Among the raft of initiatives with which Donald Trump and his Musk minions have carpeted bombed the American people — let us not even get started on the beleaguered citizens of Denmark, Greenland, Panama, Ukraine; the list goes on — the one that fills me with the greatest ambivalence is his decision to cease minting the penny.
Forget for a moment that it’s unclear whether any president even possesses the authority to consign the humble cent to history. Congress oversees the Mint’s operations and has the authority to manufacture coins, or in this case to stop making them.
Unlike many of the President’s destructive impulses I can understand the merit for killing the penny. It apparently costs twice as much to produce as it’s worth.
At least I can understand the decision intellectually. Emotionally, I’m a wreck. The penny and I go way back. I’m sufficiently aged that I can remember when a single cent bought a tasty piece of Bazooka bubblegum. I recently tried to purchase one and was certain some mistake had been made when the merchant wanted to charge me something like a quarter.
Let me know if you agree with me that penny bubblegum, consumed in moderation, is an unalienable right and deserves to be subsidized by the government alongside commodities such as corn, milk and soybeans.
My love affair with the penny started somewhere around sixth grade when I began collecting coins. Back then it was still possible to find pennies, some of them dating almost as far back as the Lincoln cent’s 1909 origin, in your change. At least I believed so. My father wasn’t the most hands-on dad but one endearing thing he did was occasionally to stop at a coin shop on the way home from work and buy ancient beat up pennies that he’d use to seed his change. I was so dumb, or at least credulous, or maybe greedy, that I never caught on that these antiquities hadn’t found their way into his pocket by accident.
Poring through his change every evening was like going treasure hunting. And the lovely thing is that no matter how decrepit and jaded I’ve become I’ve never lost the thrill of the chase. Some years ago I developed a relationship with an expert at Stack’s Rare Coins, New York City’s premiere coin shop, where he’d sell me bank bags full of wheat pennies for around a hundred bucks. Time stopped, sometimes literally so, as I sorted through thousands of pennies and occasionally came across a relative rarity that filled a gaping slot in my fraying LBJ era coin album.
When I say that time stopped the reason it did, apart from my singular focus on the prize, is that every ancient penny is a time capsule of sorts. A cent from the 1930’s evokes the Great Depression. A penny dated 1924 was minted in the throes of the Jazz Age. I was recently walking our property with an amateur historian who was wielding a metal detector. I took him to a spot deep in the woods where I’d found chards of china. I asked him to wave his wand and he got a hit: a 1919 penny that some farmer or farm hand had probably dropped a hundred years ago when the forest was a field where old maps show buckwheat was grown. The experience formed a visceral connection to those who worked the land and are long gone.
I’ve also inherited lots of pennies. Soon after I met my wife I boasted to my father-in-law about my penny collecting escapades. A modest gentleman who played down everything, including the fact that he was a war hero, garnering headlines for his courage at Anzio, one of World War II’s fiercest battles, he took me to his basement where he showed me thousands of pennies dating back to the 1920s and ’30's in neat rolls of fifty. I was suitably humbled.
I have particular affection for steel pennies. They were minted for only one year, 1943, to spare copper to make war munitions and shell casings. They’re not worth much in anything other than mint condition because so many were made — billions of them — but I’ve always loved their idiosyncratic nature. They’re like albino deer. My father-in-law had dozens of them.
I’ve tried to pass along the thrill I felt hunting for pennies by seeding my change, must as my father did, with some of those thousands of wheat pennies, hoping some kid will come across them. My own children couldn’t care less. I doubt their experience will be similar to mine because our overstimulated world offers far more distractions tugging at their attention. But you never know.
Finally, the best reason not to abandon the penny is also the most obvious. A shiny mint condition coin is a beautiful thing, even if I’m not wild about the way the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the coin was redesigned in 2010 to feature the Union shield. The copper tone boldly stands apart from the nickel clad coinage of the dime, quarter and nickel.
And if you can’t be bothered to go fortune hunting through your change — it’s become Pavlovian after all these years — those supermarket Coinstar machines will often reject wheat pennies due to differences in composition or weight from newer cents. The sound of the dropping coin may not elicit quite the excitement that I experienced as an eleven-year-old. In that case you can always deposit them in the nearest checkout counter penny tray. At least for now. Think of it as promoting American history.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
