History In My Pocket

For Mother's day I decide this year to add another installment to my own Little Brown Pennies poem which I first composed for the mother of my sons many years ago. I put together a picture of each boy, a poem, and then a penny of their birth year. Then when they were both grown, I repeated the exercise, and this time added a quarter of their birth years, indcating the growqth of their years, and return on her invetment in their lives.

I thought I would do it again, and rifled through my pockets looking for dollar bills that might have a series of the needed years, but no luck. You know what I did find though?

A 1939 Jefferson nickel. The picture is the exact nickel, but I need to be a bit stiller than I could mange. You get the idea.

Here is a nickel older than I am. It was minted before the Second World War. I showed it to my oldest boy, and he asked, "I wonder how many pockets it's been in?" Isn't that a great thought?

When I consider it, that nickel has been touched by those at the mint (the Philadelphia mint), and that involves several departments.

First it needs to be stamped. Since I feel more research screaming to be followed, I will surmise that there were probably several rows of stamping machines in their own area. Extrapolating from my previous manufacturing experiences, the stamped blank was then loaded onto a cart with many others, and then taken to the furnaces for annealing. A possible caveat: the '39 might be the last of the all silver nickels, so maybe it wasn't annealed. Usually after annealing, a blank is washed and dried. Then the blank is loaded by someone else onto a cart and delivered to another area to be run through a machine that creates the raised edge on the coin. So at least three different people have touched my nickel already. Then it is edged, reloaded onto a cart and moved to the imaging area. Four different people! What are their stories? Do they talk about the Great Depression? The uproar in Europe? The sporting events of the times? Did they eat Philly Steak and Cheeses sandwiches for lunch? In the imaging area it becomes currency when the obverse(heads), reverse(tails), and mint mark are pressed into the blank. Then it moves into the inspection area, and if it passes the inspection, it is bagged and counted, and readied for shipping to the local Treasury branch for into the economy through the local bank system.

So after the four, the inspector, and bagger/counter have touched that coin. That's in my opinion a matter of at least seven different people before it is transferred from the Mint to the Treasury. And this all happened 68 years ago!

This coin survived the subsequent World, Korean, Viet Nam, Baltic and Middle East conflicts, not to mention the actions in Panama and Grenada. It also was a part of the incredible growth of the middle class in America when taxes and wages were high, creating the likes of which has been subsequently eroded. My nickel has seen all that.

So how many pockets has that nickel seen? Let's suppose that I save my change, which I do. I use it to buy books. When I realize I have a couple pounds of steel in my pocket, I cull out a dollar worth and put the rest aside. When I hit around $30 I buy a book I want. So it came from a previous owner to me. Then it will hit the bookstore. Then let's suppose it is offered as change to someone who does what I do. It then would make a least four to five different pockets in a year. Multiplied by 68 years, and that's 272 different pockets by incredibly conservative numbers. The reality is more likely twice that many, if not many more. Over 68 years, possibly 544 different people handled the nickel I now hold in my hand. Considering that the average life span of a coin is 25 years, I'd say that it was "saved" several times at least. Was it once an aspiring fortune, spent on a comic book by a boy named Stan Lee?

Has it been bet on the ponies? Bought a beer at a local Phillie watering hole? Flipped in a bet? Used at the Five and Dime? Was it ever part of the purchase of a ticket to see a baseball game? How many times was it used to buy food? Books?

I'm going to have a gas working on this project! First step, the Philadelphia Mint....