A penny for your thoughts

As an English teacher, I was always searching for the illusive perfect reader for freshman writing courses. While I never found it, one semester I used The New Yorker, which has an educational program, as a “textbook.”  In effect, every week the students had a new textbook to explore‑‑or ignore.

Many assignments were based on shorter essays from “The Talk of the Town.”  One such assignment sprang from an informal survey of caps which the author had conducted in New York City.  After reading and discussing the piece, the students were to complete their own surveys. Some were basically copycat surveys of clothing.  One of the more creative ones surveyed student beer‑drinking habits and preferences by class.

Occasionally, I completed an assignment with the students because I liked the assignment or I wanted to see personally how workable an assignment was.  While I did not set out to complete this assignment originally, I fell into it.  While waiting outside one day for students to complete teacher evaluation forms in privacy, I found three pennies on the ground and decided to do a survey on pennies. 

 

I started my survey with the three pennies I found on the ground. I checked my wallet and my dresser for pennies.  Then, not so much to collect pennies but to gauge people's reactions, I asked colleagues at random for their pennies.  First, I explained my survey and then I offered to return their donations once my survey was complete.  Of eight people polled, only one agreed to the return of his pennies.  However, as it turned out, he had no pennies.  Everyone else shrugged and said don't bother. 

 

In all, I collected 42 pennies from my colleagues.  The most pennies one person had was ten and the least one.  One other person had none.  I got 10 cents off my dresser.  I found 15 pennies in my wallet. Later, I found a 1949 wheat penny and a 1991 penny in my jewelry box.  In all, I collected 73 pennies, including the three from the ground.

 
My survey was informative, as well as nostalgic.  I learned that all pennies on the ground are not lucky, only face‑up ones.  Proverbs involving pennies came to mind, so I consulted a proverb dictionary and found many more than I expected. I also remembered meeting a train bringing my daughter home one night.  (We lived in Carbondale, Illinois, at the time.) My niece, nephew, and I decided to put pennies on the track for the engine to flatten.  My nephew had a moment of indecision when my father told him that the pennies would derail the engine, but the less mischievous adults prevailed.  When we retrieved our pennies, they were almost paper thin and irregularly round.  I carried mine until my wallet was stolen.  Obviously, that penny was not a lucky one. 

Another time, on a weekend holiday to New York City, we went up in the Empire State Building.  For a dollar, a worker would stamp pennies with the likenesses of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty‑‑you supplied the pennies.  I had a penny stamped for my nephew and one for myself.




Since that time, I have become a collector of elongated pennies, as these souvenirs are called. Many tourist attractions and rest stops have machines which will stamp elongated pennies with various images. I also discovered that “penny passports” exist for storing collections of elongated pennies. I currently have one passport filled and half of second in the works.  At one time, I even joined a club for collectors of elongated pennies. 

After I recounted my findings to my two freshman classes and commented on them, a student rather neatly summed up all of my effort:  "I don't know.  It's still just a penny."

NOTE: I first wrote this piece in the 1990's when I was teaching college full time.  Something reminded me of it, so I decided to pull it out and polish it up for Be-Worded.