Brad Kellogg, SBA Guest Writer
(SBA) - The other day someone offered me a penny for my thoughts. A day or so later I gave my unsolicited opinion on something and was told that I was sticking my two cents in where it didn’t belong. Let me get this straight. If I am asked for my opinion, it is worth a penny, but if I offer it and you do not want it, is it worth two pennies? My opinion was not even worth the proverbial “red cent”. How do I know if one in my pocket might be the “bad penny” or even the “honest cent”? Dad Jokes are even made about the one-cent coin. “Do you smell anything? You should, it is a cent”.
I considered this as I unloaded my pockets onto the dresser last night. I don’t use cash often anymore, but what change I have automatically gone into a bowl, that will empty into a jar, to eventually go where an estimated 240 billion other pennies are, buried in the back of the closet and forgotten.
Strangely, a penny does not officially exist in the United States. Its formal designation is the “One Cent Coin”. Penny is a variation of the word “pence” in England. If you say you need “To spend a penny” across the pond it is slang for “I need to use the restroom”. Now that is one of those little things you will probably never need to know or use! It is now hard to believe that during Covid there was such a shortage that banks were begging for coins and now few people will even stoop over to pick a penny off the sidewalk. Unfortunately, if you pay for something in cash anything with prices ending in 1,2,3,4,6,7,8, or 9 will get you some pennies in change.
Some of those lowly pennies end up in massive hoards of coins. One of the largest was found in Los Angeles, consisting of over 800,000 copper coins weighing about 500 pounds. That is small however compared to the largest hoard of 1.7 million Indian Head coins discovered in an estate house somewhere right here in the Midwest. These coins weighed over 10,470 pounds and were stored in 55-gallon drums! The local bank refused to take the $17,000 in “coppers” because they had no room in the vault. Imagine having that much money and your bank refuses to take it! However, I suppose a “penny saved is a penny earned”.
The image of Abraham Lincoln photo taken in 1864 by Anthony Berger is displayed in relief on the U.S. penny. So many have been minted since 1909 that even the U.S. Mint has lost track of the total.
Do you know what the single most reproduced piece of artwork is? It is not the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, or American Gothic. Amazingly, the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on the poor lowly misunderstood penny holds that honor. That image has been reproduced on the penny countless times. Even the U.S. Treasury doesn’t know exactly how many pennies have been produced but it is certainly in the hundreds of billions. Amazingly, we have created so many of something that no one wants, and even pay more to manufacture than it is worth. The one-cent coin costs approximately 3.7 cents to generate and distribute. The U.S. Mint lost so much money on the production of the penny that Elon Musk and the DOGE committee suggested the elimination of the penny, and President Trump has directed the mint to pause production. The Federal Reserve estimates that over two hundred and forty billion pennies have been produced of which approximately one hundred and fourteen billion are in circulation. That means there are one hundred and twenty-six billion one-cent pieces squirreled away in cans and closets, three hundred and thirty-three pennies per every man, woman, and child in the United States!
Heck, the United States one-cent piece wasn’t even designed by an American. A Lithuanian sculptor named Avigdor Victor David Brenner created a plaque of a right-facing Lincoln that President Theodore Roosevelt liked and decided to put on the penny. To this day, the initials V.D.B. appear under Lincoln’s right shoulder on the face of the coin.
The U.S. Military uses POG’s at overseas bases instead of pennies, due to the cost of shipping the weight overseas. Photo from Armed Forces website.
Not even our Armed Forces like to use the penny (or any coins) at overseas bases, mostly due to shipping the weight back and forth. The commissaries overseas round everything up to the nearest five cents and use POGS instead of coins. A POG is a cardboard coin that is used as a substitute.
Don’t give up on the penny, however. Some of the older ones are worth a mint (pun intended). For example, a 1943-D Bronze Wheat penny is valued at a cool $2.3 million because a few were partly cast in bronze by mistake.
So, dig out all those jars and cans of coins you have squirreled away and sort through them. Perhaps even find some of the coin collector books and start the hobby of coin collecting, as you have nothing to lose!
ED NOTE: Brad Kellogg has spent most of his life in Wakefield, Nebraska, before retiring to Wisconsin. A passionate historian, he is an active member of several historical societies and a speaker and living history performer for Humanities Nebraska. Brad wrote human-interest stories for Living Here Magazine for four years and authored the book The Aisles of the Forgotten Graveyard. His work has also appeared in the Ponca Journal Leader, the Wakefield Republican, and Check the Oil, a magazine for automotive enthusiasts. Currently, he is under contract with Reedy Press to write Amazing Wisconsin, which is in progress.
