by Pa Rock
Hoarding Historian
I hoard coins. Every evening I go through the pocket change that I have accumulated during the day and sort it into two large jars. One jar contains coins that are less than thirty years old, and the other jar is for older coins. When I am no longer here, I trust that my grandchildren will divide up the treasure and go buy ice cream.
I know, as I hold coins up to the light trying to read the too-small dates, that my hoarding is a sure sign of an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that I, as a licensed clinical social worker, am fully qualified to diagnose. I also realize as a former history teacher and a person who is interested in trivia, that my obsession with hoarding coins is also, at least in part, the result of my gender.
Many men don't relish the idea of carrying around a pocketful of change, and they maintain a habit of dropping their change into some type of container rather than carry it around all day - and then slowly count it out when they need 87 cents to complete a purchase. Hoarding is a habit that they inherited from their fathers and are quite likely to pass along to their sons. My children and my nieces and nephews who inherited my father's jugs of bicentennial quarters could speak to that. Those quarters ultimately bought a lot off ice cream!
Years ago I took a public tour of the Denver Mint, and the tour guide made that same point. He said that one of the reasons the country needs so many new coins each year is that many Americans - especially men - hoard their change.
As another component of my gender theory of money hoarding, I would speak for any man who has ever been in a hurry and got behind a woman in a check-out line who stopped the show to count out that 87 cents, and likely dropped one or two of the coins as she did her careful calculating. Women (okay, some women) tend to carry their change and to use it. (Why break a dollar bill when I probably have the correct amount right here in the bottom of my purse?). My theory is that this "thriftiness" through the frugal use of change was passed along genetically from their mothers. There was a time, not very long ago, when men controlled the household income, and women, if they wanted to make any personal purchases, had to use their "pin" money or the small incomes that they had from minor agricultural endeavors such as selling eggs. Every penny counted.
So, now that we have circled the barn twice, I return to my original point: I hoard coins.
Last night as I was sorting my pocket change into the two big jars, I came upon a very worn penny. At first glance, my old eyes told me that it was a 1970 with no mint mark - indicating that it had been minted in Philadelphia. 1970, a year that I remember too well, was forty-eight years ago, so the penny would go in the jar for older coins. But as I prepared to drop it in with the other old coinage, something just did not feel right. I put the penny back under the lamp and discovered that the old copper penny had actually be struck in 1920, making it ninety-eight-years-old! The old wheat-back penny had apparently evaded coin collectors and hoarders - and other dangers like accidentally getting dropped into the Grand Canyon or an ocean - for nearly a century and had somehow found its way into my pocket.
The little penny had been circulating since before either of my parents were born.
Last week I wrote a couple of blog posts that had a focus on the First World War. That war had ended by the time this particular penny was minted - just barely - but the war president, Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House where he was suffering from the effects of a massive stroke that he had the previous October. Perhaps First Lady Edith Wilson, the person who seemed to have kept the presidency functioning during Wilson's last year-and-a-half in office, had this penny clutched tightly in her hand as she faced down Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (the elder) and other Republicans while they snooped around the White House trying to find out if the President was actually capable of doing his job.
Maybe Woodrow Wilson handled this very penny while he was still President - and maybe he handed it off to someone else to begin its long journey into the next millennium. Perhaps like everything we encounter and touch in life, that little penny is the material manifestation of what was - and of what is yet to be - things that span generations.
Almost every human who walked the earth when this little penny was minted is gone now - and after my grandchildren spend it on ice cream and it disappears back into the economy, who knows what type of world it will encounter when the next hoarder nabs it?
But for me, for right now, this 1920 penny is Woodrow Wilson's way of getting in touch. He has reached out from his world to mine - just to say "Hey!"
And it's nice to have connected with him.
Hoarding Historian
I hoard coins. Every evening I go through the pocket change that I have accumulated during the day and sort it into two large jars. One jar contains coins that are less than thirty years old, and the other jar is for older coins. When I am no longer here, I trust that my grandchildren will divide up the treasure and go buy ice cream.
I know, as I hold coins up to the light trying to read the too-small dates, that my hoarding is a sure sign of an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that I, as a licensed clinical social worker, am fully qualified to diagnose. I also realize as a former history teacher and a person who is interested in trivia, that my obsession with hoarding coins is also, at least in part, the result of my gender.
Many men don't relish the idea of carrying around a pocketful of change, and they maintain a habit of dropping their change into some type of container rather than carry it around all day - and then slowly count it out when they need 87 cents to complete a purchase. Hoarding is a habit that they inherited from their fathers and are quite likely to pass along to their sons. My children and my nieces and nephews who inherited my father's jugs of bicentennial quarters could speak to that. Those quarters ultimately bought a lot off ice cream!
Years ago I took a public tour of the Denver Mint, and the tour guide made that same point. He said that one of the reasons the country needs so many new coins each year is that many Americans - especially men - hoard their change.
As another component of my gender theory of money hoarding, I would speak for any man who has ever been in a hurry and got behind a woman in a check-out line who stopped the show to count out that 87 cents, and likely dropped one or two of the coins as she did her careful calculating. Women (okay, some women) tend to carry their change and to use it. (Why break a dollar bill when I probably have the correct amount right here in the bottom of my purse?). My theory is that this "thriftiness" through the frugal use of change was passed along genetically from their mothers. There was a time, not very long ago, when men controlled the household income, and women, if they wanted to make any personal purchases, had to use their "pin" money or the small incomes that they had from minor agricultural endeavors such as selling eggs. Every penny counted.
So, now that we have circled the barn twice, I return to my original point: I hoard coins.
Last night as I was sorting my pocket change into the two big jars, I came upon a very worn penny. At first glance, my old eyes told me that it was a 1970 with no mint mark - indicating that it had been minted in Philadelphia. 1970, a year that I remember too well, was forty-eight years ago, so the penny would go in the jar for older coins. But as I prepared to drop it in with the other old coinage, something just did not feel right. I put the penny back under the lamp and discovered that the old copper penny had actually be struck in 1920, making it ninety-eight-years-old! The old wheat-back penny had apparently evaded coin collectors and hoarders - and other dangers like accidentally getting dropped into the Grand Canyon or an ocean - for nearly a century and had somehow found its way into my pocket.
The little penny had been circulating since before either of my parents were born.
Last week I wrote a couple of blog posts that had a focus on the First World War. That war had ended by the time this particular penny was minted - just barely - but the war president, Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House where he was suffering from the effects of a massive stroke that he had the previous October. Perhaps First Lady Edith Wilson, the person who seemed to have kept the presidency functioning during Wilson's last year-and-a-half in office, had this penny clutched tightly in her hand as she faced down Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (the elder) and other Republicans while they snooped around the White House trying to find out if the President was actually capable of doing his job.
Maybe Woodrow Wilson handled this very penny while he was still President - and maybe he handed it off to someone else to begin its long journey into the next millennium. Perhaps like everything we encounter and touch in life, that little penny is the material manifestation of what was - and of what is yet to be - things that span generations.
Almost every human who walked the earth when this little penny was minted is gone now - and after my grandchildren spend it on ice cream and it disappears back into the economy, who knows what type of world it will encounter when the next hoarder nabs it?
But for me, for right now, this 1920 penny is Woodrow Wilson's way of getting in touch. He has reached out from his world to mine - just to say "Hey!"
And it's nice to have connected with him.
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