I find it hard to keep up with all the executive orders being signed by our President, then trying to understand how they might impact my life.
One of Trump’s orders that caught my attention directed the people in charge of making our coins to stop cranking out new pennies. The rationale seems right on the mark. A penny, worth one cent, costs about four cents to produce, so from the start it’s a losing proposition. Even so, it was a jarring thing to read.
Pennies were part of my life as a child. My sister and I each saved them in pint jars with slots cut in the lid. Once the jar was filled, parents took us and our stashes to the bank, converted them into paper money and we stopped by Mae’s Pantry to by a ceramic steer with a slot in the top and cork in the bottom.
Why The Olds called them piggy banks was a mystery to me. I just knew it was a lot larger than a pint jar and would take longer to fill.
After that the money went into our brand-new official savings deposit book where each entry was initialed by the president. No, not the one in Washington: the real one who ran the bank!
When I was in the third grade a coin collector persuaded my dad there was “real money” in coin collecting and some pennies were worth a lot of money. In particular, the fabled 1909 VDBs and 1914s from the Philadelphia mint.
The old boy saw the potential for gold in all that copper, so one her persuaded the bank president to sell him $100 worth of unrolled pennies. They came straight from parking meters, which meant no one had gotten the jump on us looking for that 1909 model.
He came home that night carrying several cloth bags for the free labor (aka my sister and me) to start going through them, one coin at a time. He had a list for each of us that included the two aforementioned pennies and a few others.
Much to Mother’s initial displeasure, he poured them on the breakfast table in a little alcove off the kitchen.
We went to work, picking up each penny, looking at the date, and either setting it aside for the Chief Inspector (Father) to determine the value, or putting it in a bowl to be returned to the bags.
What started off as a great quest for treasure soon became tedious. One hundred dollars of pennies is 10,000 pennies. The only redeeming feature was now and then we found at least one of value. Among them, the steel pennies from the World War II, a 2-cent piece from a century earlier, and one night a $10 gold piece.
Father said the gold coin was probably pinched by some teenager from his father’s collection to use in the parking meter.
That deduction was followed by a sermon about not stealing things, even a penny, and never driving a “hot” or “flash” car. It was the first step on the slippery slope that led to detention in school, slicked-back hair, rock ‘n’ roll music and eventually juvenile hall.
If that hypothetical boy didn’t amend his ways, he would end up at the state prison in Stillwater or suffer through a miserable old age at the County Poor Farm. In between, he would never have more than a low-paying menial job. At least I had the good sense not to ask, “You mean like looking at pennies?”
Father was never cut out to be preacher, so his sermon made little impression on us. Far more intimidating was whenever Mother looked over her glasses with “that look” every child fears. Deeds count more than words count.
We finished our work and thought that was the end of it. Wrong. Father had made a profit of some $20, not including the gold piece which he did not mention to anyone because it was illegal to own gold in that era. Instead, he put the gold coin away, gave my sister and me each a crisp new $1 bill and took Mother out on a date night.
He got his money back plus on the pennies and reinvested it in, you guessed it, another 10,000 copper coins. This went on for a couple months until he became exhausted watching us work.
But if anyone thinks Trump’s order means that we won’t be looking through our change for a valuable penny, they might think again. There are some 260 billion pennies now in circulation.
Some are in piggy banks, some between furniture cushions or under car seats Some are hoarded away by Olds who have lifetime stashes in buckets in their basements. And somewhere out there is another 1909 VDB just waiting to be discovered.
All of which means that even with the executive order, we are not going to run out of pennies for a few more decades. Just know there is no point digging a hole in the basement floor to hide them. Today’s pennies are primarily made of zinc with a bit of copper for color. Even with the price of copper steadily climbing, it is a losing proposition to melt down your pennies, siphon off the zinc and make copper bars.
Yet to leave them in the ground means they will corrode down to not much of anything worthwhile.
As for stashing them away for the future, just keep one word in mind: inflation.
