A Nickel Ain't What It Used to Be

 

by Pa Rock

Time Traveler

I received a few coins in change yesterday morning when I paid for a breakfast sandwich which was priced at almost five dollars.  One of those coins turned out to be a nickel that was minted in the city of Philadelphia in 1949.  It had just turned seventy-five-years-old!  The nickel, which was in surprisingly good shape, set me to thinking about how much things have changed during the course of its time on earth.  (I was “minted” in 1948, so that nickel and I have been knocking around throughout almost the exact same time frame.)
 
When that nickel was new it could purchase a cup of coffee in almost any café or restaurant in America, and most would have provided at least one free refill.  It would have also been good for a song on the jukebox (sometimes called a “nickelodeon”), one game of pinball – with five balls, and the possibility of winning additional “free” games, postage for one first-class letter and two postcards, a daily newspaper, or a loaf of bread.  In 1949 a nickel would have bought enough gas to mow a fairly good-sized yard, or a candy bar, or even a bottle of “soda pop.”
 
Heck, I can even remember when three nickels would by a McDonald’s hamburger!
 
But then again, I’m old - even older than that damned nickel - and far more worn!
 
Over the course of its existence that 1949 nickel has probably been dropped into the coin slots of hundreds of jukeboxes, pinball machines, pay telephones, newspaper racks, and children’s banks.   It has undoubtedly spent time under couch cushions, in change purses, and in collection plates.  The nickel has almost certainly been used for flipping and tipping, and perhaps even for slipping beneath a child’s pillow in exchange for a tooth.
 
Today a nickel is, of course, worth far less than it was when that one was new.  I would say that a nickel is now mere chicken feed if it weren’t for the fact that the last bag of chicken feed that I purchased sold for more than two hundred and twenty nickels.  And if I had stopped by Sonic for a breakfast sandwich on the way to the feed store, that would have been almost a hundred more nickels with at least a twenty-nickel tip!
 
A nickel ain’t what it used to be, but then again, neither am I!