Journaling: (edited out of scan because it was tiny and unreadable and continued on for two more pages)Daddy's penny can lived in the front right corner of Daddy's underwear drawer. He punched a coin slot in the top and dropped his pennies in there each night. Sometimes I would steal a few pennies to buy candy at the corner store...back in the day when you could buy candy for a few pennies.
Once or twice a year Daddy and I would get out the can and roll pennies. They were dumped on the coffee table and turned to the tails side to look for wheat pennies. The wheat pennies would go in Daddy's coin collection because they were "valuable" and the regular pennies would be rolled and cashed in.
My hands were too little to hold fifty pennies, so my job was to stack them in little stacks of five with five stacks in a row. That way Daddy could see quickly the correct amount of pennies were there for a roll. He would scrape off ten stacks, position them in his hand, then roll them in flat coin wrappers. (I was so happy when tube coin wrappers were finally invented.)
This usually took us a couple of hours and we would end up with about $5.00 of rolled coins. It was a simpler time, a cheap evening's entertainment, and I got my Daddy's undivided attention the whole time.
KC Foods in North Little Rock was bought out by competitor Clabber Girl in 1950 and operations were moved to the Terre Haute, Indiana plant. That gives some idea of how old this can is. Wheat pennies were last minted in 1958.
Daddy's penny can is now going to live with niece R'bie so she can cherish this memory of her grandfather.
I have preserved this memory without having to preserve the can. Yay! One more thing out of my house!
Stuff written around the can:
Coin slot punched in top.
On back {"Superior Quality for Over Seventy Years" and Reg. S.S.A. No. 24699 "A"
Composed of sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum sulfate, calcium carbonate, corn starch, calcium acid phosphate
KC Foods, North Little Rock, Arkansas
Stuff written on the coin wrapper:
All denomination coin wrapper. The denomination and value would show through the little windows based on the diameter of the coin.
I think that should be circumference of the coin. I ain't so gud at gemometryness.
2 comments:
Love the way the story and sketch work together. I've come to the same conclusion that once something is sketched and the memory recorded, the item can move on. I'm ready to pitch a weather balloon that fell in my neighbors yard last year. I sketched it, tore it apart to investigate, and now I'm ready to throw it out, though usually I would have saved it forever. Memory captured.
Excellent! Watch a few episodes of "Hoarders" on Monday nights and you'll be ready to toss out everything you own, even the important stuff. :)
Post a Comment