Tale Of A Lost Penny

This happened to me when I was in second grade. Back then (around 1954) the deposit on a bottle of soda pop was 2¢ and you could get a decent amount of candy for that sum. Finding an empty soda bottle that someone had discarded was like finding a treasure.

When I was in 2nd grade, kids my age came across pennies fairly frequently, and larger coins only rarely. And I knew, and every kid (that I knew, anyway) knew that there were certain pennies that were very rare and valuable, so we always looked at the dates before spending them. There were two that were legendary, a sort of double Holy Grail of pennies. If you found either one you were set for life. They were the only two that I knew of, and they were the ones that I always looked for. They were the 1909 S VDB and the the copper 1943 Lincoln Cent.

One day a penny came into my possession somehow (I can't remember the circumstances), and when I looked at it I became wildly excited. It was a 1943 penny, and it was copper! Or looked copper. I didn't check to see if it would respond to a magnet, but I did look at it carefully. Back then I had excellent eyes, and while it might have been a doctored '48, it would have had to have been an extremely good job. Probably it was just a copper-plated steel penny, but it might have been real, and at that moment I was convinced that it was. I went running to my dad and showed it to him, but he wasn't impressed. In fact, he pooh-poohed the notion that any coin found in circulation could be worth more than face value. I guess he just didn't know. Or maybe throwing cold water on childish enthusiasm was a knee-jerk reaction for him. Can't say. He's still somewhat of an enigma to me all these years later.

Anyway, I didn't know what to do with the coin, so I stuck in my desk drawer and figured when I was older I'd know what to do with it. I used to take it out from time to time and look at it, and fantasize about all the cool things I'd do once I sold it for a small fortune.

Then one day I couldn't find it. It had vanished from my desk! I took everything out, one thing at a time, and by the time the desk was empty, still no penny. So I went to my mom and told her, and she didn't know anything about it, and then I asked my sister, and she said, "Oh, I wanted to buy some crayons but I was a penny short, so I looked in your desk and found one there. What's the big deal? It was only a penny."

Went to the store where she spent the penny and they were very nice and looked through all the pennies in their cash register. Nothing.

And that's my tale of woe and childhood trauma!