A Penny Saved

Update on Litter Collecting: Yesterday’s fabulous find of a bottle partially filled with pennies has occupied far more of my time today than I like to say. A friend was amazed to hear of the discovery in the litter clean-up activity, but I was not. For years, we have picked up money on the streets and the sides of roads and have more than once come upon what is called, in the trade, a ‘penny drop.’ It seems that people collect pennies in their cars in a cup, a jar, a container of some kind and then eventually get tired of looking at the container and its contents. At that point, they just dump them by the side of the road. It isn’t always pennies; sometimes it also include dimes and nickels, but it’s still called a penny drop.

This particular penny drop was more problematic than others we have found: they have just been unceremoniously dumped into a large Mexican pig bank that we keep for found money (now several hundred dollars worth). And that is because this penny drop was in a closed jar in a ditch, but not entirely closed, so dirt and water had seeped in. I had to wash the pennies and then dry them. Most were moderately oxidized, which doesn’t restrict their value, but did make piling them into Canadian and U.S. penny piles more time-consuming, since I couldn’t always tell which was which. I cursorily checked them for rare penniness, but they were all recent coins: none of the U.S. pennies had wheat on the obverse side; all of the Canadian pennies had Queen Elizabeth's image on the front (meaning all are at least post-1957). So, having dispensed with that important issue, there remained only the counting.

About three dollars worth, and three Canadian pennies for every two U.S. ones. Fortunately, we have a now-nearly-filled bank of U.S. found money for the U.S. pennies, but I don’t know what to do with the Canadian ones, because the Canadian found money bank is absolutely full. Just dump them behind some unsuspecting teller’s wicket in B.C.? Maybe the prior owner had the same problem, which would account for the jar in the ditch. Well, $3.00 for an hour’s work. It’s not like it’s skilled work, after all.