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Photo courtesy of http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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Every now and then there is talk about getting rid of the US one cent piece - the penny. The argument is that pennies are irrelevant now. They are of such small worth that they are useless. The people that say this often like to point out that it costs over a penny to manufacture a penny. I am devoted to the penny and will defend it's use. Yes, the above arguments against the penny are true, but I have a real emotional attachment to the coin.
To a child today, a penny doesn't mean much. I'm not sure if there is anything in any store anywhere that you can still purchase for a penny. Even when I was young, I only remember being able to occasionally find a machine that would take pennies and give you in exchange a small hard hollow sphere of gum that would last approximately 67 seconds before the flavor was all drained from it. Then, more often than not I would swallow the gum and receive a lecture that the gum stays inside of you for seven years. Although I now know that this isn't true, even back then I wondered why that would be a bad thing. In those days it was still a big deal to get a penny, it represented purchasing power, and as we all know, power is not a thing children have in abundance. It shocked me by the time I got to middle school to see kids throw their pennies down the hall or outside. I'm sure that I must have emitted an audible gasp the first time I saw anyone commit such sacrilege. Of course throwing money away, even if it is a penny is a silly thing to do and their attempt to show how little these cents meant to them actually showed the power the penny had. Me, being the polar opposite of a "cool kid," would pick up these discarded coins whenever possible. This would cause the penny chuckers to laugh at me and, on more than one occasion, claim that the offending copper was recently housed in their butt. This made me wonder why I was the uncool kid if they kept pennies in their butts.
When I was 10 years old I had this little chuck of steel. It was about one inch long by two inches wide and maybe a half an inch deep. I'm not sure where I got it, more likely than not, I found this treasure in the street and took it home. I had almost a full tube of model glue. I remember where this had come from. I saw some model cars a friend had built and decided that I was going to start building models. This never happened. My first model car was dust covered, uncompleted on my dresser in my bedroom. But I did have glue, so being a boy of ten, I started looking for things to glue. Looking through my pile of pennies I found one marked with the current year and also found some from the last couple of years. I started with the oldest one and glued it to the piece of steel, then attached the others in a pile. I decided that every year the new penny came out I was going to glue it on top of the old one. In my mind, this seemed like a great idea and I imagined myself looking back as an adult on this stack of coins and reminiscing about the days gone by. I'm not sure how old I imagined this adult to be, but probably really old - like 40. My imagination showed an impressive column of coins glued onto a piece of steel and me looking at it fondly. Of course, even if I had kept up with this gluing of pennies and even if I had stared with the year I was born, the stack wouldn't be very big at all since a penny is only .05 inches thick. This means that if I was looking back from age 100 at my impressive accomplishment, my stack of coins would only be 5 inches high. Maybe the glue in between would make it bigger.
I remember when I would get a dollar when I was little. it seemed like so much money, especially after one of my older siblings told me that it was worth 100 pennies. One hundred seemed like such a big number and I kind of wished I had the one hundred pennies instead on the dollar bill.
I am a fan of "give a penny, take a penny" trays. Yes, a penny doesn't mean much to most people, but I like the polite "good neighborly" old fashioned feel of it. When I was a younger and more annoying, I always wanted to go into stores and just empty those trays into my pocket to see what people would say and get their reaction, but I never really had the nerve to follow through on it.
Even though people act annoyed by getting pennies back as change, I always like it. It is always nice to get something back when making a purchase.
Of course, one of the best things about the penny is
Abraham Lincoln. I love that pennies are so copious, and on the penny is a picture of Honest Abe. The one cent piece that is most common has the Lincoln Memorial on the back, which if you look closely, has the statue of Lincoln visible on the coin, thereby making this coin picture Lincoln on both the front and back.
Well, I didn't present much of an argument for keeping the penny in circulation other than the fact that I am nostalgic for them. I guess I could argue that being a Wisconsinite, if pennies were gone, people might not visit "The Worlds Largest Penny" in Woodruff, WI. While on the subject of giant pennies, Batman has a giant penny in the Batcave as a souvenir of his battle with the Penny Plunderer. Both of these coins are of an impressive size and both are too big for any kid, no matter how cool, to fit into a butt.
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| image courtesy of http://www.comicvine.com |
