For the Want of a Penny…

…a fortune was lost.

It was early in the spring on a chilly Sunday afternoon, and there wasn’t much to do, so I squandered my time admiring my #wheatPenny collection. I had become fascinated with the old #coins after receiving some in my change for a candy bar at a little store near our house about a year prior. I had been hunting for them ever since, an admirable past-time for a twelve-year-old boy. I don’t know why I chose pennies, probably because I had little money, and it was the cheapest denomination to collect.

A few months earlier, I was overjoyed when my grandmother had given me an old #piggyBank she had stashed in her cupboard for who knows how many years. It was full of pennies, and most of them were the old wheat backs. I went right out and purchased some coin display books and went to work plugging my collection into the slots.

My collection of pennies dated all the way back to 1911, though most of the older ones were quite worn. I eventually had almost every date from the early nineteen hundreds to 1956 when they stopped minting that style. Since I was just a kid, my father rarely took my interests seriously, beyond giving me one of those “isn’t that cute” smiles or pats on the back. On this one particularly lazy day, he had been lounging on the couch as I proudly read off the dates of my oldest coins.

“I have almost every date from 1911,” I said as he lay back with his eyes closed.

“You’ll never find a 1943 penny,” he went on. “That’s the year I was born. I always wanted one, but it was during the war, and they only made a few of them.”

I ran my finger across the coins and followed their dates, stopping at the 1943 slot. It was not empty. “I have one right here,” I said.

My father jumped up so fast the pillow went flying. “Let me see that,” he said as he snatched the coin book from my hands. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He was staring at a 1943 copper penny. I found out later that the coin listed as being worth a quarter million dollars, which was a ton of money in 1980. The pennies that year were minted in steel. My father promptly pried the penny from its slot and grabbed his car keys.

We spent the rest of the day driving from shopping mall to shopping mall looking for any coin shop that was still open on a Sunday. I never saw my father so happy. It was like a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He was telling me all about the house he was going to buy, the vacation he was going to take. I think he was salivating as he spoke of the brand new car he was going to buy- or was it two? I asked him if I could buy a gas-powered go-cart. He said yes, and I was happy. He had half the money spent before we even got to the first coin shop. It was closed. By the time we reached the second shop, he had it all spent. But it was closed too. On the way home, he continued to speak of his dreams being fulfilled.

Upon entering our apartment, the first thing my father did was grab the phone book and began punching numbers into the telephone as I went off to play. From time to time, I could hear him shout something in frustration. After dinner, I went to bed, and my father went upstairs to visit my grandmother. I didn’t hear anything more until early morning when I got up to go to the bathroom. The kitchen light was on, and my father was sitting at the table. He looked extremely depressed. In one hand, he held a small black object, and in the other, he had the penny. I could hear the distinct clink of metal hitting metal. It was a magnet. My father sat there, pulling the #penny off the magnet and letting it clink back to it, over and over again.

Finally, he looked up at me and slid the penny across the table. “You can have your penny back,” he said. “It’s counterfeit. Somebody electroplated copper onto the steel. It’s worthless.”

I picked the coin up from the table and studied it. I finally had my penny back. It wasn’t worthless. It was worth one cent, and it looked great in my collection.

I often wonder if the universe, God, or fate was testing my father that day.

Story and photo by Jeffrey David Montanye
#jeffreydmontanye #coinCollection #1943CopperPenny