth certificate. I knew a couple of Pennys as a kid. Even fell mortally in love with one of them whose parents informed me on my way out the door that their daughter was called Penny because she was so bright and shiny. Their Penny was not to be sullied by association with a bozo named after a broad valley that stretches between hills. And Penny’s parents would be much obliged if I stayed on the other side of those hills. It was traumatic and had consequences. Later when penny loafers became a fashion craze among teenagers, I wore mine sans the penny inserted on the front strap.

All that’s water under a bridge. Or maybe under water that fills many urban monuments, casino facades, or rural wishing wells. What to do about that? How about the tradition of tossing a penny into those waters and making a wish which lore indicates will come true? Has inflation doomed us to heaving nickels or quarters in order to have any shot at wish fulfillment? Ponder that while I sing along with Satchmo for a few phrases.

Folks should wonder about all the kids who might get into coin collecting and even learn to spell numismatics. There’s the off chance that penny collecting could wean them away from their phones for a few hours each day. Drug dealers trade in folding money—despite terms like nickel and dime bags—so little chance that a sock-full of copper coins would lead to ruin and addiction. From what I could determine by talking to a guy who lives in his underwear and inhabits his Mom’s basement, serious coin collectors don’t have time for mischief out on the streets. The guy says pennies are a cheap and accessible route to serious coin collecting as a hobby. We’re missing a potential distraction here for kids walking on the wild side.

There is, of course, a semi-serious side to the demise of the penny in American commerce. Guys in sleeve garters and pocket protectors at the U.S. Mint say it costs Uncle Sam four cents to make one penny. Let’s see…divide by two and carry the one…OK, it’s a losing proposition to spend four something in making something that’s only worth one something. And most folks who actually get out of the house to buy stuff rather than having that stuff delivered the next day by Amazon will attest that fewer people use change in everyday transactions. We all know that $19.99 is just a shuck to get us to fork over a twenty, not really expecting anyone to hand back a penny.

Here’s a penny’s worth of monetary history to cogitate. The penny entered American commerce via the Coinage Act of 1792, which established a mint in Philadelphia to start producing national coins. With the stroke of a Congressional quill, we were literally in the money-making business and by the following March there were something like 11,000 copper pennies in circulation helping people buy things like wagon wheels and butter churns.

Those first American pennies were about the size of today’s quarters and with inflation factored in, probably worth about as much. Surviving examples feature a woman with flowing hair that was designed to symbolize liberty. I’m betting that woman was not named Penny. Lincoln didn’t show up on the lowly one-cent coin until 1909 in honor of Old Abe’s 100^th birthday.

Somewhere around that time, grocers and local merchants were offering to buy back soda bottles for pennies and reloading with popular quaffs such as Dad’s Root Beers, Dr. Peppers and Grape Ne-Hi’s. Kids who had pockets made money to stuff in them by roaming the neighborhoods collecting old soda bottles. They were learning street-level economics when they weren’t squabbling over penny-pitching matches.

All this is grinding on my hidebound soul. It’s a rough row to hoe for traditionalists like me but that’s nothing new. I still believe electric cars are a commie plot. Still, it’s hard to make sense of a system that produces pennies at the cost of millions of dollars each year just for minting and handling things that mostly wind up buried behind couch cushions or rattling around in old dresser drawers. Geeks and nerds who actually keep track of such things estimate there is something like $14 million in coins that just get tossed into old bowls or empty mayonnaise jars where they molder or serve as doorstops.

Those same geeks opine that without the penny in circulation, those businesses that still deal in cash will have to start rounding prices up or down to the nearest five cents. The cash spending spotlight will be on the buffalo nickel worth five cents and costing our government 14 cents to produce. Maybe I’ll just ignore all this and go watch Penny on Big Bang Theory reruns.

Click for Books by Dale A. Dye